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Murdoch media, the Queensland election and the bleeding obvious

by Michael West | Oct 28, 2024 | Comment & Analysis, Latest Posts

The biggest influence in the Queensland election was an American billionaire living in New York, Rupert Murdoch. Michael West follows the money, finds the real ‘take-outs’.

Perhaps it simply did not occur to them. The nation’s pundits, that is. Did they only see the trees but not the forest as they ruminated earnestly about the Queensland election?

The single biggest influence in the Queensland election is an American billionaire living in Central Park, New York – or perhaps on one of the family’s super-yachts – whose media empire News Corp Australia is rarely in the habit of paying any corporate income tax but thanks to the policies of the Coalition and Labor political duopoly, is subsidised by the public. By us.

And here they were, hard in the wake of the weekend election, those soi disant champions of free markets, demanding even more taxpayer assistance from government. This, while their core business model is operating a ‘loss-leader’ media empire for commercial purposes. Peddling influence to swing political favours and make money.

This, while effectively celebrating another election win, because, for all intents and purposes, News Corp is little more than a propaganda machine for the Coalition. In Queensland, Rupert’s Courier Mail is the monopoly metro newspaper. In regional Queensland, most of the dailies are Murdoch rags.

Local and metro radio both take their editorial cues for the 24-hour news cycle accordingly, mimicking daily Murdoch talking points like marionettes. And then there is Sky News, which has – thanks to flawed government media policy by both major parties – been awarded a licence to be the monopoly ‘news’ network in the bush.

How about the rout of Labor in regional Queensland, wondered the media pundits, apparently without irony.

Queensland Electoral Commission’s latest count

While the pundits, and we are including the ABC in this, were holding forth in mainstream media in the wake of the LNP’s emphatic victory after 9 years of Labor rule, they blithely missed the greatest factor in the result. Themselves.

For those who have not had the pleasure of watching Sky News, it is hardly news, it is a relentless, belligerent campaign operation for the Liberal Party. Every night of the year, host after host interviews right-wing Sky News ‘contributors’, clobbering their viewers with the message: Labor incompetent, Coalition sensible, Greens terrorist supporters, Teals and other independents closet Greens and Labor. Woke leftists are your enemy.

They are to blame for whatever it is you don’t like.

With morbid curiosity, we watch it once a year because it’s free outside the cities, and just, from a professional point of view, to check what they are up to, and, phew, it’s rugged work. Every show parroting the same points in their war on woke inner city leftists and so forth. Pure desk-pounding identity politics. 

Now Crikey, the independent media outlet to which we at MWM are a subscriber, ran a bizarre debate between journalist Stephen Mayne and one of their own the other day. Was it okay for journalists to criticise other journalists? Totally fair game. Mostly, people believe what they see and hear in the media. The media are the conduits between politicians, political parties and the voters.

They are manipulated daily, unwittingly compromised to adhere to the two party system. The ABC show Insiders is a case in point. 

Host David Speers, evaluating the poor result from the Greens with Patricia Karvelas – two former Murdoch pundits with another current Murdoch journalist along with one from the other major media house Nine also on the couch – pondered of the Greens “what’s happened to their brand nationally”?

Look in the mirror, sonny-jim.

Not to speak ill of these two, they are capable and professional journalists, yet part of an ecosystem which advocates for the two major parties, but the answer to that question is, “You guys trashed it” with your ‘political race call commentary’ rather than policy consideration, or what is in the true interests of Australians as opposed to the corporations and special interest groups which fund them.

Oblivious, like the frog slowly boiling in the pot as the water heats on the stove, they don’t realise they have been cooking.

And cooking their cookers, making their mostly angry old white man audiences ever more angry, more outraged. 

Surely, they were not alone. Same deal in other mainstream media. As evinced by veteran journalist Wendy Bacon in the lead-up to the election, the far-right Advance Australia group had allied with pro-Israel extremists and their noisy apparatchiks on social media to project the Greens as supporters of genocide and terror. 

Inside the ARC of Israel influence in the Queensland Election

We can expect to see more of this as the Federal Election looms. This is the ‘learning’ from the Queensland election amid all the recriminations and the blame-fest in its wake.   

The ‘take-outs’

So what of the take-outs? Negative campaigning, xenophobia and fear-mongering works. Murdoch media is at its vanguard. On the editorial side, its ‘rival’ in the media duopoly, Nine Entertainment, is stacked with pro-Liberal Party and ex-Liberal staffers. News Corp, the most influential media outlet in the country which had the most say in engineering the 7.7% swing against Labor in the outer suburbs and the rout in the bush.

Therefore, in terms of media influence, the biggest winners are the Coalition and News Corp, followed by Labor in the sense that these two are closer on policy federally and vested interests would like to see the two-party status quo prevail. In Queensland, incoming Premier David Crisafulli did not offer much in the way of policy at all. He had the benefit of friendly media and corporate donations to get his party over the line, as well as voters wanting a change after 9 years of Labor.

