Will Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s shiny “gentler, kinder politics” break News Corp? Or will News Corp, once again, triumph over the paradigm of nice? For the incoming government, it’s political. For News Corp, it’s existential.
Every day, News Corp (and its Fox sibling) makes its money out of the outrage story of the moment. Now, it’s confronting a new narrative: an election read as a direct repudiation equally of the News Corp business model and of the Liberal-National post-Tampa political strategy.
The Germans, as ever, have a word for it (or, in this case, a post-punk song lyric): “Angst, Hass, Titten und dem Wetterbericht” (“Fear, hate, titties and the weather report”). It captures the past two decades of News Corp’s and Australia’s conservative parties. Hate of political opponents and cultural dissidents, fear of the other from asylum seekers to African gangs, sexualised and homophobic panic, climate denial and obstruction.
This past week, there’s been the odd pause for breath in the outrage factory. The Monday tabloids delivered the briefest of honeymoons: “Top dog Albo: ruff and ready” on The Daily Tele front page; “Top dog flies high” in the Herald Sun; The Courier-Mail back-handed with “Albanese unleashed”; and The Australian begrudged “Albanese does it”.
On Sky News after dark, of course, it was business as usual with “1000 days of resistance”.
The message the company’s New York head office has sent post-Biden’s election is that hate and fear are still great business. Expect no letting up in the “war on woke” in Australia. But if Albanese’s nice politics takes off, ending (or muting) both the culture and climate wars, the News model is under serious threat.
News is pulling off a pivot from ad-supported mass media to readers’ subscriptions by continually outraging an audience safely sequestered in an echo chamber behind hard paywalls.
Those hard paywalls are both a curse and a blessing. Blessing: they successfully monetise the attention of a deeply engaged audience. Curse: the demographic is finite, ageing and dwindling. The pivot is sacrificing public influence for private engagement.
Of course, just about every election-winning prime minister (except maybe Tony Abbott) comes into office with a promise of a “kinder, gentler politics” — the phrase itself dates back to the 1980s, with President Bush. Even Dutton is running for opposition leader on an “I can do nice, too” pledge.
The difference is that Albanese seems to really believe it and has the record to show for it. In the last days of the election campaign, Albanese chipped Morrison for punning on his Italian name with Alban-easy. Tanya Plibersek’s Dutton-as-Voldemort joke would have been almost cliché just two weeks ago. By last Wednesday, it provoked the first prime ministerial cabinet-level rebuke.
As Tony Wright in the SMH and The Age and Paul Cleary in the AFR both wrote last week, Albanese has been heavily influenced both personally and politically by the Labor left’s post-1975 leader, Tom Uren. (Disclosure: I worked for Uren in the mid-1980s, including a brief overlap with Albanese.)
By the time the young Albanese met him, Uren’s politics of love (to summarise a complex man in a phrase) was seen as somehow old-fashioned, an almost soft-headed Whitlamite hangover (although, as anyone who worked with — or against — him quickly found out, he was both intellectually rigorous and politically tough).
Still, for the 1980s political class, “love” was out of step with the more thrusting arrogance inspired by get-rich-quick gurus of “whatever it takes” as the political science of the neo-liberal movement. That 1980s political shift proved powerful. Reinforced by the 2001 Tampa moment, it continued to shape the nasty, ugly politics of the past two decades. Like Frankenstein’s monster, it seemed to come to life in Morrison.
Eagerly embraced by News Corp, “whatever it takes” dictated how generations of Australia’s press corps came to understand — and report — politics. Morrison, briefly, glimpsed the potential of a new politics with his early Team Australia approach to pandemic management before he tripped over his ingrained partisan antipathy to Labor premiers and fell over his failure of empathy in dealing with sexual assault.
Now, finally, we can see that “whatever it takes” has been exhausted — and it’s exhausted the Australian people with it. Drawing on Uren, Albanese has been first through the open door.
But there’s plenty of institutional drag — starting with News Corp. It has a lot invested in stopping the rest of the political class following on.
