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  AUSTRALIA’S MURDOCH PROBLEMS

  Australia has not one Murdoch problem but two. The first is the more straightforward: the fact that News Limited’s papers in Australia account for 70% of the market represents a threat to the flourishing of an open democratic culture. If Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, was an apolitical or a distant figure, the threat might be merely notional. He is, however, not only a highly political individual with a powerful set of ideological beliefs. He is also determined to maintain tight control over the political line of all his papers on issues that interest him, as he did before the invasion of Iraq. In addition, he appears to have an almost paternal concern for what he sees as the wellbeing of Australia.

  For these reasons, I can think of no plausible argument that could justify his company’s control of 70% of Australia’s newspaper market. The issue is not the absence of alternative sources of information for politically engaged citizens. In the age of the internet there are hundreds of easily accessible sources of information. The issue is rather the capacity of News Limited to influence the opinions of the vast majority of less engaged citizens whose political understanding is shaped directly by the popular newspapers and indirectly through the commercial radio and television programs which rely on the daily papers for the content of their programs and, more deeply, for the way they interpret the world.

  Evidence suggests that at the meeting of News Limited editors and key journalists at Carmel in early 2011, discussion took place about the need to do something about the minority Gillard government and its untenable alliance with the far left-wing Greens. Following that meeting, the key Murdoch tabloids began to campaign in earnest against the government and in particular against its carbon tax. This example demonstrates that News Limited’s control of 70% of Australia’s newspaper market is no longer a merely potential problem. It poses a real and present danger to the health of Australian democracy. The Murdoch stranglehold over the daily press must be challenged and broken. The current weakening of Murdoch’s grip on his global empire at a time when the Gillard government controls the House of Representatives and the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate presents a unique window of opportunity. The question, of course, is whether the government is willing to take what would undoubtedly be an extraordinary and perhaps unacceptable risk.

  The second problem Murdoch poses for this country is the Australian. Under Chris Mitchell’s editorship, as I have tried to show, the Australian played the role not so much of reporter or interpreter but rather of national enforcer of those values that lie at the heart of the Murdoch empire: market fundamentalism and the beneficence of American global hegemony. Unquestioning support for American foreign policy led it to the conduct of an extraordinarily strident campaign in favour of an invasion that was launched on the basis of false intelligence, that has been responsible for perhaps 400,000 deaths, and for which it has never uttered a word of apology. The Australian has conducted a prolonged and intellectually incoherent campaign against action on climate change, which has undermined the hold in public life of the central values of the Enlightenment, Science and Reason. This has helped make action by any Australian government on the most serious question of contemporary times far more difficult than it ought to have been. It has conducted a series of high-volume and unbalanced campaigns directed against Labor governments, in which its journalists, rather than investigating a problem with an open mind, have often sought out evidence in support of a pre-determined editorial conclusion. The Australian has consistently attempted to turn ideas with which it disagrees, especially those that its editor-in-chief associates with that hydra-headed monster known as the Left, into un-Australian heresies. It has sought systematically to undermine the credibility of its only broadsheet rivals – the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age – and, in a relentless campaign, to intimidate and drive towards the right the only other mainstream source of analysis and opinion in this country, the ABC. The Australian has pursued its many, often radically unequal, enemies mercilessly and sometimes unscrupulously. It has conducted a kind of jihad against one party, the Greens, that has the support of one and a half million of the nation’s citizens. By its own admission it has devoted itself to the task of trying to have that party destroyed at the ballot box, a statement which in itself undermines any claim to fairness or to balance. And perhaps most importantly of all, in the guise of a traditional broadsheet newspaper, the Australian has turned itself into a player in national politics without there being any means by which its actions can be held to account. It claims that it is held accountable by commercial reality. According to those who understand such matters, its financial situation is altogether opaque. Ironically, even though its core value is the magic of the market, it is very doubtful if it could have survived in the past or could survive in the present without hidden financial subsidy from the global empire of its founding father, Rupert Murdoch, for whom the Australian has offered the most important means for influencing politics and commerce in the country of his birth.

  Extracts from Quarterly Essay 43, Bad News, August 2011

  ANDREW BOLT: “NAME TEN”

  On 28 September 2011, Andrew Bolt was found to have committed an offence under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. He had written two articles in the Herald Sun which had the capacity to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate members of the group about which he had written – a group Justice Bromberg called “light skinned Aborigines”. Bolt had not breached the Act because he had written critically about the question of racial identification. He had breached the Act because his articles were filled with “errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language”. The full judgement is a brilliant forensic analysis of the Bolt technique. Of this technique I can boast some personal experience.

  In 2000 and early 2001 I was working on a Quarterly Essay called In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right. The essay documented the campaign conducted by the then editor of Quadrant, P.P. McGuinness, and a dozen or so sympathetic journalists debunking the supposed myth of the Stolen Generations, the name given to mixed descent Aboriginal children removed by government from their mothers, families and communities. Shortly before the essay was concluded, Andrew Bolt, one of the journalists involved in the campaign, wrote a story that appeared on the front page of the Herald Sun. The article claimed that Lowitja O’Donoghue, an Indigenous woman involved in the fight for the recognition of the injustice done to these children, had “confessed” that she had not been “stolen” at all but had simply been “removed” by her white father to a South Australian Christian mission. According to Bolt, here was vital evidence that the left-wing Stolen Generations myth was indeed a fraud.

