Mr ROSS CAMERON (8:16 PM) —Just before Christmas last year, Bill Gates, then chairman of Microsoft, was asked, `How does it feel to be the most powerful man in the world?' `I don't know,' came the reply. `You'd have to ask Rupert Murdoch.' If we ask ourselves the question who is the greatest Australian of the 20th century, Howard Florey, the co-inventor of penicillin, and Rupert Murdoch, in my view, must be at the top of the short list. We ought not to be so parochial as to be blinded by his decision on citizenship into devaluing Murdoch's contribution to Australia and to the world. The great shame, in my opinion, is that we have only one Rupert Murdoch; what we need is three or four. I have heard it argued that the greatest thing we could do for human rights in China is for Sky TV to be given broadcasting rights in that country, and I believe there is some force in the argument. If information is power, then Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and Ted Turner have done more than any government policy or political leader to empower the global citizen. In 1975, hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were massacred, in part because of the paucity of television and print media coverage. In 1999, the bloodshed, though tragic, was minuscule by comparison, in part because of the television pictures beamed around the world, creating a climate of international outrage which allowed Australia and the UN to act.

Returning to the question of raw power rather than the manner of its exercise, Business Sunday reporter Michael Pascoe filed an interesting piece last weekend about the stunning performance of Newscorp shares, rising in value from under $10 in October last year to $27.35 today. The more significant aspect of the story was the impact of one stock on the performance of the Australian equity market as a whole. News Corporation now represents almost 20 per cent of the entire value of the Australian stock market. As Pascoe observed:

Pascoe suggested, only half joking, that Rupert Murdoch ought to be required to file regular health reports with the ASX. But that commercial might does not exist in the vacuum. It flows as a consequence of Murdoch's power as a gatekeeper of news and information. In the field of newspapers alone, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, September 1999, Mr Murdoch now controls 23.4 per cent of Australia's regional newspapers, 46.6 per cent of suburban newspapers, 67.8 per cent of all capital city and national dailies and 76.1 per cent of all Sunday newspapers.

Again, there is much for which we have to be thankful from Mr Murdoch's success as an entrepreneur. The Australian newspaper, for example, spent years in the red and many doubted its rationale from the start. But Murdoch persisted, wearing the losses out of a personal belief that Australia needed and could sustain a high quality daily national broadsheet. Australia is a better country as a result. Newscorp's commercial interests are diverse and run through every stage in the communications chain. In addition to the newspaper dominance, there is 25 per cent of Foxtel in pay TV, control of film production house Fox Studios, News Interactive online services and games and just under 20 per cent of the One.tel telecommunications carrier. A joint venture with Time Warner and America Online, followed by the announcement last week in the New Yorker magazine of the deal with Yahoo, has sent the share price skyward.

But the breathtaking scope and reach of the Newscorp empire inevitably creates risks for Australian democracy. Sydney has just gone through an extensive Broadcasting Authority inquiry into the so-called cash for comment affair. The allegation being made was that editorial content and news and current affairs coverage were being skewed by the undisclosed commercial interests of program sponsors. There is nothing unlawful or immoral about sponsoring a radio program or indeed accepting payment for advocating a view one genuinely supports. The issue is one of transparency and disclosure. It is about ensuring that listeners, readers and viewers of Australian media know when a program has crossed the lines between news, opinion and advertising. The outcome of the inquiry was that a Sydney radio station was required to make an announcement at the start of each current affairs program disclosing the companies and causes making payments to the broadcaster. While I cannot equate the inhalation of nicotine with the consumption of information, the principle bears similarities to health warnings on cigarette packs. The activity is entirely lawful but people are entitled to know the character of the thing they are consuming. The great temptation for a media proprietor must always be the formation of incestuous relationships between group members in which the organs of news are placed at the disposal of the other commercial interests of the empire.