Youth crime was the predominant message, even though youth crime stats are down over the decade. Take-out? Image over substance works in a friendly media environment.

Federally, the take-out is more of the same for the LNP: stick to your knitting, demonise Labor and the Greens and independents, but be careful of shifting too far to the right on the likes of abortion, as that costs votes. The corporate money will continue to roll in, and you will be supported by far-right astroturfers such as Advance Australia.

Genocide in the Middle East is not swinging many votes vis-a-vis cost of living concerns. Although it may play bigger at the federal level in inner-city seats and with the Muslim vote in southwest Sydney.

The reason Labor has taken heart with the outcome in Queensland – no rout – is that Stephen Miles had shifted Labor swiftly back from the Annastacia Palaszczuk era to a social democratic party, back to its roots. Take-out for Labor federally? Too much centrism and corporatocracy may keep the donations firing but may also cost you votes. 

The reason for One Nation’s failure to pick up a seat in Queensland, despite jagging 8% of the vote, was that the LNP stuck to the right – equivocating on abortion and climate enough to not leak votes to One Nation. Likewise Labor with the Greens; by pursuing the social democracy route, Miles managed to stem the vote to the Greens.

Follow the money

The big picture game for the majors is to keep the corporate donations flowing to either stay in power or win office, shutting the shift down by younger voters and those concerned by policy stasis away from the political duopoly.

In Queensland the LNP coffers were filled with money from the Queensland Resources Council and other fossil fuel interests, money to finance boots on the ground at election booths, as well as media campaigns. Both Labor and the Coalition at the federal level will continue to be bankrolled by the fossil lobby.

And both Albo and Peter Dutton have been duchessing the Teals in order to swing as many votes their way in the case of a minority government. For the Greens and progressive independents, the entrails are ominous. They will have, if Queensland is any guide, a coalition of far-right Israel lobby money and fossil fuel money against them, targeting specific seats and running a national smear campaign.

There is no avoiding this. Unless perhaps the political classes and the Australian Electoral Commission were to have a burst of energy and ban misleading campaigns. But to get the facts straight on the narrative now being propounded by the media establishment – that the Greens should stick to their environmental origins and butt out of social democratic issues, that is a nonsense.

There is a line being run about the Bob Brown days. People forget that Bob Brown was anti-war and socially progressive. He stood up for East Timor, on Iraq, opposing George W Bush’s disastrous invasion. He got it right, in other words. His successor, Christine Milne, was instrumental in getting the corporate tax inquiry going, which brought billions of dollars into the nation’s coffers from multinational tax avoiders.

Now, they are standing up on Gaza and fossil fuel exporters’ super profits. The vote in Queensland was static. They lost a seat, but it did not go backwards. In the ACT, where much was made of a Greens wipe-out (6 seats to 4) they lost 1% of the overall vote. Over the years, though, their overall vote is up.

It was not a good result for progress or policy change in Queensland, and this presages poorly for the Greens and other minor players. They are up against a well-oiled machine. Nonetheless, as the Teal outcome at the last election evinced (they did poorly in 2019, then picked up nine seats in 2022), change does happen in politics, gradually, and as inequality is further entrenched, it will continue to happen, gradually. The demographics will drive it.

As for media policy, the mess that has allowed this policy stasis to occur, there is no sign of that changing. Again, following the money, News Corp refuses to say how much money it rakes in from fossil fuel interests while it continues to wage its war on climate science and wokeness. It now has its hand out for even more money.

The Old Mates Code

The way it works is that the Morrison government’s Digital Media Bargaining Code ensures a cross-subsidy via the platforms such as Google. It acts with no visibility and zero guarantee the money will be spent on journalism, instead more like a protection racket to gouge money from the platforms straight into the coffers of News, Nine, Seven and other majors.

For its part, Google, as predicted here, says to itself, okay, if we are going to have to pay off the government’s media mates, that is a cost of doing business, ergo tax deductible. And on cue, Google Australia, which had begun to pay corporate income tax a few years ago, went back to paying nothing.

The Code, besides being a cross-subsidy, is flawed policy too as, rather than enhancing media competition from smaller businesses and independent media operators, it entrenches the power of old ‘fossil’ media, which cannot compete without subsidies, by slinging money at the billionaires.

If you look at the News Corp financials, revenue in the media business is static. The growth is in digital real estate revenue while they have been looking to leverage their media distribution to expand into higher-margin operations like online gambling. While lobbying against the government’s prospective gambling reforms.


Disclaimer: MWM gets no Media Code subsidies so not happy Jan, not happy with media policy, which stifles competition and entrenches unfairness while propping up corrupt fossil media.

Michael West headshot

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.

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