Take PM, the ABC radio's premier political program. The program was abuzz with talk about the causes of the criminal mayhem, except the causes that fall outside the bounds of respectable Left-liberal orthodoxy.
We are used to being intellectually underwhelmed in Sydney by ABC local radio's Deborah Cameron. Her constant lightweight crusades are just that: they represent the unthinking Left.
Even former ABC chairman Donald McDonald has pointed to Cameron's morning stream of consciousness and asked why can't the ABC do better? Good question. A better question is this: aren't we entitled to expect more from PM, which describes itself as "one of the grand institutions of Australian public broadcasting"?
Sadly, the highbrow program let us down. Early in the week, PM's host Mark Colvin and London-based reporter Rachael Brown kept making comparisons with the race riots in the 1980s.
When it became clear that the riots were not political protests, but instead rampant, opportunistic crime, the program then canvassed every Left-liberal excuse for the shocking violence.
We heard about the hot weather, high unemployment, bad police communications, unfairness, inequality, austerity cuts, culminating in PM interviewing author Will Hutton, who blamed the crime wave on capitalism.
By Friday, not even the ABC could ignore another possible explanation: the poisonous cocktail of welfare dependency, broken schools, the absence of family authority and a vacuum of values that bind communities. Yet, even then, PM's interview with Theodore Dalrymple, a critic of the welfare system, looked like a token effort to placate a broadcasting charter that requires the ABC to present different perspectives. After all, why didn't the ABC's premier political program evince earlier and more genuine curiosity about the riots? Plenty of people have asked questions about the damaging role of welfare.
The journalists at PM could have spoken with Frank Furedi or Brendan O'Neill, to name just a few who have provided thoughtful analysis that challenges leftist sacred cows. If PM didn't want to take its cue from this newspaper, which featured both men, the program could have interviewed many others who reject the so-called progressive orthodoxy of welfare.
The term "so-called progressive" is also deliberate: the London riots have shown that decades of progressive welfare policies have not provided a path to progress for the people who need it most.
Colvin's evening political coverage could have included Katharine Birbalsingh, for example. The former state school teacher made headlines last October after her passionate speech about education to the Conservative Party conference attacking the deep "culture of excuses, of low standards and expecting the very least from our poorest and least disadvantaged".
Colvin's PM program could have explored what turned Birbalsingh from a self-described serious lefty who read Marxism at university and flirted with the Socialist Workers Party into a well-placed critic of a leftist ideology that has long since stopped helping children.
The 37-year-old teacher told the conference that when she tells a child who has caused trouble to repeat "I am responsible for myself, Miss", she is "fighting a generation of thinking that has left our education system in pieces".
From front-line experience, Birbalsingh blames the "well-meaning liberal" for the dumbing down of schools 'that even the children themselves know it", where the children are crying out for structure and discipline (one child pleaded with her: "Miss, I want to be in your class because I hear you're really mean").
In schools and in society, "we need high expectations; we need to instil competition among our kids and help build their motivation". A few days after saying these things, Birbalsingh was asked by her employers to work from home and she has since parted ways with the British state school system.
Perhaps PM will interview Birbalsingh when she comes to Sydney to speak at a Sydney Institute function next month. That they failed to cast Aunty's net of analysis wider during the London riots tells us much about the state of debate on important issues in this country.
This is a debate that requires some genuine curiosity and courage from the broader political class if we are to learn anything from the riots across London.
And there is plenty to learn. Lessons such as what happens when we fail to attribute responsibility to individuals for their actions, when we fail to lay down boundaries for behaviour, when there are too few expectations on people, when generations grow dependent on the state, when they have only a sense of entitlement to handouts rather than a sense of contribution to the community in which they live.
After all, people don't jump up and start demolishing their own community because benefits are cut back.
If the austerity cuts are to blame for the violence, then handing benefits back won't restore the moral values that were absent on the streets of England last week. The mentality that led to the riots was quietly brewing while public expenditure in Britain has skyrocketed for the past few decades.
Instead of using the riots to attack capitalism, we could relearn some basic economic lessons too. As Irving Kristol once said, it's true that a market economy creates inequalities of income and wealth but "there is simply no alternative to 'trickle-down economics' which is just another name for growth economics".
As Kristol said: "The world has yet to see a successful version of 'trickle-up economics', an egalitarian society in which the state ensures the fruits of economic growth are universally and equally shared" because this socialist ideal has never produced the fruits in the first place.
When the state grows bigger and more intrusive, assuming greater control over individuals, the other side of the equation necessarily gets squeezed. Individual freedom, accountability and responsibility for our actions as free agents diminish in equal measure.
Jed Bartlet, the fictional Democrat president on The West Wing, best described the consequences of not taking responsibility when he said: "We come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty". In response to his wrongdoing, Bartlet said: "I'm to blame. I was wrong."
When governments and the broader political class, when schools and bureaucracies, and when parents raising children relearn the importance of individual responsibility, then we will see real progress for those who most need it.
