Stop the hype on petrol prices!

an open letter to the AB-friggin-C

I’m great fan of the ABC both TV and radio and believe that you provide a great service – but you’ve gone completely overboard on petrol prices! The whole media has gone nuts and I’m completely sick of hearing about it. Petrol prices will continue to go up, this a good thing (to reduce carbon emissions) and there’s very little the government can do about it anyway. We all just have to get used to driving our cars less and finding others ways to get around. So can we move the debate on please? Obviously it’s an issue a lot of people are concerned about but the can’t ABC do something useful to help us deal with it rather than just continuing to fuel a huge whinge cycle which expects politicians to have all the answers to make our lives easy. What about talkback segments that encourage people to share stories and ideas of how they’ve reduced their car usage? What about encouraging governments to invest more in alternative fuels, public transport and solutions to the problem that don’t rely on ever diminishing supplies of oil? Can’t you facilitate some more constructive discussion than just whinging?

The hype around divisions in the parties over the various petrol plans is unbelievable! Do you really expect all the members of either party to agree on everything? Why is disagreement so surprising? Why is it seen as so damaging? These sort of debates are healthy and the idea of democracy. The real issue here is about the role of the parties themselves. They’re the ones who sold us this myth about unity. So drawing attention to this stuff is good but it’s how you go about it that’s important. What we’ve ended up with is the parties publicly singing the virtues of diversity and debate while behind the scenes they draw the nooses that hold them together ever tighter – essentially making things worse for our democracy. If we took an approach that welcomed this internal dissent and questioned the role of the parties in forcing everybody to tow the line, then we’d have the parties on the back foot.

So come on ABC you can do better.