Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and labour movement veteran Sharan Burrow have been tapped to lead the campaign for a News Corp royal commission, after former PM Kevin Rudd vacated the role this week to take up his post as ambassador to the US.
The appointments were announced in a Nine newspapers op-ed on Tuesday and signal growing bipartisan support for a royal commission into media concentration in Australia, as News Corp executives move to put out fires on multiple fronts.
Turnbull said the case for a royal commission has been “considerably strengthened” by the revelations made in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against the media behemoth by voting machine maker Dominion, which has accused the Murdoch-controlled Fox News channel of spreading election conspiracy theories it knew to be wrong.
“The reality is that Murdoch [and] Fox News, knowingly propagated a lie, which they knew to be a lie. I mean, this brought the country to the very edge of a coup,” Turnbull told Crikey.
In the co-written opinion piece Turnbull and Burrow wrote that Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media scion whose empire controls The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and Sky News in Australia, “created the environment” that made the Capitol riots of January 6 “possible”.
“These events alone justify the rigorous inquiry that only a royal commission can bring,” they wrote.
“Just this week Australians have been reminded of how dependent we are on our American ally. Indeed, the AUKUS agreement has doubled down on that dependence. So the subversion of American democracy threatens Australia, and Australian security, as much as it threatens the United States.”
Burrow, the former general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation and ACTU president, said hers and Turnbull’s appointments should signal to the rest of the country that the push for a royal commission is an effort above party politics.
“We’re down to less than 70 democracies in the world, and more than a third of them are authoritarian,” Burrow told Crikey. “So if we have media outlets that simply can, unquestioned, promote lies and disinformation, then you don’t have the kind of stability to allow people the genuine choice of considered debate, and that’s what democracy is based on.”
Last year Labor ruled out entertaining calls for royal commission into media ownership, after Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said it was “not warranted”, despite a 2021 Senate inquiry recommendation in favour of the move.
Turnbull and Burrow signalled they would move to change the government’s mind.
A Senate report handed down by Labor and the Greens in December last year recommended that an inquiry with the powers of a royal commission be established to look at current media regulations and their ability to promote a diverse news media market.
The committee responsible for the report was established by Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young after a petition started in 2020 by Rudd calling for a royal commission secured more than 500,000 signatures.
Turnbull, who served as prime minister between 2015 and 2018, was among the petition’s notable signatories. He reiterated on Tuesday the role that News Corp editors came to play in the leadership challenge mounted against him by then home affairs minister Peter Dutton in 2018.
“The point is to examine and ventilate the central issue, which is that the biggest threat to our democracy is not from Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin — not that either of them should be underestimated — but rather it is from within,” Turnbull said.
“And certainly in our country, and in the United States, the largest, the most influential destructive force in our democracy is News Corp. And if you doubt that, I tender January 6 as Exhibit A.”
