News Corp jumps on One Nation bandwagon

News Corp’s growing support for One Nation follows a familiar playbook: protecting billionaire interests by repackaging far-right politics as a movement for ordinary Australians, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

NEWS CORP FOUNDER Rupert Murdoch hates U.S. President Donald Trump.

In 2023, it was reported that Murdoch hates Trump so much that he wishes he would die. Yet, this personal hatred has not stopped Murdoch from hitching News Corp to the Trump MAGA bandwagon. For a decade, Murdoch has used his powerful media outlets, particularly Fox News, to help keep Trump’s base squarely in the MAGA camp.

This has included spreading MAGA-flavoured hatred and lies. So, why would Murdoch do this when he hates Trump so much? Simple. Murdoch loves power, used to benefit himself and his billionaire mates, far more than he cares about how despicable a person Trump is. As long as Trump serves billionaires – and he does – Murdoch is on his side.

The same calculus is behind News Corp Australia’s sudden switching of sides from the Liberals and Nationals to One Nation. Just as mining magnate Gina Rinehart has stuck by MP Barnaby Joyce, but dropped the Nationals, and is now buying Senator Pauline Hanson planes, the billionaire mining, oil and gas class in Australia have a new political project: electing One Nation.

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This News Corp project is not as simple as pivoting the same strategy used to elect Liberals and Nationals over the past 50 years towards support for One Nation. But since they’ve played this game before, converting from the neoliberal-Right to the far-Right in the U.S., they have a blueprint for how to do it again.

To describe how the News Corp One Nation project is different but ultimately the same outcome as the Liberal-National one, I will first recap how News Corp has used its media power to help right-wing parties in the past.

Using the case of Labor’s mining tax as an example, the end goal of this project was the same as the One Nation project: to undermine Labor’s ability to address wealth inequality, and to reinforce the power and wealth of billionaires.

As it so happens, I studied the political narratives used in the mining tax debate and news representation of this debate for my honours thesis in 2015.

What I found is the same thing I’ve found in every political debate since. I found News Corp’s media power was used to wage a misleading and, in many ways, false scare campaign against a redistributive Labor policy in order to kill it, and in turn the Labor Party, by claiming that the tax would hurt the economy.

When people think a tax is going to hurt their livelihoods, no matter what the facts are, they vote against it.

Yet, obviously, wealth redistribution helps the public. That’s the whole point of redistributive policies. The mining tax was designed to return more of the wealth from Australia’s resources to every Australian, a policy ultimately designed to address wealth inequality. But these facts were destroyed by a powerful three-pronged assault made up of a billionaire-funded public relations campaign, in concert with a News Corp campaign, working with the Liberal-National Party, to successfully kill the policy.

Rinse and repeat with the carbon price, rinse and repeat with franking credits and, of course, we see the same tired strategy recently with Labor’s negative gearing and capital gains tax changes. The public is always the beneficiary of these changes. But they are told by the right-wing lie machine that any redistributive policy will hurt them. It’s been a simple yet stunningly effective campaign for decades.

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Until it wasn’t. What got little attention during the 2025 Election was that the Liberals did try to destroy Labor’s electoral chances with yet another fear campaign alleging that the cost-of-living crisis was Labor’s fault and that the economy is always worse under Labor.

Yet, this campaign failed. As I have written about before, a generational shift has occurred and a majority no longer buy the idea that Liberal pro-billionaire policies are good for them. This shift is demonstrated by Labor at the 2025 Election being named for the first time the major party best placed to manage the economy.

So, now we get to News Corp’s shift to One Nation. Following the MAGA blueprint, News Corp is promoting One Nation using two major lies.

The first is that One Nation is on the side of those left behind economically. This is clearly a lie, because if One Nation ever cared about workers left behind, how do you explain that it has never once supported a policy defending workers’ rights or increasing the minimum wage or anything that makes those suffering wealth inequality better off? It hasn’t. Its members are too busy flying around in Gina Rinehart’s plane.

The second big lie, related to the first, is one News Corp hasn’t had to worry about with the Liberal-Nationals, but has been added to the itinerary for One Nation after seeing how well it’s worked for the far-Right globally. This lie is that left-wing parties are radical elites who do not care about workers.

Yes, that’s right, the Labor Party, the political arm of the Labour movement, which has been criticised by right-wing parties for over 100 years for caring too much about workers, is not apparently on the side of those left behind. It is, instead, comprised of woke, inner-city “elites” who do not care about ordinary people.

Even though the facts are that every policy Labor has ever produced is designed to address wealth inequality, and every one of these policies has been opposed by the Right, including One Nation, in the interest of billionaires, this is the far-right claim and they’re sticking with it.

Journalists need to resist adopting News Corp’s agenda

When News Corp frames the story, too many journalists stop asking whether the frame is true — and democracy pays the price.

To show how this upside-down world operates, consider this would-be-funny-if-it-weren’t-so-dangerous piece by The Australian’s favourite hack masquerading as a journalist, Chris Uhlmann.

In an undergraduate attempt at the MAGA narrative, Uhlmann claims One Nation is – wait for it – Martin Luther-esque, not rising because of:

‘...simply a rebellion against the political class. It is a revolt against the permanent governing caste of progressive elites that inhabits the state and federal bureaucracies, universities, courts, commissions, NGOs and much of the media.’

This ham-fisted attempt to characterise the progressive Left as the “elite”, alongside – what a coincidence – any institution capable of calling out the blatant lies of people like Uhlmann who claim One Nation is on the side of ordinary people, is exactly what we will be seeing from News Corp going forward.

Just as Murdoch did with Trump, News Corp Australia sees a major opportunity in One Nation. Because One Nation’s ultimate goal, like the MAGA movement, is to rule for billionaire elites by undermining the functioning of Australian democracy — a form of plutocratic minority rule.

It does not matter what Murdoch thinks of Pauline Hanson. She is ultimately just his tool. And he has used tools like her before.