Extract from ABC News
Analysis
It's a well worn path for Australian prime ministers to meet with the world's most powerful person while in the United States.
They also usually meet with the US president.
Take 15 years ago. It's September 2008, a fresh-faced Australian prime minister, not even a year into the job and riding high in the opinion polls, finds himself in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly and meet with world leaders to discuss the global financial crisis.
Kevin Rudd and the media travelling with him are staying at a nearby hotel that's a stone's throw from the salubrious One Beekman Place apartment that Australia's consul general calls home.
The apartment is no stranger to powerful figures, none more so than arguably Australia's most famous export, Rupert Murdoch.
Had the media mogul been hoping for a secret visit to see Rudd at the consul general's residence, he'd have been disappointed to find the ABC's Michael Rowland awaiting his arrival.
What exactly the two discussed we'll never know but it certainly wasn't a rarity.
Rudd's NY pilgrimage
A year later, with Rudd again in New York in September, he met with Murdoch.
It was fast becoming something of an annual pilgrimage for Rudd, who'd met with Murdoch in New York in early 2007.
That April meeting proved pivotal for the then opposition leader.
As the two left News Corp's headquarters, the media mogul was asked if Rudd would make a good prime minister, to which Murdoch responded "oh, I'm sure".
At the time, it was seen as the all-mighty emperor sending the strongest possible signal to his newspapers back home that he'd just anointed the next Australian prime minister.
Within months, Rudd would have the job.
That Rudd met with Murdoch regularly isn't isolated to his prime ministership. PMs from all parties have long wanted to be close to the man whose companies have long held an iron grip over the Australian media landscape.
Scott Morrison, while making what would be his last September trip to New York as prime minister, had to settle for a meeting with News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, a fellow Australian export, because Murdoch wasn't available.
Within a year, Morrison was would be out of the job.
Suddenly the Rudd-Murdoch relationship was over
The relationship wasn't to last for Rudd and Murdoch.
In the years that followed those New York meetings, Rudd would twice lose the prime ministership, for which he apportions plenty of blame on Murdoch's Australian tabloids.
"You see the truth is Murdoch has become a cancer, an arrogant cancer, on our democracy," Rudd said as he launched a petition calling for a royal commission into the "Murdoch media empire" in 2020.
That petition attracted more than half a million signatures, including that of another former prime minister — Liberal Malcolm Turnbull.
Turnbull, like Rudd, knew all too well the power Murdoch's papers can have on a prime ministership.
Three years on and with Rudd now Australia's ambassador to the US, Turnbull has replaced him as the face of the royal commission push.
They make for curious bedfellows but prove that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. (Remember it was Turnbull, as PM, who blocked Australia backing Rudd's bid to become the UN's boss, having deemed him not suited for the role)
The petition sparked a year-long Senate inquiry into media diversity, which recommended the government hold a judicial inquiry with the powers of a royal commission.
That was never likely to happen under a Coalition government and Anthony Albanese's Labor government too has ruled it out.
It leaves the Greens as the lonely voices in Canberra still pushing for a royal commission into the Murdoch empire.
Just yesterday, in the aftermath of Rupert Murdoch's retirement announcement, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was dubbing the media empire a "cancer on democracy" and disastrous for humanity and the planet.
Few from Labor or the Coalition were offering a similar commentary.
While Rudd and Turnbull may be speaking up about the Murdoch media empire after they've left parliament, they certainly didn't find their voices while they were in power.
Their successors are no different.
Lining up to kiss the ring
Politicians of all stripes might privately bemoan the reach of the mogul but they line up to kiss the ring.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong, speaking from New York, said Murdoch "might not exactly be a cheerleader for the Labor Party" but she wished him well for his retirement.
It was even more bland from the men who might one day be future prime ministers.
"Rupert, I suspect, is telling his friends that he wanted to go when he'd seen everything. He's obviously still in good health. He's got a new girlfriend," Opposition Leader Peter Dutton joked on Nine's Today show.
Jim Chalmers, the federal treasurer and a man seen by many as a likely future Labor leader, was offering little more.
"Obviously this is a very consequential thing and Rupert Murdoch has been a very influential, indeed central figure in the global media landscape for some time now," he told reporters.
"And so this is the end of an era at News.
"How this plays out now with the leadership transition and all of the rest of it remains to be seen, but obviously a very significant announcement."
Why would neither be offering more? Because it's long been considered be political suicide to go up against a behemoth like News.
Brisbane, in Dutton and Chalmers' home state, is a one-paper city — News's Courier Mail. Anyone with eyes on the nation's top job is going to be alive to its influence and ownership, even if Rupert Murdoch is slowly heading for the exit.
Shame in politics died long ago, so too did it in our modern media landscape.
Murdoch, one of the world's richest people, in an email to staff yesterday decried the "elites" who he said had "open contempt" for those "not members of their rarefied class".
He went further and accused other media of being "in cahoots with those elites peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth".
This from a man who Turnbull said had "done enormous damage to the democratic world".
Murdoch makes no secret of the fact he's going nowhere. His title might be changing but he's vowing to maintain a hands-on role in shaping the "contest of ideas".
Put another way, reports of Murdoch's death are greatly exaggerated.
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