So we can take it as a “yes” that Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Penny Wong, as reported by Nine newspapers last week, met with Lachlan Murdoch and News Corp executives on Wednesday. While the office of Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was happy to confirm her non-participation, all we got from the prime minister, deputy prime minister and foreign minister was stony silence — despite repeated efforts to draw an answer.
Not getting an answer from the PMO is of course something we at Crikey are used to — we were persona non grata with Scott Morrison’s office as well, so maybe the old email filters and phone blocks are still in place. But the general silence is more interesting for what it says about Labor’s embarrassment about dealing with a company committed to supporting the Coalition at every turn — and which remains deeply antagonistic to even the unambitious climate action agenda Labor is pursuing.
As we noted last week, we don’t exactly know the purpose of the meeting, so Labor partisans can hold out hope it was some unprecedented laying down of the law from a Labor PM to the Murdochs. The rest of us, more cynical and jaded perhaps, can suspect that in new boss Albanese, we have someone with some traits in common with the old boss Scott Morrison — in particular, a hostility to transparency about which special interests may seek to influence policymakers and what deals might be being done to facilitate that.
But this goes beyond transparency, or the great bipartisan tradition of media moguls dictating policy (and even beyond Lachlan Murdoch’s lawsuit against Crikey).
News Corp is a threat to Australia, the US and the world. In the words of Malcolm Turnbull, it operates like a mafia gang, and “is an absolute threat to our democracy”. Joe Biden is said to have called Rupert Murdoch “the most dangerous man in the world”. The complicity of Fox News in the propagation of the Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election — a lie peddled on Australia’s Sky News as well — and the febrile atmosphere that led to the January 6 insurrection is a matter of public record in the United States.
So why are the three most senior figures in the ALP going to Lachlan Murdoch? Why are they normalising relations with a company that should be beyond the pale of any politician committed to democracy — and to the stability of the United States, which is crucial to Australia?
What’s that line about the standard you walk past is the standard you accept? That extends to walking in to visit a media mogul too.
