Lidia Thorpe's King Charles protest was a masterclass in how to make front-page headlines in 2024

If you're Australian (and your name isn't Murdoch or Assange) it's not easy to get on the front page in the UK.

It helps if you have a fist fight with a kangaroo. Or was arrested for being drunk as a skunk captaining a motorized Esky on a legal road.

Another thing that will send you soaring in the British news algorithm, as Senator Lidia Thorpe discovered under laboratory conditions in the Great Hall of Parliament this week, is having a visiting monarch.

Senator Thorpe cemented her role as a federal stimulus package for Australia's struggling news industry on Monday when she shouted “F**k the colony!” on a visit to King Charles, which demanded a treaty and spawned three different cycles of coverage.

First: the breaking news about their intervention when it happened.

Secondly, the busy line-up of experts called television and radio studios to assess the exact level of Antipodean insult and whether it was worse or better than Paul Keating putting his arm around the back of the king's late mother during her visit Sydney 32 years ago.

(Of course, a significant number of Australia's radical free speech advocates were not so burdened by previous commitments as to come forward and demand the senator's immediate dismissal.)

And third: yesterday's usual cocktail of national nonchalance and excitement as we hit the news in London (“She's terrible!” groaned The Sun about the independent Victorian senator whose raised fist and possum skin also graced the front pages of the Guardian , the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express)

Three years ago, an Australian woman went viral on TikTok when she was attacked by a possum. That Senator Thorpe would go viral for attacking the British monarch while powerfully covered in possum skin seems like a natural escalation.

King Charles himself didn't seem particularly bothered. After all, for a man who was shot while visiting Australia 30 years ago, being yelled at is pretty thin paste when it comes to threats.

What's more, Senator Thorpe – a charismatic rabble-rouser who divorced her Green parents several years ago and has attracted unusually high levels of public interest in her love life – is essentially the Australian Parliament's closest equivalent to Prince Harry.

As much as the organizers in Parliament House must have blanched on Monday as they heard the guest of honor being loudly and publicly reprimanded for his personal links to a racist system of colonial oppression, it is important to remember that this is not the first rodeo of the year King's response to this issue is at the forefront, even in his immediate family.

But in this fractured world, where politicians' ability to capture mainstream attention is diminishing as is the legacy news media's ability to convey it, this week's events were a good example of what works.

And what works is conflict.

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The perverse incentive for politicians to create conflict

This has always been true to a certain extent for political reporting in the media. In the building where Senator Thorpe confronted the monarch, we in the media report far more eagerly on the one in ten government laws that are controversial or contentious than the nine in ten that pass more quietly through Parliament.

By the way, this is not as unreasonable as it sounds. Our Parliament is designed to take advantage of adversarialism. Our system actively requires the government – ​​the holder of formal power – to share space with its opponents, listen to those with whom it disagrees, and find compromise when necessary. Not only is disagreement a healthy thing in a democracy, it is also a lever we use to ferret out difficult issues and resolve them thoroughly to ensure that every point of view is heard.

Being able to handle criticism, even when it is unreasonable – and especially when it is unreasonable – is a sign of human maturity and self-confidence that we have every right to expect from our political leaders and monarchs and that we do too wherever possible should practice.

But the common-sense tendency to focus on conflict in political reporting creates a perverse incentive for politicians to create conflict, and this phenomenon has become worse as media audiences have become divided.

Sometimes the major parties hold broadly similar policy positions on an important issue, but feign major differences to create conflict, attract attention, and recruit from the ranks of the outraged.

Backbenchers compete for promotions and TV minutes by being outrageous, sharp or destructive. We reward them with screen time and attention. Sometimes, faced with a problem that would respond better to consensus and compromise, it makes more strategic sense to foment conflict or portray the opponent as extreme and stubborn, stupid or evil.

In recent decades, this has certainly been true of climate change and immigration, both important policy areas where political consensus would have been useful and, indeed, probably would have been present at many points in time to a greater extent than would have been apparent from the spittle-stained rhetoric .

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Cooperation also creates trust among the governed

The other problem with our pro-conflict orientation is that it does not sufficiently reward the hard work and goodwill required to reach compromises, particularly in difficult or contentious policy areas.

For example, while Parliament appeared poised to fall apart in recent months on everything from Gaza to immigration to housing, it was easy to miss that various parties were making difficult decisions together and addressing some long-standing structural problems.

For example, reforming the exponentially expensive elder care system has been an overly difficult problem for decades. But protracted negotiations between the government and opposition last month secured a hugely significant – and, it must be said, statistically unlikely, given the tribalism of politics – deal between the major parties and savings of $12.6 billion over May 11 Years.

Aged care is extremely fertile ground for scare campaigns, but you probably won't hear about it in this area because the government's aged care minister, Anika Wells, and her opposition colleague Anne Ruston are both on board; After both parties worked somewhat collaboratively on the reforms, they now own the property.

Similarly, the NDIS – which was launched with cross-party support in the fractious and contentious final days of the Gillard minority government – ​​underwent a revamp this year, with the government and opposition agreeing on reforms that promise to raise US$14.4 billion -Save dollars from their rapidly growing household over four years.

Balancing the need for financial sustainability with the interests and legitimate fears of the most vulnerable and habitually overlooked sectors of society is a delicate task, and compromises are always imperfect and messy. Conflicts are unavoidable. But a democratic system in which participants trust each other to work together – and forgo opportunities for partisan shouting, even when they are extremely tempting – is a system that also deserves the trust of the governed.