In addition to the risks of commercial bias, the issue of political involvement of media owners seems to me worthy of greater public consideration. A media magnate is just as entitled to a political opinion as any other citizen, perhaps more so. But politics is ultimately about the communication of ideas and images. What happens when one citizen, or non-citizen as the case may be, exercises control over the lion's share of a nation's communication assets? There must at least arise the possibility of an exercise in political power which is discordant with the idea of the sovereign people in a liberal democracy.

Tonight, I want to address three questions: (1) Does the prosecution of the other commercial interests of the corporation distort the coverage of news in Murdoch publications? (2) Do the proprietors of Newscorp seek to translate their commercial and information dominance into political power? And (3), if the answer to either of the first two questions is yes, have sufficient steps been taken to ensure transparency of news coverage and an adequately critical and informed electorate?

I turn now to the evidence, beginning with some historical material relating to the making and unmaking of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister. By the early 1970s, Mr Murdoch appears to have formed the view that it was time to sweep out the cobwebs of 23 years of Liberal government and that Billy McMahon was not a great adornment to the Liberal Party. I see other members in the chamber shaking their heads in agreement. The story is taken up by John Menadue who, as General Manager of the Australian newspaper from 1967 to 1972, was a confidante of both Murdoch and Whitlam, serving the latter as private secretary and head of the Prime Minister's Department and later as Australian Ambassador to Japan. In his memoir, Things you learn along the way, Menadue records:

In relation to the 1972 election, Menadue records:

But providing his intellectual resources did not satisfy the appetite for participation that Murdoch sought. Mick Young and Eric Walsh created a group styled `Businessmen for a change of government' with a couple of Labor mates and a few names supplied by the ALP advertising agency. The advertising copy was well prepared and Menadue remembers:

Mr Murdoch himself makes a fairly frank confession about this particular foray into Australian political king making. Shortly after the 1975 election, Murdoch is quoted as saying that he `single-handedly put the present government into office'. His biographer, William Shawcross, takes up that case at page 162:

And on another occasion he said his papers were perhaps unprofessional and certainly unfair to McMahon. He said:

As the tide comes in, however, so it goes out. By 1975 Mr Murdoch had suffered a rebuff from Whitlam on development of a bauxite mine but much more significantly, in my view, had formed the view that the Prime Minister's wider political agenda was antithetical to his own. The partisan character of the campaign which followed in 1975 was so excessive that the News journalists staged a revolt and the printers refused to print. Led by senior reporter Robert Duffield and subeditor Barry Porter, 73 of them signed a letter to Murdoch in May 1975. The mood can be gleaned from one paragraph which reads:

Subsequently, the entire staff of the Australian, the Mirror and the Telegraph launched a strike including a public statement about the affair chastising Murdoch's `very deliberate and blatant bias in the presentation of news'.The journalists went on to say that they `felt it necessary to disassociate ourselves entirely from the desecration of the traditional and historical ethics of journalism'.

Mr Murdoch subsequently turned his attention to Fleet Street. It is worth asking, following the confessions in relation to the making and unmaking of Whitlam, whether his political activism was in any way tempered by the Australian experience. For this period we turn to Andrew Neil, who spent 11 years as Editor of the Sunday Times. Chapter 7 of his memoir, Full Disclosure, is titled `At the Court of the Sun King', a reference to Louis XIV, the most absolute of European monarchs in the modern era. Here he describes the climate in which he worked as editor of a Murdoch publication. He said:

This chapter shows the hazards of parting on less than amicable terms with a newspaper editor. It also reminds me of that expression `A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse', that it is not necessary to issue explicit instructions to achieve a particular editorial outcome.

Returning to Australia and the more recent past, we can reflect on the strategy employed by News to gain its long sought foothold in the Australian television market. The issuing of spectrum for the broadcast of digital television presented this government with a choice which involved a technical question about quality which had implications for existing TV players and possible new market entrants. I will not comment on the merits of the argument, on which I have some sympathy for the News case, but purely on the tactics employed to pursue the commercial objectives.

