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Michelle Grattan: Genius or robot?
Harold Hark
21 October 2002

I rarely read Michelle Grattan. My loss, I'm sure, as she is something of a genius, and perhaps the most respected journalist in Australia. But you can't read everyone, unless you're getting paid for it. (I have to keep reminding myself that SCATT's deadlines are imposed by me, not some editor-in-chief with a dandy contract to wave over my head. The trouble is, when I do remind myself of this ludicrous situation, I feel stupid. Why, oh Lloyd, am I not doing something more constructive? Like watching a movie or the World Series?)

So I may be sticking my neck out here, presenting its knob-like apex for a swift lopping by the self-wielding axe of uninformed opinion, but the thing that drives me nuts about Michelle Grattan is that she never reveals herself. She is a reporter in the old fashioned sense. No heartfelt convictions, just likely extrapolations on the facts. The opposite of a Thomas Fowler in Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Or Mungo MacCallum, who loved to make judgements about everything. Yet in these politically polarised days we need more Fowlers and MacCallums, not less; doggedly impartial reporting without a human perspective is a cop out at best and immoral at worst.

Then again, maybe she is that clever that if we read between the lines we can hear the Grattan who uses her art to condemn by simply letting perpetrators speak for themselves.

Take her commentary in The Sunday Age of 20 October: Detainees a dwindling problem". Within a few paragraphs I felt a chill running up and down my spine. By the time I finished, it seemed I had read an example of reporting that could have passed even Saddam Hussein's censors with ease.

But then, I thought, by simply reporting, using Heil Ruddock's own words, his efforts to achieve "a clean slate [emptying detention centres] by the end of this parliamentary term," as he sought to "manage" the refugee problem by providing each of them with a $2000 repatriation "package", that she was damning him with his own language, a language cold and shorn of humanity.

Over and over Grattan refers to "the package". I want to believe this is not her speaking but her interpretation of Ruddock speaking. "On Nauru," she reports, "4894 have accepted the package, including 470 Afghans. The main hold-up with the latter is getting them processed by the Afghan embassy in Canberra. As most have no papers, it is a complicated job."

Almost as complicated as filling out bills of lading and finding enough empty boxcars to transport Jews to Auschwitz.

Elsewhere she speaks of the difficulty of "forcible returns".

"The government believes that if there was an agreement [with Iran] allowing forcible removal, a financial package would encourage many Iranians to go voluntarily."

She continues: "But Ruddock is optimistic about the end point. He said he would expect to get agreements to return 'the big cohorts' forcibly, meaning the Afghans, the Iranians. ' Some of the smaller groups might require more management,' he said. 'But we've seen you can get Palestinians and Iraqis (to go).'"

She concludes her article thusly: "It would be a great irony if the Labor Party agonised over drawing up a new policy on asylum-seekers and detention only to find that, because of a cessation of boat arrivals and success with forcing departures, the problem had faded."

In other words, Labor should not bother trying to reconstitute itself as a party of integrity because these people were never anything but ciphers and that when they are finally gone from our shores, the matter will be forgotten for eternity.

Maybe I have misread the Great Grattan. I urge you to read the article [above link] and draw your own conclusions.

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