Should We Be Concerned?

The Junior Murdoch Speaks Up

I always find it unlikely when a Murdoch stands up for freedoms, what with the generally casual fascist tone their editorials in their miserable newspapers take. Of course, one shouldn't be surprised that they do it when it suits them directly to do so, for maximum effect. And so it is with Lachlan Murdoch who is invoking his grandfather's reporting of the Gallipoli campaign.

Mr Murdoch said Australia's press freedom was under threat and had already fallen dramatically by world standards. 

"It might surprise you that today Australia ranks 33rd, just behind Belize, on the Freedom house index. 20 years ago we ranked 9th," Mr Murdoch said during the Keith Murdoch Oration at the State Library in Melbourne on Thursday night. 

Mr Murdoch said the government was frequently asking Australians to trust them 'we're from the government', when attempting to censor the media. 

"But trust is something that should not be a consideration when restricting our fundamental freedoms. Our freedom of speech and freedom of the press are not things we should blindly entrust anyone." 

Mr Murdoch singled out the government's national security laws that could jail journalists for up to 10 years for revealing "special intelligence operations".

Mighty fine sentiments on a night for orations. I have to say, it's still a bit rich coming from the scion of Rupert Murdoch, hardly an egalitarian or democrat. If Mao said justice comes from the barrel of a gun, the Senior Murdoch certainly has behaved like governments are born from the printing press. The senior Murdoch set about killing Whitlam's government back when he was junior's age.

The US National Archives has just declassified a secret diplomatic telegram dated January 20, 1975 that sheds new light on Murdoch's involvement in the tumultuous events of Australia's 1975 constitutional crisis.

Illustration: Ron Tandberg 

Entitled "Australian publisher privately turns on Prime Minister," the telegram from US Consul-General in Melbourne, Robert Brand, reported to the State Department that "Rupert Murdoch has issued [a] confidential instruction to editors of newspapers he controls to 'Kill Whitlam' ". 

Describing Mr Murdoch as "the l'enfant terrible of Australian journalism," Mr Brand noted that Mr Murdoch had been "the principal publisher supporting the Whitlam election effort in 1972 Labor victory". 

With a publishing empire that included The Australian as well as daily or Sunday newspapers in every Australian capital, Mr Murdoch's new editorial direction was seen as a critical political development. 

"If Murdoch attack directed against Whitlam personally this could presage hard times for Prime Minister; but if against Labor government would be dire news for party," Mr Brand telegraphed.

And so it was in 1975 that Rupert bent his considerable powers of the press to undermine and ultimately destroy the democratically elected Whitlam Government. It's pretty much in line with what Chris Boyce (the Falcon in 'the Falcon and the Snowman') told us all those years ago. The CIA took a great interest in undermining Whitlam's Labor Government. Rupert for his part obliged by unleashing his dogs - just as he did with Beazley, Crean, Latham, and ultimately Rudd and Gillard. It's almost the rule that the ALP should find every legislative means of limiting Murdoch's power because it is the largest opinion-maker as well as being totally anti-democratic and anti-social. He likes us to think of him as a contrarian codger. He's not. He's full-blown Citizen-Kane-type, trying to turn our democracy into his plaything.

In that light, it's really difficult to imagine that the son is any less meddlesome as the father. And by extension, he's not really standing up for journalists, he's standing up for his right to publish and report a scoop in the press without facing gaol time. I mean, yeah, that's really bold of you Latch. 

How Can They Call Their Rag 'News'?

While I'm on this topic, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey that lays out where the News Corp mouthpieces sit in the wake of Whitlam passing away. Here's the juicy bit:

The first person who might consider checking “the facts” is Sheridan. He asserts rather confidently that under Whitlam, “inflation got above 20% at one stage”. His confidence is misplaced. During Whitlam’s government, inflation as measured by the consumer price index peaked at 17.7% in the first quarter of 1975. Since the beginning of Australian Bureau of Statistics records, inflation has only exceeded 20% in three quarters, and in all three of them, it was Robert Menzies’ pyjamas that were tucked under the doona in the Lodge. (Perhaps Sheridan could let us know if “ruinous” is the right adjective with which to garland our longest-serving prime minister.) 

Things don’t get much better when Sheridan turns to the international scene, where he is apparently more of an expert. Here we discover (and though Sheridan generously allows that there was a tiny little oil shock to contend with) that on the question of inflation, “the outcome in Australia was much worse than in comparable countries”. This might have come as a surprise to Aldo Moro, the then-prime minister of Italy, where inflation reached 24%, or to Harold Wilson, who presided over a British inflation rate of 26.6%. 

Other commentators trying their hand at sacrilege fared no better. Thanks to Gough, Miranda Devine lamented, “half the ­nation is now on welfare”. In 2012, the last year for which the Department of Social Services has released data, only around a quarter of the population over 15 was receiving some kind of income support payment. A bit under half of these are old age pensioners. Presumably, sans Gough, we would have adopted work-for-the-pension schemes or simply euthanised the elderly to spare them the moral decay of Devine’s “culture of entitlement”. 

Meanwhile, Andrew Bolt, making the daring argument that Kevin Rudd was merely Whitlam digested and reconstituted, credited the former with “the same debt blowouts” as the latter. When Whitlam left office, Australia had negative net debt. But did not Whitlam “lose control” of the purse, as Alan Mitchell wrote? Of the three budgets prepared by Whitlam’s government, two resulted in surplus; deficits accounting therefore for a third of his budgets. That fiscally continent duo Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, on the other hand, recorded 10 deficits from 13 budgets (about three-quarters in the red).
For all of the ruin occasioned by Whitlam’s supposedly disastrous programs, government spending has, as a proportion of economic output, never retreated to the levels seen before 1972. 

Whatever else the electorate might have thought or now thinks of the government he led, they have never really shown much interest in reversing the increase in the size of government he oversaw. In this sense, budgetary history since 1975 has been a remarkable vindication of Whitlam rather than an repudiation.

In other words, the Murdoch journalists are still banging on about the Whitlam Government, believing in their own crappy press which was all made up in the first place, for the sole purpose of destroying the standing of the Whitlam Government. Stuff most people would call mischaracterisations. It is mischaracterisation right now, as it was back then. So it's really just too rich hearing from Lachlan telling us how journalism should work.