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  By now an image of Behrendt had taken shape. She was a privileged ivory-tower Indigenous academic unaware of and indifferent to the plight of Aborigines living in the remote communities. She had written a monstrous tweet, which had been published on eight occasions in the Australian. Her apologies had been both belated and humiliating. She was unfit to lead the inquiry into Indigenous higher education. She had let the Indigenous students at UTS down. She had tried to have a fellow female Aboriginal lawyer banned. Larissa Behrendt felt as if she was experiencing a never-ending nightmare. Close friends and family advised her to take a holiday to get away. At four o’clock each afternoon she was sick to the stomach, dreading new charges from Patricia Karvelas. Surely there could be no more.

  In some ways the worst calumny was still to come. Larissa Behrendt came from an unprivileged background, with a white mother and an Indigenous father whose mother had been brought up in an institution after her own mother died. She had graduated in law from the University of New South Wales and had been awarded a scholarship to do perhaps the most prestigious law degree in the English-speaking world, the Master of Laws at Harvard. Behrendt had not only completed the Masters successfully, she was one of only twelve students in her year admitted to the degree of Doctor of Jurisprudence. She completed the doctorate in three years rather than the more usual four. On 21 April, the same day that the “Strewth” columnist Graeme Leech called her tweet “the slur of the century”, the Australian published an article by Keith Windschuttle which suggested that her scholarship to Harvard and the degrees she was awarded there had not been earned. Behrendt had been assisted in her Harvard application by Bobbi Sykes. But there were questions about Bobbi Sykes’ Aboriginality. Therefore … it was unclear exactly what. The suggestion that she did not deserve her scholarship to Harvard was a slur on an unnamed Australian authority. The suggestion that she did not deserve her doctorate was a slur on Harvard University. All this was truly foul. Oddly enough, shortly after I interviewed Larissa Behrendt she received the following letter from one of the most distinguished international lawyers, Martha Minow, the Jeremiah Smith Jr Professor of Law at Harvard. “I send congratulations on your recognition for your advocacy for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders. I wanted you to know how delighted we are to see a graduate of this place make such a difference.”

  Before this letter arrived, there was still more to come. On 23 April the Australian published another characteristically stream-of-consciousness editorial complaining about Larissa Behrendt’s tweet, “the moralising mumbo-jumbo spreading like a virus from university humanities departments” and “another failed experiment, an online opinion forum known as Crikey”. On 28 April it published an article about a supposedly anti-Behrendt petition circulating in the Northern Territory signed by 121 Warlpiri people and additional petitions “said to be signed” by 800 more people. I have seen a copy of the Warlpiri petition in defence of Bess Price. It attacks Barb Shaw and Marlene Hodder. It does not mention Larissa Behrendt. Finally, on 2 June the Australian published a report – “‘Divisive’ Academic Paid $641 Daily Fee” – which suggested that Larissa Behrendt was doing very well indeed out of her role as head of the Gillard government’s inquiry into higher education. This was yet another lie. The consultancy fee was paid directly to her university. Behrendt did not benefit by one cent.

  In the whole disgraceful saga of protracted character assassination, the only decent article in the Australian was written by Noel Pearson. He made it clear that he completely disagreed with Behrendt’s anti-Intervention ideas. But he also made it clear that her achievements ought to be an inspiration to young Indigenous people. He had previously urged the government to appoint Behrendt to the Indigenous committee inquiring into the promised constitutional referendum. He now suggested that she was the right person to lead the inquiry into Indigenous higher education.

  On 15 June I interviewed Chris Mitchell and Paul Kelly. Both believed the articles on Larissa Behrendt were what she deserved. To my surprise Kelly was even more vehement than Mitchell. Following this I met Larissa Behrendt. In the course of the interview I asked her to comment on the impact the Australian’s campaign had had upon her life. She could not speak. We quickly passed on to other questions.

  THE GREENS: “THEY ARE HYPOCRITES; THEY ARE BAD FOR THE NATION; AND THEY SHOULD BE DESTROYED AT THE BALLOT BOX”

  Isaiah Berlin once argued that thinkers could be divided into two types: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes knew many small things. Hedgehogs knew one big thing. It is also possible to apply Berlin’s notion to political leaders. Senator Bob Brown has led the Greens party for decades. He knows one big thing – namely, that as a consequence of global warming the future of the Earth is at risk. Because this understanding has gradually deepened, especially among the better-educated sections of the Australian population, many of whom now regard the issue of climate change as incomparably the most important political issue of contemporary times, and because Bob Brown is known to be principled and unwavering on this question, support for his party has steadily grown. This view is not shared by the editor-in-chief of the Australian. He has long despised the Greens. So has Rupert Murdoch. When he visited Australia in late 2010, he spoke of this country as “a wonderful land of opportunity” and warned: “Whatever you do, don’t let the bloody Greens mess it up.”

