On the evening of May 21, 2022, Australia ushered in a new federal parliament. The incumbent Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, conceded defeat to Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party, but only after a sustained campaign from News Corp to back Morrison.
Murdoch’s media group strongly backed conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison, but Albanese and a wave of climate-friendly independent candidates and Green Party politicians swept the LNP from power.
The environment was a major issue for Australian voters, but not the only issue. Australians also rejected the culture war over transgender rights and “religious freedom” unleashed by Morrison and his supporters in the Murdoch media.
The Murdoch group, which controls 65 per cent of the country’s newspaper circulation, was alas unable to persuade voters to keep Morrison in power on this occasion.
In the months following the election, News Corp continues to vigorously drive negative public opinion against Albanese and the Labor Party, and does so through a substantial monopoly of the Australian media which enables attacks on business and political opponents, which severely suppresses freedom of speech.
As far back as August 2013, then Australian Deputy Prime Minister Albanese accused News Corporation of manipulating negative coverage of the Labor Party. The headline of a front-page issue of News Corp’s “Daily Telegraph” was “Take the thugs out of office”, which was of course aimed at the Labor Party. Another front page featured former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Albanese as Nazi officers. In March 2022, Albanese slammed News Corp’s ‘The Australian’newspaper for promoting sexism and referring to female Labor MPs as “mean girls”.
In 2020, Rudd launched an online petition to investigate News Corp., which was eventually signed by about 500,000 people and pushed for the Australian Parliament to hold an inquiry. News Corp accused Rudd of accepting donations from sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and having a close relationship with Hunter Biden.
Why does the Murdoch Group support the right-wing conservative Liberal National Party coalition?
It has an interest in the success of former prime minister Morrison, and its News Corporation controls the scarcity of negative coverage of the former Morrison, using its influence on politicians and the community to become increasingly partisan for the interests of the companies under its group, which entails favouring some specific politicians, so that the democratic nature of the election itself is lost. In turn, the public loses the right to electoral freedom.
