Opinion
About a month ago, a man was attacked at a local shopping centre in Perth.
I asked an authority about ongoing anti-social behaviour at the centre because anecdotally, it had always been a problem patch for people targeting random passers-by.
In reply, I was told they weren’t going to facilitate an interview with anyone who could tell me what was going on, and the shopping centre wasn’t really a problem.
Frustrated, I whinged about it to a close friend who worked at the authority.
She sent me back a photo of a dashboard on her phone, showing the outsized number of offences happening at the shopping centre I’d asked about. It was a couple of clicks away, she told me.
Much has been made about how the local media landscape has reached a critical low point in recent years.
But what readers often don’t see is the fight WA journalists undertake on behalf of the public to get you even basic information.
I speak to people in government organisations and private institutions every day, and the common thing I hear? Transparency has actually never been worse.
And with a media landscape in WA that is often seen as under-baked or ineffective, is it any wonder why?
For example, whispers about the controversial WA university merger have been doing the rounds in political circles for years, and as journalists tried to dig in more to find out what actually was going on behind the scenes – a decision that could impact the lives of tertiary education students and staff in the state – I fired off a query in April.
“Just checking in to confirm the existence of an internal report done by the University of Western Australia,” I wrote.
“I have heard from three different sources independent of one another now that UWA has done a feasibility study into the possibility of a merger, and the study outlines what would happen if Curtin and Murdoch were to come under the UWA umbrella. It also signposts it would support any potential merger.
“Can you confirm/deny the above? My deadline is COB today.”
As is so often the go with communications professionals nowadays, that deadline was ignored. So I checked back in after three days, asking if the email had been received.
The person who responded to me – someone who was ostensibly a journalist about 20 years ago – replied: “Yes.”
“All good. Does the university intend to respond?” I asked.
“No.”
End of conversation. A few months later, the government came out and said it would be proceeding with a business case into the argument for a potential university merger. And what do you know? UWA supports the idea.
In another example, earlier this month, I turned up to a hearing in Perth Magistrates Court after a tip from earlier in the year.
The woman appearing had been charged with soliciting a prostitution ring out of a city apartment, as part of her gig as an OnlyFans model.
The idea was the case could expose just how different sex work was in modern day WA, after the heyday of Shirley Finn.
Girls, in a mining state where cash was still continuing to flow despite a cost-of-living crisis, were going online to keep their own dollar, and using the city’s increasingly unoccupied buildings to run a different kind of business.
But at the very end of the sentencing, the woman’s lawyer applied for a suppression order. She was embarrassed, he said, and her family didn’t know about her line of work.
This was despite the fact her Instagram was publicly linked to a profile where a picture of her derrière was her cover photo, and a public OnlyFans link in the bio.
It was also granted despite precedent in WA saying a person cannot use embarrassment because of which to apply for a suppression order. Reporting, stopped in its tracks.
There are hundreds more examples from my colleagues.
The Prisoner’s Review Board has decided to stop publishing release details of paroled prisoners, meaning convicted murderers’ privacy means more than the public’s right to know they’re in the neighbourhood.
A journalist wants a court transcript to fact-check a claim someone is making?
That will be $227 for about 20 pages, thank you.
Want to ask a government department a series of simple, spelled out questions?
Prepare for an irrelevant statement back that answers none of your questions, and then a phone call from a gatekeeper who says they “actually didn’t refuse to respond, they provided a statement”.
Don’t get me wrong. Over the last 10 years in WA, generations of experience have left newsrooms and there is far less in-depth reporting as a result.
However, many of those journalists have gone on to embed themselves in highly paid PR jobs, running interference for a government that once billed itself as the “gold standard” of transparency.
Yet, after reading this piece, their first reaction will not be for introspection on how far we have fallen.
It will be to try and find my friend who dared show me a photo of a dashboard with figures the public deserves to know.
