It's time for Albanese to stamp his authority

To ensure its longevity, the Albanese Government must pull recalcitrant public servants into line and take on the Murdoch media, writes Paul Begley.

SINCE WINNING a comprehensive victory in the May 2022 Election, there is plenty of evidence supporting the idea that Anthony Albanese is proving the critics wrong in the way he has established his authority domestically.

That said, and mindful that Albanese has been in government for just over one year of a three-year term, there are ominous signs that suggest his authority may be short-lived.

Although the opposition Coalition is pitifully weak on numbers and wafer-thin on talent, it enjoys two advantages over the government that could see Albanese’s authority head south just as Julia Gillard’s government did a decade ago.

The first is an advantage Albanese gifted to his political opponents by generously declaring he would not fire partisan public service chiefs. The second is his reluctance to take action against the Murdoch media empire.

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On the first, both the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme and the ACT Board of Inquiry into the ACT Criminal Justice System following the aborted Lehrmann rape trial, have shown senior public servants operating in ways that are consistent with a determination to remain loyal to the government that appointed and promoted them rather than to provide impartial advice as expected by a professional public service.

Competent public servants are capable of saying “no minister” when giving advice that takes into account the long-term public interest rather than short-term party political advantage. That became almost impossible during the Morrison years within a public service dominated at the top level by secretaries such as Phil Gaetjens, Mike Pezzullo, Greg Moriarty and Kathryn Campbell, and agency heads such as Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw and ABC chair Ita Buttrose.

In addition, there are appointments such as ABC deputy chair Peter Tonagh, a 15-year News Corp and Foxtel executive handpicked in 2018 by Scott Morrison and Paul Fletcher to conduct "efficiency reviews" of the ABC and SBS before being appointed to a five-year key ABC board position in 2021. Those appointments have given him the capability to facilitate appointments and promotion of personnel who appreciate the value that News Corp tabloid journalism can bring to the national broadcaster.

Those top bureaucrats were inclined to promote public servants from the ranks who displayed attributes "responsive" to the personal ambitions of Coalition ministers rather than to the dissemination of expert advice for the good of the nation.

As Social Services Minister in 2014-15, Scott Morrison was well known among his Cabinet colleagues to be after the job of fatally wounded Treasurer Joe Hockey. His deeply flawed $1 billion Robodebt policy was the trump card he took to cabinet in 2015 at the expense of around 800,000 social security recipients. He then secured the treasurer’s job in the Turnbull ministry.

When Morrison ascended to the prime ministership, it resulted in a further promotion to a plum job in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for Campbell. Campbell’s successor, Professor Renee Leon, believed Campbell was not qualified for that promotion which Leon saw as a reward for her cooperation with the Coalition policy agenda.

With respect to Albanese’s reluctance to take on the Murdoch media, the present context is one in which he might be reminded of the way News Corp ruthlessly destroyed the reputation of the House Speaker, Peter Slipper, whose fall helped bring down the Gillard Government in 2013.

Tony Abbott and his colleagues in opposition used News Corp to create the rumour that Slipper was fast and loose with his entitlements, an unlikely eventuality because Slipper was meticulous in his observation of entitlements and knew the rules intimately, but it was a rumour that News Corp tabloids made real when James Ashby threw them the crumb of a cab charge trip to a winery at a cost of $954.

For reasons that have never been explained, that trip was referred to the AFP which dragged out an investigation until by the time an appellate court decided the charge was baseless, his reputation had been ruined by a relentless series of The Daily Telegraph front pages with a rodent theme.

They bear a remarkable resemblance to this front page featuring the subject of a current News Corp campaign attempting to denigrate Labor Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, on this occasion using a fragment based on text messages provided to police under subpoena for a criminal trial.

Like the Slipper campaign, this "story" relies on a mainstream media that neglects to exercise its role as gatekeeper of information that comes into its possession. The News Corp-led campaign rests on a premise that the Lehrmann scandal came about not because a female Liberal Party staffer accused a male Liberal Party staffer of raping her in a Minister’s office, but that a Labor Party backbencher knew about the allegation in 2021 a few days before it was made public but did nothing with it.

NewsCorp has decided there are no questions to answer about why in 2019 the Defence Minister fired the accused male staffer, exiled the female staffer to Western Australia where she was sidelined for two years, and swiftly arranged to steam-clean the couch in her office.

Katy Gallagher “has questions to answer”, however, because she knew about the Higgins rape allegation, information discovered in text messages that should be known only by the AFP investigators to whom it was given by Brittany Higgins and not tendered in evidence at the trial because it was deemed to be of no significance.