  On 21 August 2010, there was an Australian federal election. Neither the Labor Party nor the Coalition won a majority. Four independents were elected whose votes would determine who formed government. The most significant outcome of the election, however, was the increase in the vote for the Greens. The party received 11.7%, or one and a half million, of the votes for the House of Representatives. One Greens member, Adam Bandt, was elected to the lower house. Six Greens senators were elected. This meant that when the new Senate assembled on 1 July 2011, there would be nine Greens members who would now hold the balance of power, that is to say would determine the outcome of any legislation where Labor and the Coalition disagreed. Not only was this by far the best result the Greens had ever achieved, it was also the best result at any federal election achieved by any so-called third party.

  For eighteen days it was unclear whether the four independents would support a Labor or a Coalition government. The Australian clearly hoped that the independents, three of whom held country seats, would support the Coalition. There were many ways of trying to influence their decision. One was to launch a propaganda war against the Greens. In preparation for this essay I spoke to Bob Brown. He told me that despite its very longstanding hostility, he noticed from the day after the election an obvious change of mood and level of aggression among the journalists from the Australian, who dominated the Canberra press gallery.

  The nature of the unceasing propaganda war waged by the Australian – which began on 21 August 2010 and has continued to the present day – needs to be documented in some detail. My analysis will begin with the whole-of-paper coverage of the Greens – news reports, opinion columns, editorials – for the eighteen days between the federal election and the creation of the second Gillard government.

  On election day, in separate reports, the Australian told its readers that the stock market’s “worst fears” were “a hung parliament followed closely by an ALP-controlled lower house and Greens-controlled Senate”; that business “executives” would “go to the polling booth” feeling “very worried about the idea of Greens leader Bob Brown holding the next government to ransom”; and that as Bob Brown planned to retire at the end of his current term, troubles loomed between Senator Christine Milne and the New South Wales Greens candidate, Lee Rhiannon, who would become the favoured target of the Australian over the coming months, if she were to be elected. These themes were taken up on the Monday following the election. Readers now learned that business believed that the expected hung parliament and the Greens’ position in the Senate spelt the end of prospects for “vital economic reform” and that Lee Rhiannon, who from now on was associated
with the so-called watermelon faction of the party – green on the outside; red on the inside – “has had to fend off suggestions she is positioning herself to lead the Greens when Senator Brown, 65, retires”. In the Australian’s by now conventional language, “having to fend off suggestions” is code for denying an untruth put to a target by a journalist from the Australian.

  On 25 August the Australian published its first editorial on the significance of the Greens’ outstanding election performance. The editorial ridiculed the claim that the election had witnessed the “real birth of a new political movement”. “Political observers who didn’t come down in the last shower” had “heard it all before”. The success of the Greens was likely to prove ephemeral unless they abandoned their “tomato Left economics”. For the one-thousandth time, the Labor Party was warned not to “lurch to the Left”. For their part, the Greens were advised to “occupy the ground between the major parties” so as not to “stray from the values of their voters”. The ideas that the Greens – the most important left-wing party in Australian history – should try to squeeze into the almost non-existent political space between Labor and the Coalition, and that their voters had supported them without noticing that they were a party of the Left, were, even by the standards of the Australian, seriously strange. Obviously the political situation was creating confusion among senior staff there. On the following day the Australian ran a comment on its front page by Dennis Shanahan. A day after his paper had advised the Greens to position themselves to the right of Labor, Shanahan described the party in the kind of language B.A. Santamaria might have used about the Communist Party half a century ago. “Bandt is a member of a party that has a worldwide movement, a national structure, funding from overseas and a platform opposed to much of Labor’s election policy.” Shanahan called for a new election five days after the last. It seemed to Bob Brown as if the Australian regarded the result of an election signalling the possibility of a Labor–Greens alliance as somehow illegitimate. Brown interpreted the publication of Shanahan’s article as a portent of the virulent anti-Greens campaign to come. He was not wrong.

  On 28 August the Australian gave prominence in both a report and an extract reproduced in “Cut and Paste” to something Adam Bandt had written fifteen years ago while a Marxist student radical at Monash University, which described the Greens as a “bourgeois party”. Bob Brown was asked whether, in the light of this, he still had confidence in the new member for Melbourne. Brown offered Bandt his “160 per cent support”. “We are not into book burning in Australia.” Perhaps not, although one might have begun to wonder after reading a column that day by Terry McCrann, one of the most senior, influential and rabid members of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian stable. McCrann’s interpretation of the election was apocalyptic. For him it marked the end of the great period of economic reform begun under John Howard in 1979 and the beginning of a new era where “a permanent Green minority … will endorse irrational policies from a Labor government and frustrate rational ones from a Coalition one”. According to McCrann, Treasury was already under the control of enemy forces – “green most strikingly in its analysis of climate change” and “red in its support for even a 99 per cent super-profits tax”. McCrann used the Cold War language of conquest by the Totalitarian Enemy. The Treasury had been “colonised”. The Greens had “seized” the balance of power in the Senate. Seized? On 30 August the totalitarian theme took off. A report on the New South Wales senator-elect Lee Rhiannon, who had foolishly tried to hide her long-distant pro-Soviet past, was headlined “Forget About Stalinism, I’m a True-Blue Green”. Not so fast, Lee. On the basis of information from an obscure South Australian Greens party member, Christian Kerr informed readers that in New South Wales the Greens branch was under communist control and that throughout Australia the party consisted of “a small communist core and a great mass of politically naïve people”. In his customary world-weary style, David Burchell disagreed about this naivety. He described the party’s “grassroots” as consisting of “the foul-smelling detritus from a hundred leftist fragments of yesteryear”.

