On July 29 this year, Tony Abbott declared on Nine’s Today show that carbon dioxide was “an invisible, odourless, weightless, tasteless substance,” making its industrial emissions too hard to measure. Anyone with a Year 10 chemistry textbook could have proved him wrong. But if we were expecting a response to such a sizeable error, we found a nation’s media staying strangely quiet.

It seems that every bulletin in the last six months has opened with Abbott, in a hardhat or a high-vis vest or a pair of safety goggles, prodding at a piece of machinery like a gibbon with a Scrabble set, then crankily soundbiting the same evidence-free statements he made the day before at a different dog food plant or Slinky factory. This is a toxic tax. It’ll cost lots of money. Lots of jobs. Ruin our economy.

Each rehash is reported as though it were news. For an industry keen to avoid accusations of bias against the Opposition, these blue-collar-meets-clean-white-collar publicity parades are in the national interest. But ‘unbiased’ does not mean allocating each side 37 seconds in the lead bracket. It means that journalists should report what actually happens. If someone has nothing to say, you’re allowed to mention the fact.

News Ltd columnists can always find time in their busy days to complain about left-wing media bias, having apparently missed the memo that their employers own 70 percent of Australian newspapers. The lack of scrutiny of the opposition leader’s claims indicate exactly the opposite tilt.

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