'Friendly' media could not save the Opposition

The impotence of Murdoch's News Corp, Sky News and the 2GB radio network as political persuaders was shown up by the 2025 Federal Election.

These sorts of outlets featuring intransigent and heavily partisan, right-wing “commentators” have been useful to the Liberal and National Parties, and others on the right, to help consolidate existing supporters.

Threats to mainstream media

The long free-kick interviews and boosterish headlines for whatever the party spokespersons wanted to say, seduced them into avoiding media that played by the conventional rules — ones working on factuality, fairness, balance, accountability both for themselves and for the “power”.

Peter Dutton, as Liberal Leader, even started complaining about those, such as ABC and The Guardian, as “hate media”. It was redolent of Dutton’s opposite number in the United States, Donald Trump, calling the mainstream media (not disinformation or misinformation outlets on social media) “fake news”. It is a black sign, with media manipulation (such as the U.S. NPR stations targeted for cuts), where certain parties only want to talk with friends and want to stop others speaking entirely.

Labor victory proves public rejected malicious media falsehoods

Saturday’s electoral mauling of the Coalition was a resounding rejection of media lies and distortions.

Political persuasion texts going back to the 1930s conventionally pointed out that media bombardments, as persuaders, were only good for shoring up the support of the ready-converted, heavily-committed. It works for movement politics like Trump’s MAGA campaign, which may or may not last, but there was not enough of the same anger and dysfunction loose in Australia to mobilise on the same kind of scale.

(Social media, being interactive, may be more persuasive with isolated individuals, though the same dynamic applies — users pay most attention to what they already believe in.)

Add in, in Australia, that the Labor Party campaign was highly organised, strong on set themes, developed policies and messages, backed by incumbency in government; and the Opposition was the opposite.

Postmortem time

Why that should be, on the Opposition side, was a question being thrashed out in the postmortems.

One clear point was that the Opposition was split and could not get it together to jump one way or the other.

The first option was to be a “progressive conservative” party wanting restricted taxes and government services, to favour “haves” against “have nots”, but usually liberal on social issues; prepared to observe and defend democratic values like fair elections, separation of powers and rule of law; and in favour of free and diverse media.

The second is to go to the extreme, where we did see Dutton this time, making lunges in that direction. The trouble was, a lot of it did not appeal much to voters in Australia under 55; a minority in his own party (as opposed to the stridently right-wing Coalition partner, the Nationals), did not like it; and it was easy for critics, especially Labor, to associate it with the excesses of Trump.

Coalition's problems far greater than a terrible campaign

The crushing defeat of the Coalition on Saturday stemmed from its inability to let go of hateful, racist and divisive policies, of which Australia has had enough.

Going Trump’s way

Some of the lunges to the radical Right include:

Decrying “hate media” like Trump’s decrying of “fake news”.
Stopping work-from-home, to put the boss back in charge. (Oops, voters vocally started opposing this, so the plan was abandoned as a “good idea whose time has not come”).
Sacking 40,000 federal public servants and more; at one level aping the bigotry in the U.S. Government against public employees, thousands being sacked at random; at another level, setting it up both to reduce government services and give contracts to friends in business: privateers, “consultants”. (Oops, people started asking who would be getting the sack; if there was a plan it was well hidden, hard to tell what these Liberals were trying to say, if they knew: Canberra-only, not Canberra-only, compulsory redundancies, attrition only, what were the “back office” jobs that would go, would it be just the ones processing the back-log of veterans? Big mess, confusion.)
Big slash of migration including many international students, an opportunity to mobilise some bad feeling on race and ethnicity, even a dash of anti-intellectualism (who needs all this education?). Not quite able to get up a U.S.-style attack involving a sealed border, separation of families with the children fenced in pens, peremptory mass deportations without judicial process to foreign prisons. Certainly millions of Australians would not care if it happened, witness so many who applauded the blocking of asylum seekers on the ship Tampa in 2001. But there are others who do care and have some power to stop it. We can suspect, too, that some of the zeal has worn off and the ageing of the population is a factor, where a lot of racial feeling has been concentrated in older generations now actually disappearing.
“Law and order”. A few lines were tried on “security”, probably in the hope of stirring up racial feeling like in the Queensland and Northern Territory elections last year, “suburbs under siege”, where the focus was mainly on catching and locking up delinquent Indigenous children. This time, that was being seen as “state business” and people had many other things to study in the Federal Election.
The nuclear power stations idea, a last-minute “brainchild” of Nationals and some Liberals, was part of a putsch against the Government’s advanced transition program to renewable energy. Gone is the rear-guard action, the “debate” that was staged over climate change being real. Instead, we have the Trump proposal, to drill for more oil anyway, and keep on digging regardless. Building the nuclear plants, late, with limited capacity, dangerous, expensive, would be an excuse to keep old coal plants going much longer — profits for the fossil fuel lobby. The long and the short of it: on the radical Right, they care most about making money, don’t want to think about innovation and don’t care about the environment.
Symbols and insults. Several backward-looking players hoping to revive the bad mood of the Referendum against Indigenous Australians, jumped in to say no Indigenous flags on government podiums and also gave some sympathy to hecklers against “Welcome to Country”. Dutton took up the first and equivocated about the second.
Likewise, the Opposition proposed purging the nationally agreed schools curriculum, brought in under the last Liberal Government, of “woke” topics like tolerance of LGBTIQ. This was championed by the Education spokesperson, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, photographed in a MAGA cap. (The U.S. Administration has written to schools telling them all funding will be cancelled if they keep policies on discrimination, equity and inclusion on the books.)
The ”woke” epithet from the USA is used pejoratively in staged-up “culture wars”. Those who see and adjust to changes in society are perceived to have “woken up”, for example, to better ways to relate to Indigenous people. This is loathed on the extreme Right, where you get the resistance to change and anger about it — “woke” then used as a dirty word.

Will the Liberal and National Parties, post-election, be able to think it through and decide on more moderate approaches, or try to keep on along this reactionary pathway?

Amongst Dr Lee Duffield’s vast journalistic experience, he has served as ABC's European correspondent. He is also an esteemed academic and member of the editorial advisory board of Pacific Journalism Review and elected member of the University of Queensland Senate.