Life on the West Island - Lost focus

Australia’s media establishment has a problem and it’s not just about declining revenues or shrinking newsrooms. It’s about a fundamental failure to understand where we live and what’s at stake in our own neighbourhood – Bruce Dover

Award-winning journalist and diplomatic observer Bruce Dover believes that the West Island’s media and government have lost focus on the Indo Pacific region in which we live. This week, he wrote an insightful commentary for Pearls and Irritations, detailing the reasons for his conclusions that we are being badly misled by our major media organisations. He began:

While authoritarian regimes weaponise information across the broader Indo-Pacific, Australian news outlets continue to treat our nearest neighbours as if they no longer existed. Certainly, the Middle East crisis and our daily obsession with Donald Trump’s latest pronouncements have added to our myopia, but have we forgotten where we live? This isn’t merely an editorial blind spot. It’s a strategic failure that undermines Australia’s security, prosperity and democratic values at precisely the moment when the battle for hearts and minds in our region has never been more critical.

For some years, Dover has argued that West Island media is still dominated by “white man’s thinking,” garnering most of its information and opinion from old white men in the Northern Hemisphere. He says this leads to:

Privileging stories from London, New York, and Washington, while treating not just Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila as peripheral afterthoughts, but the likes of Tokyo and New Delhi as well. This editorial hierarchy isn’t accidental. It reflects deep-seated cultural assumptions about which stories matter and which audiences count. When major Australian outlets do cover the region, be it Chinese expansion, the AUKUS defence pact, climate change or the evolving geo-political world, our mainstream media typically recycle opinion from so-called eminent experts writing in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, London Telegraph or on television, the BBC, CNN, or worse, Fox News. Predominantly Anglo-Saxon voices interpreting events through Western frameworks. The result is coverage that’s not just inadequate, but actively misleading, filtering complex regional dynamics through inappropriate cultural lenses.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating famously remarked that Asia was the place you flew over on the way to Europe, while it is now obvious that to West Island media and decision-makers, what Prime Minister Morrison called “Australia’s backyard” in the Pacific has become the region they fly over on their way to Washington.

What has been the case for decades is now coming into open view - the United States is the most warlike nation on earth, with over 400 military facilities scattered across five continents, and violent invasions of numerous sovereign nations since 1950. Rather than other nations leeching off America, it is the United States which has been a parasite on the West, building its prosperity on massive debt financed by its allies and foes alike and operating a brain drain programme for decades to garner the brightest scientists and geniuses, ever since it harvested Nazi experts in the aftermath of the Second World War. Given the size of the US national debt, if the country was a corporation, it would long ago have been wound up by its creditors and its leaders imprisoned for trading while insolvent.

America’s predation on the world has been brought into sharp focus by the criminally deranged conduct of the Trump regime. West Island media, especially the Murdoch print, television and radio outlets, have become enthralled by the realisation that Trump models himself on tyrannical autocratic leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, who persecute, exile or kill those whose oppose them, while in the process accumulating fabulous personal wealth.

West Island media have ignored these revelations, continuing to focus on the personality cult supporting the ego-driven US President and his mindless demolition of what little remained of democracy in his country – replacing it with the politics of populism and anger. Like the leader of a quasi-religious cult, Trump promises the poor and disadvantaged untold riches, while at the same time milking them of their incomes and benefits and redistributing national wealth to obscenely rich oligarchs.

Meanwhile, our media and political leaders continue to pursue the “white man’s thinking,” basing their reporting on what they believe to be credible Western sources. Dover outlines the outcomes of this bias:

The result is coverage that’s not just inadequate, but actively misleading, filtering complex regional dynamics through inappropriate cultural lenses. The digital age has only worsened this tendency. In newsrooms driven by click-through rates and social media engagement, editors naturally gravitate toward content that generates immediate buzz: celebrity gossip, viral footage from Western highways or disaster pornography. Hard-earned context about Indo-Pacific politics, social change, or climate impacts rarely clears the editorial bar for “high engagement". Behind this editorial bias lies a more fundamental problem: the systematic dismantling of Australia’s capacity for serious regional journalism. Over the past decade, newsrooms have shuttered foreign bureaux across Asia and the Pacific, leaving skeleton crews of understaffed correspondents to cover vast, complex territories.

Norfolk Island has suffered from a similarly blinkered approach by the West Island media, bureaucrats and governments for decades, but especially since 2015 when its self-government was abolished and administration of the Island was “normalised” to a one-size-fits-all governance model based on highly inefficient, costly and wasteful West Island local government systems which are steadily decaying. These are characterised by lack of consultation and decision-making to benefit vested interests, rather than local communities.

The treatment of Norfolk Island is a microcosm of the much larger global phenomenon – the decline of democracy and the rapid rise in oligarchy based on autocratic leaders and a false gospel of nirvana promising “sovereign citizens” that they who can become immensely rich and powerful at the expense of all others. Thatcher’s view that “there is no such thing as society” is coming to pass – even on the supposed democratic and egalitarian West Island.