  On 1 September Labor and the Greens signed a very significant alliance agreement, which may come to be seen as a turning point in Australian politics. The prime minister committed to meeting regularly with Bob Brown and Adam Bandt. Greens’ legislative proposals would be assessed by the prime minister’s office and costed by Treasury. The government promised a referendum recognising the Indigenous people in the constitution. Perhaps most importantly, it promised to establish a parliamentary committee to investigate how to put a price on carbon. At the time of the alliance agreement, the vital decision of the independents was looming. The Australian’s war against the Greens now went into overdrive.

  On 2 September no fewer than six articles hostile to the Greens were published. On the front page of the paper readers learned that “Labor’s alliance with the Greens” had “sent shock waves through Australia’s mining heartland” and that, in the opinion of Paul Kelly, “the once great Labor Party passes into history with this deal”. Inside the paper they learned that Australia’s “mining chiefs” had voiced their “strong concerns” about the possibility of a “more punitive mining tax and the potential demolition of Australia’s coal and uranium industries”; that the alliance “would slug regional areas, place miners’ jobs at risk and usher in bans on recreational fishing and a softer policy on boat people”; and that the alliance would revive “the confiscatory attitudes towards reward for effort of the quaint old Left”, which included something neither quaint nor old, the “so-called Tobin tax”, a levy of one-hundredth of 1% on all financial transactions. If the prospect of a Tobin tax and the end of recreational fishing was not worry enough, readers learned that Adam Bandt had been “sleeping with the enemy”. This turned out to mean that his partner was an ALP staffer.

  And so it went. Between 3 and 7 September there were a dozen articles flaying the Greens. Readers learned that the Greens’ tax policy “was devised by a party that is green with envy” and that their pledge to spend more on dental health would place unwelcome pressure on the budget bottom line. They learned that Origin Energy was concerned about the new power of the Greens; that the coal-seam gas industry had “slammed” the Greens for their “hypocrisy”; that Anna Bligh thought they had “a blinkered view” of the liquefied natural gas industry; and that, surprise, surprise, the chief executives of BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata were “deeply troubled” by the arrival of “Bob Brown’s Greens to the Government benches”. As Matthew Stevens helpfully pointed out, “Who can blame them?” The mining executives were indeed, it soon turned out, so troubled by the Labor–Greens alliance that they felt obliged to warn the Australian that, sadly enough, they might be compelled to mount yet another advertising campaign against the government. Nor was the danger the Labor–Greens alliance posed to Australia purely economic. Patricia Karvelas, a left-leaning gay feminist according to Chris Mitchell, reported on the front page about the danger of the Greens rushing a “same sex” marriage bill through the parliament by use of a “conscience vote”. Russell Trood pointed out that the Greens were about “to become a powerful and malign influence on Labor foreign policy”. Although they had led the Gillard government to the promise of a referendum on Indigenous constitutional recognition, Wesley Aird was of the view that “as far as indigenous affairs goes, Labor should have nothing to do with the Greens”. This was not only Aird’s view. On 7 September, as the moment of the decision of the independents approached, Karvelas reported, once more on the front page, “an extraordinary last-minute intervention” from Noel Pearson, appealing to Rob Oakeshott to support the true friend of Indigenous Australians, Tony Abbott.

  The campaign waged against the Greens in the eighteen days between the 21 August election and the 7 September announcement of the independents’ decision for Gillard was so unrelenting, so exaggerated, so obvious, so desperately unbalanced and unfair, that reading through the relevant articles is a c
omical experience. Bob Brown, however, was not amused. He complained on the ABC’s Lateline about the astonishing bias shown by the Australian in its attempt to wreck the Labor–Greens alliance. Usually the Australian denies such accusations with persiflage and Jesuitical nonsense. On this occasion, uncharacteristically, it did not. In its editorial of 7 September the Australian argued: “Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor. We wear Senator Brown’s criticism with pride. We believe that he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.”

  With this statement the Australian had ceased even to pretend to be, in the words of its US Murdoch cousin, the execrable Fox News, “fair and balanced”. With this statement it made explicit what was already entirely obvious, namely that the Australian saw itself not as a mere newspaper, but as a player in the game of national politics, calling upon the vast resources of the Murdoch empire and the millions of words it had available to it to try to influence the national political agenda and to make and unmake governments. The pretence of the Australian was that it scrutinised those in power. The reality was that it exercised extraordinary power without either responsibility or accountability. The editorial of 7 September was a perhaps unique and most likely inadvertent moment of honesty.