KEVIN RUDD. Democracy overboard: Rupert Murdoch’s long war on Australian politics (The Guardian 7-9-19)

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Australia has become a dangerously complacent country, dancing to the reactionary tune of the Murdoch press

Australia has become the complacent country. Complacent about its future economic competitiveness. Complacent about climate change. Complacent about how to navigate our future in the region given China’s rise, America’s response and a neighbourhood increasingly torn between the two. Complacent too about the gradual erosion of our democracy itself through a growing “pay for play” culture from financial donations to political parties, an increasing assault on the independence of the public service and the abuse of monopolistic media power.

The latter, in particular, is perverting our national politics, undermining the public commons on which the nation can conduct a balanced policy debate on our national future. The Murdoch media has mutated to become a cancerous growth on our democracy. It no longer even pretends to be a media organisation, separating out news coverage from editorial option. Instead it has become a de facto political party prosecuting its own ideological and economic interests, acting as an effective coalition partner of the Liberal party.

You don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar to work out that since 2007 through to 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019, the Murdoch media, representing some 70% of the nation’s total print media, has hated the Australian Labor party’s guts. More broadly, they despise the progressive left. And they will do anything within their power to keep Labor out of office.

Even in 2007, when some Murdoch mastheads technically endorsed me in their pre-election editorials, Murdoch’s tabloids for the year prior to that election did everything they could to destroy my leadership through one series of personal accusations of scandal, misdemeanour or corruption after another. No Liberal leader has been subjected to anything similar, but it has become routine for Labor leaders. Once they failed and Murdoch concluded that a Labor win was unavoidable, that’s when the technical, pre-election “editorial” endorsement was deployed to put themselves on the right side of history.

If you look at Murdoch’s election “news” coverage during the 2007 campaign, it was at best 50-50. Roll the clock to 2010 and 2013, it was more like 80-20 against Labor. Then 90-10 in 2016. And in 2019 it was 100-0, when all pretence of being a news organisation was finally given up. And Murdoch’s print dominance in this country bleeds into both radio and television and through to social media.

The Murdoch beast itself is deeply ideological. Its papers conducted a relentless campaign against any form of economic stimulus during the global financial crisis, arguing that financial markets would magically self-correct. Its far right agenda on climate change is clear to all. Murdoch’s mastheads are driving Australia’s national China hysteria with “Reds under every bed” rapidly morphing into the “Yellow Peril”, as one giant throwback to 1950s McCarthyism, where any dissenting views are attacked as being in Beijing’s pocket. The Murdoch media – in Australia, the US and in the UK – led the charge to go to war in Iraq in 2003; 16 years later we are still paying the price in Iraq, Syria and an emboldened Iran. In the UK, Murdoch backed both Brexit and, for a time, Scotland breaking away from Britain. In the US, Murdoch’s Fox has been the great Trump enabler. Indeed, without Fox, it’s doubtful Trump would have been elected.

The Murdoch commercial agenda in the 2013 election was also on full display. My government had advanced a fibre optic to the premises NBN across Australia as part of a $42bn plan. Murdoch was determined to kill it because it represented a threat to his only significant profit centre left in Australia, the Fox cable entertainment network. Why? Because the NBN we were building would enable Foxtel competitors such as Netflix to provide direct entertainment products to the home. Which is why Murdoch did a deal with the Liberals to kill it by turning fibre optic to the premises into fibre optic to the node, thereby leaving the last bit of the NBN unconnected unless customers were willing to pay for it. This has left Australia’s broadband one of the slowest and least reliable in the world. Denials by Murdoch executives, or by their Liberal party accomplices, are unbelievable.

Murdoch’s agenda is patently ideological, commercial and of course political. But it is also global. Across much of the Anglosphere, these debates occur in parallel. But interestingly not in Canada – because Murdoch is not in Canada.

And for those who think it will all expire when Rupert dies, there’s another Murdoch in waiting. Lachlan is every bit as conservative as his father, including being a climate change denier. Murdoch has cultivated an atmosphere of fear in Australia. Debating Murdoch’s power has long been effectively off-limits. Politicians, academics, corporates, even journalists and commentators from other news organisations are fearful for their own reputations, because they know from experience that Murdoch’s editorial henchmen will come after anyone who attacks them, with a view to shredding the offender’s reputation. Murdoch editors see no need to correct the record when they print inaccuracies or just make stories up. After all, who is going to have the guts to challenge them? Which is why we have such a deafening national silence in this country on the problem which dare not speak its name: Murdoch.

