Eleven o’clock pressers provide distraction

Many people are truly suffering because they’re doing the right thing. For me, lockdown hasn’t changed much as I mostly sit on the couch reading books – which is what I did before the restrictions were put in place, and it’s what I’ll be doing after they’re relaxed – so not seeing people isn’t much of a hardship. But for many it is very difficult. I can understand that people need company to make them feel whole, to take their thoughts away from unpleasant resorts, or to distance them from other urgent things like paying bills that pile up even as income is cut off. 

No wonder the daily eleven o’clock press conferences the state premiers hold are so welcome for people sitting at home with little to do. One friend put up an image of the TV tuned to the news and commented as though it were, for him, an occasion to break out the popcorn. It’s the signal event that marks the weekly rhythm, the bass note that gives the day its form, the place people go to in order to feel, for a few minutes, that they’re in control of their lives, and not some bizarre new illness come out of Wuhan like a new horseman of the Apocalypse.

“Poor Johnny lacklustre lock down,” commented one friend, “no play dates, just the existential crisis of corona virus and media saturation, here is hoping this chapter of our lives can end soon.” This shows that some people have come to resent the eleven o’clock presser. The federal government has been the main loser from the notoriety of the presser, its approval rating sliding alarmingly even as people stock up on intellectual comfort food while seated on the couch. My friend John will no doubt be applauding the opinion poll result, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the government, its stars hung so high until recently, and nothing that the Opposition did seemed able to lay a finger on it. Now, it lies like a Coke can crumpled in the gutter, ready for binning. For all of its sinning.

Nikki Savva to write a column for Nine Newspapers

In 2016 Savva published a book about Tony Abbott and the small coterie of insiders who helped him to govern. In it, she talks about Abbott’s problems. I wrote at the time:

One of the main ones was that all decisions seemed to emanate from a small group of select people in the leader's office, including his chief-of-staff. The type of collegial consultation that members of Parliament are apparently used to in a Westminster democracy were thrown out the door. A tiny clique was doing everything to control the message, but when the leader's popularity failed to turn around people outside that group turned on the leader and replaced him just like that.

That chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, now writes a column for The Australian, where Savva used to run her words. Savva also used to work for Nine Chairman Peter Costello, so the current move is as cosy as Abbott’s counsellors were.

Savva is best known to the general population for her appearances on the ABC’s Sunday chat show, ‘Insiders’, which gets talked about at length on social media. One thing Savva didn’t talk about in her book was the one-term government we’ve seen so much of in recent years in Australia. As I wrote at the time of her book’s appearance:

But this phenomenon of one-term governments is something that the commentariat will have to one day really take a close, hard look at. So far noone has really made the attempt. I think it has something to do with the new public sphere in the age of social media. But a lot of people would despise me for even suggesting something like this.

It'd be very interesting if Savva could turn her attention to such things as these because so far the quantity of discussion about the shiftiness of politics in this country hasn’t percolated through the community to any significant degree. People are aware that something’s changed, but they are not all saying the same thing. Awareness is limited to responses to journalists and politicians who castigate the broader community when debate turns ugly. The common people revel in the icy sobriquets thrown out by the wounded.