The Murdoch Party

1 May 2020

Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd do not agree on much, but both Malcolm and Kevin agree that Rupert Murdoch is effectively a political party in Australia and by controlling information gets whatever government and policies that he wants.
Kevin Rudd may have been a religious, egotistical, micro-managing nerd, but probably what brought him undone was that he wanted royalties for mining Australia’s assets, a carbon tax and most significantly he would not change the media ownership laws to let Murdoch have even more than what he already had. The mining magnates and Murdoch got rid of him. Kevin 07 was gone at Kevin 10. Julia Gillard brought in the mining tax to save face, but it had been modelled by the industry not the tax department and it raised almost no revenue and the extra mining profits that year were almost exactly what the tax would have raised.
Living in NZ at the time I read over there of how incredibly well Australia, with Gillard leading a minority government with intelligent independents was doing in the GFC. When I came back to Australia there were endless moans about how bad she was, her hair, her clothes, her accent, her boyfriend. I asked what the hell all that had to do with anything? It was, of course, trivial but the endless trickle of negative stories from Murdoch create public perception. People read the days ‘news’ and no one looks at the long-term pattern and agenda. So in the end the ‘gut feeling’ of the electorate relates to its diet of junk news.
The first thing Abbott did was ‘reform’ media ownership so that Murdoch got more.
Malcolm Turnbull says that Liberal far Right are the foot soldiers for the Murdoch party, and no doubt Kevin Rudd agrees. Folk like me who vote with their wallets and do not buy Murdoch’s newspapers or watch Sky at the stockbrokers are in danger of underestimating the trickle down effect of slanted news and its political effect. Inexplicable election results have causes.
As a footnote we could discuss the points that Malcolm and Kevin disagree on, but we need to get our country back.
www.smh.com.au/national/five-ways-malcolm-turnbull-s-memoir-gets-it-wrong-kevin-rudd-20200427-p54np7.html