Strangely provisional of me, but watching 4Corners presenting more tales of NSW corruption reminded me of the provincialism of media and the dangers of assuming Australia is one homogenous population of social clones. The reality is, travel more than 500 k in any direction in this country and you begin to find the social expectations, the rituals, the language, the accent, and aspects of the dialect shifting and changing. This is subtle, but its real. It is more than just colourful and amusing. It involves more than sporting codes and railway gauges. It is at times serious stuff. In terms of crime and approaches to crime it can be very serious indeed. The radio stations are different, the newspapers are different, the criminal code is also different. The very means of corruption, the keys to that dirty door, are in different hands, depending on where you are in the country. Crime in Australia - and opportunities to prosper from criminal behaviour - is intensely regional. The 4C program, as an example of a narrow view of regionalism, simply went over old ground, didnt really say anything new, and presented what is largely a NSW problem as a national problem. The parade of creeps who seem to thrive in the sewers of influence that make up NSW public life were trotted out with yet more revelations of just how easy it is to rob the public purse in the harbour city. This seems easier in inverse proportion to how intensely physically unattractive you are, and becomes a mere doddle, merely a matter of turning up in a rented suit, if you also went to the right school with the offspring of the right people, who are themselves at least as intensely unattractive as you. There were half-hearted attempts in the 4C program to draw in Qland, and there are some federal implications, but I wish our Sydney centric media would not simply assume anyone anywhere else in the country actually thinks NSW and Sydney is anywhere remotely near the centre of the universe, or that uniquely NSW manifestations of crime and corruption are universally relatable elsewhere. Wrong. Things are done differently elsewhere. Trust me, there’s plenty of crime and corruption in Victoria, but its done by very different people to the ugly mugs north of the Murray. Meanwhile, media practitioners need parochial awareness training. Any State Minister or former Premier from NSW should be introduced with the tag NSW. Quite often, they are not. Parochial awareness training should particularly apply to ABC 24 presenters who routinely and smugly feign ignorance of anything south of the Murray, or who make comments like some of my best friends are from Melbourne, or I went to Adelaide once.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:32:19 +0000
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