Former Finance Minister Ken Henry wants the media to do better work.
According to him, the media must keep the Australian political system responsible for the fact that it is not a better future for younger Australians.
“The report after the report tells the same story,” he said last week.
“The environment is not protected. Biological diversity is not preserved. Nature is in systemic decline.
“We have entire industries that have business models built to destroy the world of nature.
“We have translated nature against us. The destruction of the natural environment now poses an existential threat to everything we value.
“I am angry with our failures. But we should all be angry with our collective failure to plan financial structures, including environmental regulations that support confidence in the better future of our children and children,” he said.
Dr. Henry made these comments at the National Press Club on Wednesday.
But his speech in Q&A he separated the media.
He said that none of today’s politicians are alive in 100 years, but younger Australians have to live in a world that today’s politicians leave them.
He said that unless the media keeps the political system responsible for its obligation to deliver a better future to our children, this obligation will not be complied with.
“We used to talk about the critical role of the” fourth manor “,” he said.
“It’s time to rebuild it again.”
Political pressures in the media
What did he mean?
‘Fourth Property’ refers to the media.
In Australian society, the first three mansions of the Democratic State are Parliament (legislature), government (implementing) and courts (judicial).
Because the so -called. The fourth property, the media, is to monitor the behavior of these three mansions to keep them responsible.
Last week of Dr. Henry, Australia’s media remember the important democratic role that was important to hear.
But it’s not an easy task.
Why does trust fall in mainstream media? Why are people more and more about their “fifth property” about their news and analysis?
It Fifth property Refers to growing alternative and independent news sources, including bloggers, podcasters and influencers.
There, a large number of journalists who previously worked in the old media are now working.
A significant amount of the journalistic output of the fifth manor is dedicated to documenting the chronic and systemic failures of the fourth real estate to tell the truth about the modern world.
The phenomenon reflects something bigger and basically a broken world where we live.
Two weeks ago, Malaysia’s oldest living former prime minister, Dr. Maathir Bin Mohamad, who recently turned 100, shared his feelings where he thinks we are all going:
“Something has gone wrong in the world, with human civilization” he wrote.
“For centuries we have liberated man from barbarianism, people’s oppressions of people (…)
“But can we say that we are still civilized now?
“Now we see the killing of killing. We see genocide to make our own eyes. Even worse, genocide is really promoted and defended (…)
“We will stop? No.
“I hide my face. I’m a shame. Civilization is no longer a norm.”
Independent courts and truth
In his speech last week, Dr. Henry complained that we have entire industries on business models built to destroy the natural world.
But many of the leading people in the world’s most important media companies are deeply invested in these devastating industries.
Their media (and thought banks) have spent decades by attacking the scientific community and other media to weaken global efforts on climate change.
How many decades have they attacked with CSIRO?
However, it is assumed that Dr. Henry gets his wishes, and sufficient media companies can resurrectly to form a critical mass of the idealized ethics of the fourth manor.
Where can a revived fourth property look for the “agreed facts” in the world in which we live, to keep our political system into account over the next few decades?
Fortunately, in 2025, the independent courts of Australia are still an accepted source of facts and truth.
We are very lucky to have a legal system that has avoided corruption of legal systems in other countries.
And in recent weeks, the Federal Court has published a few reviews that should help the fourth manor keep the bearings.
Climate change and law
One of these judgments was Pabai vs Australian CommonwealthPublished on Tuesday.
As my ABC colleague Kirstie Wellauer and Stephanie Boltje wrote, it was the first time that the Australian Court had decided whether the Commonwealth has legal care to protect its citizens from the effects of climate change and whether climate change should be a cultural loss.
Federal Court judge Michael Wigney stated that the Commonwealth is not owed to be careful to protect the peoples of Torres Salmi Archipelago on the effects of climate change or fund adaptation measures.
He also decided that Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions targets were “government core policy” issues that Parliament should decide, not by courts.
He said he had “significant compassion for” the Torres “archipelago people, but the law of Australia, as it stood, did not give a real or effective way through which they were able to continue their demands on the matter.
“This remains, unless and before the Australian law changes either by the additional development or extension of the general law by the appeal or by law,” he wrote.
“Until then, the only safety that is in place of the position of applicants and other Torres Salmi Archipelagoers through the voting box.”
But Justice Wigney found some other things.
He stated that when the Australian government set emission reduction targets in 2015-2021 -when the federal coalition was in power -“it” was not involved or without any real attention to what was the best available science “to set these goals.
“The best science available was and is clear,” Justice Wigney wrote.
“In order to prevent the worst and most dangerous effects of climate change, each country had and is necessary to take action to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to ensure that the rise in global average temperature is well above 2 ° C and to limit the increase in temperature to 1.5 ° C
“These critical goals were recorded in the Paris Agreement, to which Australia is a party.
“The evidence of this case showed that the emission reduction targets set by the Commonwealth in 2015, 2020 and 2021 were clearly uniform with these objectives or its international obligations in accordance with the Paris Agreement,” he said.
Last week at a press club, I asked Dr. Henry about that observation.
If the media wanted to keep the Australian political system responsible for its obligation to offer a better future to younger Australians, what does it have if the Australian governments don’t even care about science?
“This is missing the respect of science, it is respecting the evidence to respect the truth,” Henry replied.
Anti -Semitism, Israel and Zionism
Another important judgment published earlier this month was Wertheim vs Haddad.
In that case, the federal court judge Angus Stewart decided that lectures held by Islamic preacher Wissam Haddad at the Sydney Prayer Center in November 2023 should be removed from social media because they contained “basically racist and anti -Semitic” materials.
He found that the lectures had broken the law of racial discrimination.
“They make the wrong generalizations against the Jews as a group,” he wrote.
“The Jews in Australia in November 2023 and after that they found them disturbing and scary.
“It is all the more because they were made at the time of the experienced vulnerability and fragility of the Australian Jews, but they would also be disturbing and scary if they had been made before October 7, 2023.
“This is due to their in -depth insult and the long history of the persecution of the Jews, which is related to the use of such rhetoric. These effects on the Australian Jews would be profound and serious,” he wrote.
His summary For the reasons for the judgment, the Minister of Justice Stewart also had to say:
“The court has stated that the dispute and sermon in the interview say critical and derogatory things about the activities of the Israeli and especially the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza and Zionists, but that an ordinary, reasonable listener does not understand those who are in general.
“This person would understand that not all Jews are Zionists and that decline in Zionism is a degrading of philosophy or ideology, not a breed or ethnic group.
“Israeli political criticism, albeit inflammatory or opponent, is not its character in general or is based on Jewish breed or ethnic identity.
“The conclusion that Israel is not anti -Semitic is, as a result of the conclusion that blaming the Jews for the activities of Israel is anti -Semitism; one flows from another.”
It was an important point.
It should help Australia’s media to think more clearly of one of the deepest conflicts of the 2000s and keep the Australian political system into account in the conflict of its involvement, response, processing and discussion.
Both federal court decisions have provided the mainstream media with a solid foundation for the fourth property for those who have been revitalized.