Mainstream media gatekeepers have traditionally regarded sourced information that has no public interest and gratuitously damages individuals, as unreportable. An example of a breach of that rule was the release in Britain by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World of hacked phone calls by missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler. It led to a 2012 inquiry conducted by Lord Leveson and a decision by a House of Commons Committee that Rupert Murdoch was a person unfit to lead an international company. It also put an end to News of the World, the best-selling Sunday newspaper in Britain at the time.

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Murdoch still runs an international company of course, though his Fox News just paid a $1.17 billion settlement in the US to Dominion Voting Machines because it enabled lies about Dominion to be reported on the supposedly ‘stolen’ 2020 presidential election. Fox is likely to be liable also to Smartmatic for more than $2 billion over a similar claim, and other claims are expected to follow

With existential damage having being inflicted on Murdoch’s credibility and the financial sustainability of his empire in the UK and the US, his NewsCorp outlets in Australia continue to operate unfettered in a mainstream media landscape that increasingly adopts as narratives and story angles those that Murdoch outlets deem to be newsworthy.

Whatever else might be said about Morrison’s all-round incompetence, he has been supremely successful in taking a submissive and loyal mainstream media to bed, and that loyalty has flowed over from the Liberal Party’s period in government to its present period in opposition.

It shows itself primarily in the stories that are regarded as newsworthy and are therefore permitted to be reported. The long running public hearings of the Robodebt Royal Commission in late 2022 to early 2023 revealed a number of heart-rending accounts from among the 800,000 social security recipients billed for debts they didn’t owe with money they didn’t have.

It also put on show the behaviour of some highly paid senior public servants who were willing to do the bidding of government ministers ruthlessly pursuing their personal ambitions at the expense of vulnerable citizens.

Despite meeting standard newsworthy benchmarks, the Robodebt evidence was reported sparingly in the mainstream media and all but ignored in News Corp outlets. It included bombshell evidence given by onetime ministers Alan Tudge and Stuart Robert, the former displaying a callous indifference to cases of suicide arising from Robodebt.

The latter of whom proudly declared that he made false public statements about Robodebt that he knew were false because he prioritised cabinet solidarity over telling the Australian people about the fundamentally flawed scheme that was causing havoc and misery to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians.

Both Tudge and Robert resigned from public life after giving evidence at the Royal Commission but, because of suppressed reporting, consumers of the mainstream media could be excused for having have little idea about what caused those resignations.

During the Victorian election in November 2022, The Herald Sun and Sky News deemed the central issue to be Daniel Andrews’ personal character and campaigned relentlessly using a conspiratorial storyline about the Sorrento steps at his holiday house. They compounded that fiction with a car accident from when he was in opposition some 13 years earlier and somehow manipulated the police to give him special treatment.

Although the stories were baseless, they gave rise to the News Corp mantra, “questions need to be asked” suggesting there was more to the story than met the eye without ever saying what the more was or what questions needed to be asked.

If the malaise were simply restricted to News Corp outlets, consumers could simply dismiss it as over-the-top tabloid journalism, but the mainstream media, including the ABC, adopted the News Corp perspective as the default news story. So Victorian ABC political reporter Richard Willingham showed up early in the election campaign insisting to Raf Epstein’s listeners that there was only one election issue, and that was the character of Premier Andrews, in perfect sync with The Herald Sun.

Although Andrews won the 2022 election in a landslide, News Corp accused him in February this year of awarding a $3.4 million training contract to the Health Services Union, a body with a long training history. The ABC’s Richard Willingham joined other mainstream media outlets and NewsCorp in amplifying that story as an abuse of process.

That in itself would not be inappropriate, but no ABC or other mainstream media outlet carried a 2021 story coming out of a Senate Estimates hearing of a $1.8 billion contract awarded to a Liberal Party donor company, Canstruct, by the then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. Canstruct at the time had no assets, no staff, and no revenue.

The media pile-on over Labor Senator Katy Gallagher having known about the Brittany Higgins rape allegation before it became public in 2021 is a classic case of NewsC orp calling the shots to its mainstream cousins. Gallagher did know about the Higgins case but kept the knowledge to herself. By contrast, it was “very, very, very unlikely” that Linda Reynolds did not inform the Prime Minister’s office about the allegation two years earlier during the 2019 Election campaign, as former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull publicly suggested.

When an outbreak of clarity about an issue such as the Lehrmann-Higgins matter is problematic for NewsCorp and the Liberal Party, confusion is their best friend. They are presently maximising confusion in order to cause serious damage to the Government and to Albanese’s authority as Prime Minister. The Prime Minister continues to appease NewsCorp at his peril, and would do well to look again at the motion moved in September last year by independent MP Zoe Daniel on media diversity.

Paul Begley has worked for many years in public affairs roles, until recently as General Manager of Government and Media Relations with the Australian HR Institute. You can follow Paul on Twitter @yelgeb.