I grew up in a pretty good time in Australia, I reckon. Oh, the media, as it always will, would disagree, telling me all manner of terrible things about the mid-Seventies to early Eighties, but like so many increasingly frustrated Australians, I don’t believe what the media tells me.

As I made my neurotic way into my teens, I began to take an interest in politics. I was born just days after the Whitlam dismissal and every time it was dragged back to public awareness I would look into politics again, with the vigour one had to have in those pre-Internet days.

We were also enjoying the Hawke-Keating years and all of the eccentricities that entailed. I was disgusted by the election of Nick Greiner’s Liberal government in NSW and its horrendous gutting of the NSW school system. Then when Howard got in, I thought the world had gone to hell in a hand basket.

Before Howard, the thing I most remember was that politics seemed important and that politicians tackled the big issues. The arguments seemed to be over things that mattered, like, you know, the future of the country. Yes, there was a bit of aggro over stupid things and the beginnings of talk of ‘the public interest’ when someone wanted to embarrass Bob Hawke about his drinking or womanising, or Andrew Peacock’s wandering… um…peacock.

Stuff happened in the Eighties. It may not have necessarily been good stuff but, despite the looming recession, it was an optimistic time and then momentum picked up again straight after the recession. When interest rates were stupidly high, things were hot in Canberra but it seemed like there was a basic level of respect. Hell, after Paul Keating utterly destroyed John Hewson — and really, if you weren’t there, it’s hard to imagine what carnage a Keating-led flensing was — he took Hewson aside on the first day of the new Parliament and made sure he was alright, acknowledging he’d gone in pretty hard.

Can you imagine Tony Abbott doing that if he won the next election? Or, if Gillard somehow manages to survive this bout of not-being-able-to-convince-us-of-anything and win the election, do you think she’d commiserate with Abbott? Not a chance on either count.

I had a bit of a barney with my father a few weeks ago over the differences in politics between now and 1975. There are some striking similarities — Whitlam introduced some game changing stuff — fee-free university, Medicare, Legal Aid, the beginnings of trade with China. Some of this stuff was so big even the Liberals didn’t roll it all back, despite the acrimony surrounding the fall of the Whitlam government. Some of the things Whitlam did or supported were grand, they were expensive, they were important even though, financially speaking, they got the country into a spot of bother.

So too is the National Broadband Network. Well, it’s certainly grand and, while not as spectacular as accessible tertiary education (sadly being slowly eroded by cock-eyed policy of all Governments), it’s of national importance. The carbon tax is an epic piece of policy and is certainly as important as any Whitlamesque grandeur — the change it aims to make is fundamental to the future of the country.

There are other parallels, however tenuous, in foreign policy. By 1975 Australia had extricated itself from a pointless war waged by the Americans in a country viciously opposed to American interference. We find ourselves in a similar position today, with a dragging, hellish impossible mess in Afghanistan. (Bear with me, there’s a point coming.)

What are we arguing about in 2011? That everything is just a Great Big New Tax – not whether or not the proceeds from the mining boom should be spread around the industries (and jobs) that the mining boom is destroying. That this government is destroying the economy by spending the ‘Costello Surplus’ and creating Huge New Debt. We’re not so much arguing about the carbon tax itself but whether or not climate change is occurring. The Earth is cooling, we keep being told, by people who refuse to acknowledge that there is any scientific rigour to the theory of climate change. The argument with Dad got ugly because I said there’s no real substance behind these arguments. The economy is in ruder health than anyone ought to expect it to be. We’re running a very modest deficit, our borrowings are a single digit percentage of GDP and yet we have an Opposition making — usually undisputed — claims that we’re in dire financial straits. And all the time the Government is hopeless at getting its message across and seems to have fists made entirely of tasty pork products. We’re not even hearing about the important things, let alone arguing about them.

Jay Rosen, a journalism lecturer at New York University, kicked off a storm on a recent visit here because he advanced the opinion that part of the problem we face is not so much the politics itself — which is poisonous enough — but the reporting. That one took a while to percolate into my head but I reckon he’s right. Back in the 1970s and even the 1980s, Australia had a much more diverse media. Rupert didn’t own too much, Sydney and Melbourne had several newspapers of varying tones and we had points of difference. The ABC didn’t engage in troll television like the excremental Q&A, which is just a way to generate Twittering and to get the well-educated chattering middle-class to tell everyone how much cleverer they are than the rest of the country because they’re supporting the person-du-jour in the Q&A bloodbath.

This closed, link-bait driven media feeds on fear so much that a negative line is always the line that wins out. The dollar goes up, we’re rooned. The dollar goes down, we’re rooned. I am very lucky in that I don’t have a mortgage and, goodness me, am I pleased I don’t have to spend the first few days of every month before the Reserve Bank board meeting panicking about what’s going to happen because the media is telling me that the country is going to hell in a hand basket, my home is virtually worthless and I’m going to lose my job.

So, while I blame the politicians for sick-minded, petty point-scoring (on both sides) and being generally ineffectual in response to negativity (the Government), the media is the problem. My son is not growing up seeing several points of view — there’s Rupert’s view and there’s the Fairfax view. There’s Alan Jones’ view and…um…well, nobody else really gets through, do they? The vested interests in this country’s national media are leading us to believe that the Lucky Country is falling on hard times when all that’s needed is a trip into the decaying suburbs of Detroit, a city in the richest country on earth, to remind us that we are in fact, absurdly lucky.

Not that we’re ever told that. It doesn’t sell newspapers and it doesn’t generate clicks, so all we get is doomsday prophecy and bikini babes link-bait.

Come back 1975, all is forgiven.

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Peter Anderson is a 35 year-old who likes to think he’s a writer, raconteur and occasional broadcaster. He writes stuff at http://www.zerogeewhiz.com, runs a small IT consultancy and makes irrational claims about why people do things. Over the years he’s written about video games, Formula 1 and been a big film and music critic — he is therefore unbearably smug. Twitter: @zerogeewhiz

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