Extract from The Guardian
The former Australian PM admits he once courted the mogul’s mastheads but now says democracy is at stake
Last modified on Sat 17 Oct 2020 06.01 AEDT
Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has embarked on what he says is an immensely challenging endeavour: to have a public conversation about the power of Rupert Murdoch in a country gripped by a “culture of fear” due to his dominance of the media.
Rudd wants to make it possible for a future Labor prime minister to do what he was unable to achieve when he led the country – take on Murdoch in the interests of democracy.
A week ago, Rudd launched a petition to the federal parliament calling for a royal commission into News Corp’s conduct in Australia and its “overwhelming control” of the print media. So far, the petition has more than 280,000 signatures.
The present conservative Liberal and National party Coalition government is generally seen as a beneficiary of the Murdoch press’s dominance and the Labor opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, has distanced himself from the petition.
So what is Rudd hoping to achieve?
When he was Labor leader, he says he courted Murdoch, visiting him in New York in the lead-up to the 2007 election that returned the ALP to power.
As prime minister, he says, he tried to “manage the egos” of Murdoch’s editors, including Chris Mitchell, who was then editor in chief of News Corp’s flagship national newspaper the Australian.
Now, he hopes the petition will spark a national conversation that will make it possible for a future government to act – but admits it might be a long game.
“Obviously, the beneficiaries of the Murdoch protection racket, the Liberal National party, will not do that [act],” Rudd says. “It will take some time to convince the Labor party that it’s in their interest as well. That will be influenced directly by the volume of public support.”
Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world. News Corp Australia owns about 70% of newspaper circulation and has a monopoly in some states. It also owns the 24-hour channel Sky News Australia which, in its evening line-up, increasingly resembles Fox News in the US. It’s stacked with rightwing commentators, climate change deniers and advocates for lifting all coronavirus-related restrictions.
Rudd has been calling for a royal commission into News Corp, which he blames for his loss of the prime ministership, at least since the second volume of his memoirs were published in 2018. Why ramp it up now?
His home state of Queensland goes to an election at the end of the month. A federal election is likely next year. Is Rudd trying to inoculate the public against Murdoch’s anti-Labor campaigns?
He launched the petition without consulting the leader of the Australian Labor party, Anthony Albanese. “I thought it would be less complicated for him if he didn’t know,” he says.
Albanese, meanwhile, has said Rudd is acting as a private citizen and a royal commission is not Labor policy.
But Rudd says the bias is getting worse. In Queensland, in the lead-up to the 31 October poll, Labor has been subjected to what he calls “a rolling campaign … every story, every edition of every paper”.
In the state of Victoria, which has been battling a second wave of coronavirus, the Labor government’s lockdown restrictions and handling of the pandemic have come under continued attack, with the tabloid Herald Sun describing the premier, Daniel Andrews, as “Dictator Dan”.
Former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, now a Sky News commentator, attends Andrews’ media conferences and engages in trenchant exchanges that have gone on for more than 15 minutes at a time – all livestreamed.
Rudd also points to the fact that James Murdoch’s comments on the reason why he left the family company, published in a New York Times interview last week, have not been mentioned by any Murdoch newspaper in Australia.
James Murdoch said he had stepped away partly because his father’s media empire legitimised disinformation and obscures facts.
As for his own record, Rudd makes no apologies.
In the memoirs of the Australian’s former editor, Rudd is described by Mitchell as “the gift that keeps on giving … an important source, contact, contributor and subject”.
The two men had known each other since Mitchell was editor of the Queensland Courier Mail and Rudd was a senior state public servant in the late 1980s. Rudd is even the godfather of Mitchell’s son – although both men agree that was organised through Mitchell’s then-wife.
Mitchell gave accounts of extraordinarily intimate meetings and drunken carouses with a succession of prime ministers, particularly Rudd and Abbott.
Mitchell claimed that Rudd asked the Australian opinion columnists to approve the party’s industrial relations policy. He also wrote that later, when foreign minister, Rudd organised a secret tete-a-tete, held in the sauna of a five-star Sydney hotel that had been closed to the public and set up as a private dining room.
"There is a culture of fear in Australia about what happens if you take on the Murdoch monopoly … they will seek to individually eviscerate people"
As for the industrial relations policy, Rudd says he discussed it with many people. That doesn’t mean he was seeking approval. “That is an example of Mitchell’s inflated view of his own significance in the galaxy,” Rudd says.
Mitchell on Friday was adamant the hotel meeting happened but accepted it may not have been in a sauna.
“It was a private room with a single table on the roof of the Intercontinental where Rudd was staying,” Mitchell tells Guardian Australia.
“Apparently not a sauna despite comments on the night. But that does not change the fact of the meeting, its timing, him making me come in a separate lift, leave in a separate lift or the fact he wanted to be sure [Julia] Gillard never knew about it.”
The ex-editor insists: “The place was the size of a sauna with a single table and no one could see in … whether it was a sauna or not it was a dinner he invited me to.”
Rudd admits he did his best to get on with Mitchell and the other Murdoch editors.
“Any Labor leader is mindful of the fact that the Murdochs will be out to take you down. Your job as leader is to try and maximise something approaching balanced coverage. That’s a really difficult thing to do … to work to ensure that our narrative is covered rather than simply ridiculed as a matter of ideological politics.”
So what does Rudd think should be done? There have been many parliamentary and other inquiries into the Australian media over the past four decades, most of which have touched on the power of News Corp. Their recommendations have been mostly ignored. The levers available to government are limited.
Should Murdoch be forced to sell some newspapers? Should the government fund startups to take the contest to him?
Rudd says he hopes the petition campaign will educate the public on why the recommendations of previous inquiries were ignored. “There is a culture of fear in Australia about what happens if you take on the Murdoch monopoly … they will seek to individually eviscerate people.”
As for the threats to media freedom from any suggestion of government intervention, Rudd says: “We don’t have press freedom. Murdoch’s journalists are not free journalistic agents. They are tools and a political operation with a fixed ideological and in some cases commercial agenda.”
Rudd is in favour of more money for the public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which has seen its funding eroded under the current government.
Otherwise, he refuses to lay out solutions. That will be for the royal commission to determine, he says.
“We cannot adopt a posture of national learned helplessness and say, well, Australia’s just like that. Australia is just going to have 70% Murdoch media domination forever and a day. And we’re going to just habituate to the level of a built-in bias.”
The petition, available through the Australian parliamentary website, has no legal status other than as a call for action. It is open for signatures until 4 November after which it will be presented to the House of Representatives and the government will have to table a response. Comment has been sought from News Corp Australia.
Rudd doesn’t plan to give up. He says he will keep up the campaign after the petition is closed. “I am a determined bastard,” he says. “And I am not going away.”
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