Nine’s takeover of Fairfax, the country’s only remaining independent newspaper organisation including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Financial Review, is a further nail in the coffin of media diversity in Australia. Nine’s chairman is Peter Costello, long known for his fair and balanced views on Australian politics. And then we have Hugh Marks, Nine CEO, who hosted a $750,000 fundraiser for the Liberal party at Nine headquarters, as if this was now perfectly normal, before a belated apology after a backlash from reporters.

The time has come for a full royal commission into the ownership and operation of the media in this country. Murdoch has too much power. The rest of the print media is now heading to the right. The ABC, under systemic editorial and budgetary attack, its board repoliticised by the government in defiance of the ABC Reform Act (2012), is now frightened of its own shadow. And social media offers no credible alternative as a common, neutral platform for any form of national political conversation.

Taken together with Clive Palmer’s $60m paid campaign against Labor leading up to the last election (the likes of which we have never seen before in our politics), the growing swagger of the conservative’s general assault on the independence of the public service and other national institutions like the ABC, together with the new intellectual respectability now being accorded the authoritarian right both in this country and across the west, we can no longer simply assume, in the absence of fundamental reform, that the Australian democratic project as we have know it for the last 100 years will necessarily remain the permanent condition of our politics for the future.

Kevin Rudd is a former prime minister of Australia. This is based on a recent public lecture at the University of Sydney in a series entitled “The Complacent Country”

This article was published by The Guardian on the 7th of Septmember 2019.

John Menadue

John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.

Comments

7 responses to “KEVIN RUDD. Democracy overboard: Rupert Murdoch’s long war on Australian politics (The Guardian 7-9-19)”

Sep 12, 2019

Rosemary O’Grady

I have long-suffered for my defence of Kevin Rudd who, before his rise to power, was notable amongst politicians for speaking to the electorate as if they were human beings with brains.
Those were the days.
Now he proposes to deal with the nation’s indigenous affairs problem by mounting a legation of two – Rudd and Tony Abbott – to mediate or something- and bring home a consensus on the Uluru Statement.
It’s been said before about contemporary politics but: beyond satire?
Sep 11, 2019

Jerry Roberts

Murdoch preaches to the converted. Labor has a bad habit of blaming others for its own problems. The public is not just complacent. It is not interested in politics.
1. Sep 14, 2019
  
  John Doyle
  
  You haven’t been following politics lately? Every speech from the LNP attacks labor . Labor hasn’t been in power for 6 years but it is as if they were defeated only a few weeks ago. Sauce for the goose? It is really tiresome for this government to blame the opposition when the failure is theirs, but that’s the venality of politics now. Complacent incompetents everywhere, clueless about real issues. No extra money for newstart? the Budget surplus must be honoured. Little do they realise a budget surplus is a chimera. It only exists on paper.
  1. Sep 14, 2019
    
    Charles Lowe
    
    John: you’re obviously not a marketer. ScoMo is. Repetition is everything. As is “simplicity” (simplisticness).
    
    ScoMo’s one goal is to win the next election. Regardless.
Sep 11, 2019

Frank Alley

Australians essentially haven’t changed in terms of complacency from before WWII. When Australia was in its greatest peril, John Curtin the prime minister appealed to the public to tighten their belts so that we might be able to face the Japanese and German onslaughts. They, the public would not and seemed not to care about even our soldiers facing their dangers. The wharfies wanted extra pay, ‘danger money’ to load munitions on ships to be sent to the troops facing real danger. I’m alright Jack, bugger you syndrome is alive and well.
Sep 11, 2019

Ken Dyer

Australia is indeed complacent. Stagnant wages and attacks on the welfare system epitomise today’s politics. So far, the government, aided by the Murdoch press have been very successful in killing off innovation and rewarding old technologies such as coal fired power stations.

But it wont last, according to Carlota Perez, whose work on long cycles addresses workers resistance to the neo-liberal chaos Australia is in at the moment.

Ultimately, the Murdoch press will be overtaken by the giants of technology, e.g. Google, and that is a reason the Government is so resistant to these new technologies and business models, that innovate rather than exploit.

We find ourselves in uncharted waters, with the defeat and moral surrender of organised labor. The question is where will the spark come from that will allow Australia to move on from the failed neo-liberal experiment foisted upon our country?
1. Sep 16, 2019
  
  Rosemary O’Grady
  
  Schoolchildren – whose stake is in the future. Too late.

KEVIN RUDD. Democracy overboard: Rupert Murdoch’s long war on Australian politics (The Guardian 7-9-19)

John Menadue

Comments

7 responses to “KEVIN RUDD. Democracy overboard: Rupert Murdoch’s long war on Australian politics (The Guardian 7-9-19)”

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