How the West leads Australia over the edge

Last Tuesday night, in a digital outlet based out of Perth, an attempt was made to draw up battlelines for the coming elections.

Andrew Carswell, former chief media advisor to Scott Morrison for four years of government, could smell blood, and he was encouraging others to see the same weakness he perceived in the Albanese government.

“Tanya Plibersek is emerging as the single biggest threat to the Albanese Government’s tenuous hold on majority rule,” he opined in a piece for Seven West’s The Nightly that labelled the PM “spiteful” for sidelining his Environment Minister.

“Environment policy is suddenly front and centre in a brutal political and public debate.”

The attempt to drive a wedge through the government was transparent and might have meant little, were it not coming from a Coalition svengali in an outlet that has gone harder after Tanya than any other.

But the trigger was also critical - not the climate or environmental reforms, but Plibersek’s decision to block part of a gold mine in New South Wales after a “Section 10” cultural heritage application from traditional custodians concerned about its impacts on their sacred sites and songlines.

The conflation of environmental and cultural heritage concerns as equally out of touch with the electorate made the Carswell piece especially relevant:

“If ever the public needed an example of what Nature Positive could mean for new projects, Plibersek gave them one last week, overturning a decision by her department, and killing off the $1 billion Regis Resources’ McPhillamys Gold Project in Central West NSW.

“Now, in reality, there may not be a direct crossover between the Nature Positive changes and the minister’s decision to stop the gold mine on cultural heritage grounds. But guaranteed, the leap will have been made in the public’s mind. It confirms voters’ growing belief that the Albanese Government gives only a fleeting consideration to the best economic outcomes.”

Seven West has been taking on the government’s admittedly imperfect ‘Nature Positive’ reforms for ages, and now Plibersek is caught in the pincer. It’s unclear how much she will care, given that the only threat to her personal political survival comes from the Greens in her own Sydney seat, but it’s certain that the PM’s office has been paying close attention.

Last Saturday, Seven West’s other paper, The West Australian, ran a front page lead about the thwarted gold mine, which not a single local reader would have heard of, setting off an increasingly hysterical response on the front pages of The Australian and the AFR all week. Prior to that, The West ran a mid-week front page and a Friday editorial respectively extolling the WA government’s move to “slash green tape” (on what was dubbed “the darkest day in the history of WA nature laws” by the conservation sector) and demanding the federal government can their plans for stronger protections.

This has been the play for a long time and is nothing new. The West Australian operates primarily to leverage political influence for WA’s resources sector, especially as they relate to the specific pecuniary interests of proprietor Kerry Stokes - mining equipment, onshore gas developments, and Woodside (Stokes wants to pump said gas to the Burrup Hub for export, and also holds about $100 million in Woodside shares).

Since 2019, when Anthony de Ceglie took the helm, The West has also operated a consistent veneer of social progressivism, particularly on Indigenous issues. The West has driven a relentless campaign around a youth detention crisis in WA, and editorialised early to change the date of Australia Day while running an annual front page in Noongar language for Reconciliation Week.

De Ceglie has now been called upstairs, however, to save Seven after probably the biggest reputational drive-by for a non-party in Federal Court history. As the new head of national News and Current Affairs for Stokes’ TV arm, he’ll have little time to focus on print or WA while he cleans up a pretty toxic mess that has been in the Four Corners spotlight again recently. 

His interim replacement, former Australian editor Chris Dore, seemed so unhinged in his culture wars fixations that it appeared Stokes had sacrificed his sharpest weapon at the height of its power, given the prospect of overlapping WA and federal election campaigns early next year and the central importance of key WA seats.

So it made perfect sense on Thursday morning when The Last Place on Earth exclusively revealed a new permanent editor for The West, Sarah-Jane Tasker, its former business editor and more recently the founding editor of The Nightly.

If Seven West has now broadened its target from Nature Positive into First Nations heritage issues, it has also extended its range since launching The Nightly six months ago. The digital outlet, an overt attempt to expand to the east coast the political influence Stokes has always enjoyed in The West, is funded largely by WA resources interests including Gina Rinehart, who advertises prominently across the site.

Launched with an initial twelve-month funding model, it will likely fold shortly after the next election having delivered what impact it can for its backers. With its ominous tagline of “Spend your night wisely” (or what, Anthony?), it’s hard to see many outside of Canberra and the Sydney CBD paying any attention to it - but that’s the point.

Within weeks of launching it claimed its first scalp, with ‘Nature Positive’ delayed and diluted past a point of no return before the next election. Now it’s turning its target on one of the few avenues First Nations people have to stop their heritage going through the crusher along with the critical minerals bound for Asia.

Given that WA is the only state where domestic emissions keep rising in the absence of any reduction target, and leads a LNG export industry with global emissions second only to Russia, the stakes couldn’t be much higher.

“Amazing how much damage you can do from Siberia,” Carswell concluded about Plibersek’s occasional attempts to intercede. 

Or indeed from Western Australia.