  Bolt’s story had influence. Even the prime minister, John Howard, thought it “highly interesting”. Lowitja O’Donoghue was distraught by the manner in which her story had been twisted. She hadn’t realised the kind of a journalist Bolt was. Eventually Lowitja’s true story was revealed by Stuart Rintoul in the Australian magazine. At the time of her birth the policy of the South Australian government had been to separate “half-caste” children from their Aboriginal surroundings. Lowitja and her brothers and sisters had been removed by their Irish-Australian father, who then abandoned both the children and their Aboriginal mother. Thirty years later, by accident, Lowitja discovered her mother’s identity and whereabouts. Lowitja’s mother who, in turn, learned that her daughter would visit her as soon as she could, waited patiently by the roadside each day for several weeks. When they were reunited, Lowitja found that her mother had spent her life in grief over the loss of her children. For her part, Lowitja had never overcome the pain of separation. What kind of journalist would manipulate a story as tragic as this, entirely consistent with the interwar policy and practice of “half-caste” child removal, for a cheap and false polemical point?

  I was angered by Bolt’s attack on Lowitja O’Donoghue and suggested a debate with him on
the subject of the Stolen Generations. Bolt at first agreed, and then at the last minute pulled out. Later, Russ Radcliffe, events manager of Reader’s Feast at the time, the person who had set up the debate, explained to me what had happened: “I telephoned Andrew Bolt – he was affable, amused by the prospect, and keen to participate. I subsequently called on Bolt on several occasions leaving messages to confirm the date. He did not reply. When I eventually reached him his tone had changed drastically … He became irate, saying he had no intention of helping Manne ‘flog’ his book … ” On 2 April 2001 in the Herald Sun this was also the reason Bolt gave for his change of mind.

  After this time, in the Herald Sun, Bolt launched scores of attacks on me over the question of the Stolen Generations. One of the lines of attack was defamatory, namely that I was what he called the chief Stolen Generations “propagandist”, a claim that he has repeated, according to a Factiva search I made in preparing this piece, on no fewer than thirty-two occasions. Some claims were stunningly dishonest. In In Denial I had outlined four biographies of mixed descent children who had been removed from mother, family and community as a way of demonstrating the policy and practice in different states and territories and in different historical periods. Time and again Bolt told the readers of the Herald Sun that in all my research I had only been able to find four cases of “stolen” children. Bolt also entangled himself in contradiction. On the one hand, he very frequently accused me of being a propagandist. On the other, he repeated hardly less frequently the criticisms I had made of Bringing Them Home, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity report into Aboriginal child removal. “Even Manne acknowledges…” If I was indeed a propagandist why would I have been critical of the major report into Aboriginal child removal? Moreover while outlining my criticisms of Bringing Them Home often Bolt suggested to his readers that I rejected all the conclusions of the report. This was another lie. In general, I praised the report. Finally, on several occasions Bolt suggested to his readers that I was profiting from the research I was undertaking into mixed descent Aboriginal child removal. I had profited, he claimed, by winning a Queensland Premier’s Prize for In Denial. I had profited by being paid the standard fee for writing a Quarterly Essay. It was even suggested that I had profited personally from a comparatively modest grant I had received from the Australian Research Council to work in the Commonwealth and state government archives. Bolt called the grant a “top up” of my salary. This was yet another lie, designed to deceive. Grants are carefully audited and must be spent on nothing but research. They are not income.

  Between March 2001 and May 2006 Bolt had written in the Herald Sun attacking me, mainly although not exclusively as the Stolen Generations chief propagandist, on no fewer than forty-seven occasions. More importantly, by May 2006 he had written over seventy entirely ill-informed articles on the supposed myth of the Stolen Generations. Apart from ad hominem attacks on scholars working in the field, Bolt’s articles had three main interconnected characteristics. First, as a “terrible simplifier”, Bolt distorted beyond recognition the individual histories of mixed descent children who had been removed from mothers, families and communities in order to demonstrate they had not been “stolen”. Second, Bolt treated the general name Indigenous Australians had by now attached to the phenomenon of child removal – the “Stolen Generations” – not as a metaphor but as a literal description. The result was to exonerate cruel and inhumane but lawful policy on the ground that it did not involve the crime of kidnapping. Most weirdly of all, in his discussion of the question of the stolen generations, Bolt ignored entirely the problem that was central to any sane historical discussion of mixed descent Aboriginal child removal, namely the policies and practices of the states and territories in the decades between 1900 and 1970. He simply assumed, without offering any evidence, that Indigenous child removal was motivated by concerns about neglect. How far in all this Bolt was driven by ideological zeal and absence of empathy and how far by limited historical understanding or intelligence, it was difficult to decide.

