My first editor, at a tiny rural newspaper in southwest WA in 1990, gave me the simplest and most useful advice I received in more than 30 years as a journalist.
Noticing my ambition to pursue the biggest stories I could find, but with no idea how, he simply said that repeatedly asking “Why?” was the surest and shortest route to the nub of an issue.
I soon learned that such relentless interrogation wasn’t strictly necessary when covering the award for best scones at the annual fair, but the method did become increasingly useful as I climbed the journalistic ladder and encountered more complex stories, especially ones involving people who didn’t want their activities to be scrutinised. (See, for example, my coverage of the protection of sharks in Australia; after a decade, not a single boffin or politician has been able to answer my question as to why we are protecting these stupid animals at the expense of human lives. I’ve now run out of people to ask.)
Journalism as a profession, however, seems to have abandoned this reliable method. Why? I’m glad you asked. It seems to me that media proprietors and editors have responded to the increased competitiveness for the audience’s attention by keeping their readers and viewers in a constant state of anxiety. By consistently reporting the emergence of new and alarming social problems but avoiding any aspect of the story that might proffer a solution, the mainstream media guarantees most of their readers and viewers will keep coming back for more, desperate to learn which fresh crises have developed to jeopardise their otherwise happy lives.
This makes the accidental juxtaposition of two stories in The Weekend Australian this morning uniquely amusing. The latest crisis was described in excruciating and exhaustive detail while a separate story on the opposite page offered an unintended explanation, allowing even the most anxious reader to reach an obvious and almost reassuring conclusion.
The crisis in question is to do with the standard of obstetrics in Australia. Private maternity hospitals are steadily closing down, leaving the public system as the only option for most expectant mothers. The rate of neonatal deaths and birth injuries are around 50 per cent higher in public system. “Experts” are quoted saying new national standards and other bureaucratic bandaids are necessary to ensure that Aussie mums aren’t forced to use substandard services when giving birth.
The story neglects, however, to ask why the private hospitals are closing down, or why there is an increasing demand on the public system.
The answer is obvious and actually more intriguing: rich people are having fewer babies, and poor people are having more. The former group consists of professional women or couples who no longer see the benefits of having a large family, or any family at all.
The latter are obliquely identified in this sentence: “Costs in all hospitals have risen exponentially in recent years but the rises are highest in maternity care, where rising body mass index scores and rates of hypertension and diabetes have contributed to the increases.”
In other words, obesity, heart disease and poor diet are making childbirth a more dangerous exercise. These are all conditions that correlate with poverty and, in some cases, immigrants.
Indians and Muslims, for example, are generally more likely than the rest of us to be overweight, diabetic and suffering from heart disease because of poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. I say generally, of course, because there are exceptions to every statistical finding.
Indians and Muslims, it need not be pointed out, are growing faster as a proportion of our population than any others. And Muslims in particular have a vastly higher birth rate than the wider Australian population.
So the alarmism in the story is not so much about decreasing standards in obstetrics as Australia’s changing demographics. While we ramp up our immigration intake we are also becoming, as a population, less healthy, less wealthy and more inclined to bludge off the public health system.
Which brings me back to the other story in The Weekend Australian. It was at the bottom of the page, and its headline was: “Foreign student arrivals at a record”.
The “foreign student” program is merely the legal, elaborate and corrupt system that replaced the boat-based people-smuggling operations of the early 2000s. Its objective is mostly to artificially enlarge the economy while also flooding certain suburban electorates with enough new left-leaning voters to keep the Labor incumbents in parliament.
We now know that one of its unintended consequences has also been to reduce the proportion of children born alive or healthy in our public hospitals. Solving that problem, however, is beyond even the “experts” at The Australian.