  In June 2006 Bolt wrote a column arguing that the Left was frightened of engaging in argument with the Right. In response, I sent a letter to the Herald Sun pointing out the hypocrisy. Five years ago, I argued, Bolt had fled from a debate on the Stolen Generations. In a private email, Bolt now argued that the reason he would not debate me was that he had not been sent a copy of the Quarterly Essay. He apparently forgot that this contradicted the public reason he had offered in 2001 for pulling out of the debate at the last moment.

  The day after my letter was published, I was invited onto 3AW in Melbourne. Bolt challenged me to name ten stolen children. This was, I must admit, a cunning move. Unless one is prepared for a challenge of this kind, lists of names of the victims of a policy do not trip off the tongue. I doubt I would have done better if I had been asked to name ten victims of the Stalin terror or the Armenian genocide, matters I have read a very great deal about. Bolt’s “name ten” myth was born.

  Soon after this radio encounter – the transcript of which was published in the Herald Sun – I asked the director of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival if she was interested in inviting Andrew Bolt for a debate with me on the Stolen Generations. What then followed was truly bizarre. Bolt made it a condition of his participation that I send him a list beforehand not merely of ten “stolen children” but of “a hundred” or even “hundreds”. I emailed Bolt to let him know that I found his request peculiar. The issue dividing us was whether or not there were ten or a hundred or indeed thousands of “stolen children”. What Bolt seemed to require, as a condition of agreeing to a debate, was that I first provide him with the evidence proving that he was wrong. Despite the absurdity, I told him I was happy to meet his condition so long as he provided me with a definition of what counted for him as a “stolen child”. Bolt refused to answer this question. Nonetheless I decided to send him a reasonably detailed list of mixed descent children removed in the different states and territories between 1900 and 1970.

  I divided the list sent to him into four categories. The first involved cases outlined in detail in books. Here there were twelve names. The second category was of “half-caste” children seized in Queensland at the beginning of the twentieth century. As I explained to Bolt:

  The origin of the policy of “half-caste” child removal began in Queensland at the turn of the century. All these children were “half-castes” who came to the attention of the Protector Walter Roth. He authorised for them to be formally arrested. None of them received a welfare assessment of any kind. All of them were found guilty of being neglected after a perfunctory hearing of a magistrate’s court.

  According to the relevant law, the Industrial Schools and Reformatory Act of 1865, being Aboriginal was in itself evidence of neglect. In this category I provided Bolt with some sixty-five names. The third category was of children sent to “half-caste” institutions in the Northern Territory in the interwar period. As I explained to Bolt:

  In the Northern Territory from the early 1920s “half-caste” children were picked up by authorities of the Commonwealth government (which administered the Territory) and sent to one of two extraordinarily overcrowded “half-caste” homes, in Darwin and Alice Springs. None of the children received any welfare assessment. None was taken before a court … The aspiration of the policy was to pick up all these children …

  There were some 120 names in this group. Finally in the fourth category I sent Bolt a list of sixty names of those who had been removed and had subsequently provided testimony to a Howard government–funded Stolen Generations Oral History Project. Simply to convince Bolt to debate me I had provided him with some 260 names of mixed descent children who had been removed by government from their mothers, families and communities and sent to institutions. At last Bolt agreed to a debate.

  I had a special reason for wanting to drag Bolt along to a debate. Prior to the occasion, I decided I would prepare a documentary collection which I intended to hand over to h
im on the night. Simultaneously I would make the collection available electronically on the website of the Monthly. Nothing Bolt had written in the Herald Sun on the un-Australian “myth” of the Stolen Generations – amounting by now to scores of thousands of words – had displayed even the remotest understanding of the history of mixed descent child removal. I calculated that if he was presented in full public view with the kind of evidence historians work with, and if he felt compelled to read it, he would either understand his ignorance and quietly vacate the field, or be exposed to the public as a fraud. Somewhat alarmingly, on the night of the debate Bolt referred to the documents collected as “bits of paper”. This is not an attitude to historical evidence that even the Holocaust denier David Irving takes. It was an inauspicious start.

  The documentary collection (still available at the Monthly) contained several different kinds of evidence. The first kind was statistical. In 1994 the Australian Bureau of Statistics carried out a detailed survey of Indigenous Australians. One question asked concerned separation from natural family. What the survey revealed was that for those born after 1980, 1.6% of Indigenous children had been taken away from their natural families; that for those born between 1970 and 1979, 4.6% had been removed; and that for all Indigenous children born before 1970 over 10% had been separated from their natural families. The almost inescapable conclusion was that prior to 1970 separation of a considerable proportion of Indigenous children was government policy and practice across Australian states and the Northern Territory. It also largely falsified Bolt’s strident claim that Indigenous children in danger had ceased to be afforded protection because of the “myth” of the Stolen Generations that had been popularised by Bringing Them Home. The survey, which revealed that Indigenous child removal had declined radically after 1980, was conducted three years before the publication of Bringing Them Home.