My colleague Jim Lloyd, in the marginal seat of Robertson, woke up one morning to find that a direct mail letter box campaign had begun in his electorate attacking the Howard government over the direction of its digital policy. It was made clear to the backbench that this was the beginning of a campaign which would target all government marginal seats. I want to reaffirm that there was nothing unlawful about the tactic. It was an exercise of the right to free speech that every citizen enjoys. In the end it was hardly a campaign at all. The ultimate distribution was quite small and did not include my seat of Parramatta. The tactic, however, was widely reported in both the Murdoch and Fairfax press as an indication of what might be expected in a future general election. The power in this instance was not so much in the action as in the threat.

John Menadue was asked by Karon Snowdon on ABC Radio whether the direct mail campaign in marginal seats on digital television held implications for the conduct of the next election. Menadue responded, `Yes, he's certainly threatening John Howard. He'll threaten any Prime Minister who doesn't do what he wants and maybe, this time, he's overplayed his hand.'

It has been argued by some that the pursuit of Murdoch's interest in digital TV had an effect on the tone of Newscorp coverage of the GST debate. Observers noticed tabloid support for the GST throughout the period of lobbying for a stake for News in digital TV. After it became clear that the News case would not get up, there was an apparent volte face in coverage of such starkness that the Bulletin's Max Walsh suggested that `anyone viewing the front pages of the Murdoch press across Australia throughout January would instinctively conclude that an orchestrated campaign was under way'.

Murdoch, father and son, along with a substantial proportion of the Australian electorate, have been long-time avowed republicans, and they are of course entitled to their view. But the personal attack on the Prime Minister made by Lachlan—interestingly, in a speech to a collection of Wall Street bankers in New York—struck some as excessive, and the tone of the coverage in News publications throughout the constitutional campaign was so strident that in the end, it seems to me, it actually damaged the cause of the referendum, and I understand that some within the News organisation accept that view.

There has been recent coverage about News's involvement in the National Textiles dispute, but that issue has received sufficient attention and I do not propose to rehearse it again now. We could look to other examples: at the state level, last week Matthew Moore published an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on News's prosecution of its commercial interests in relation to SOCOG. Newscorp was seeking the status of official photographer in the torch relay to give it access to the 10,000 relay runners who presumably would be prepared to pay handsomely for a photograph of their efforts. When News was knocked back on that request, two days later the Daily Telegraph newspaper published a column by its Olympics editor, Glenda Korporaal, arguing that SOCOG was `in very real danger of further alienating some of its strongest potential supporters'. Matthew Moore goes on to say, `There was a whiff of grapeshot.' He quotes the article again:

It is suggested that some 48 hours later, after reading the article, Michael Eyers rang News and indicated that some accommodation could be arrived at and that News reporters would indeed be given special status on the bus and they would be entitled to take photographs and to sell them to torch runners. This apparently produced a considerable sense of victory within the News organisation, but it is just another demonstration of the risk of using news and current affairs coverage as a vehicle for prosecuting the wider commercial interests of a news organisation.

What we have seen so far are eyewitness accounts. We have seen similar fact evidence in both Australia and the UK. We have seen corroboration from other commentators. The question of motive arises, and some have pointed to the fact that most senior executives of News have a significant proportion of their wealth tied up in News shares and options which would seem to provide a motive for a particular accent on the covering of News's commercial interests. Others have suggested that the power of the proprietor over appointments and promotions is a factor. It has been put to me by a colleague that all proprietors have an interest in the denigration of politicians as a class, because that then strengthens their own position of influence. That may well be paranoia, and indeed this is part of the problem. In defence of News, everyone who gets up to speak on the issue speaks through their particular lens of interest, whether that is as a disgruntled former employee, a competitor in another organisation or a politician displaying the paranoia for which we are well known. The question is really about transparency and the role of the media in a thriving democracy. There is evidence of generational change with the coming of Lachlan to the reins, and I believe there is a conflict taking place in News between the old guard—the sort of Sun King scenario—and the new players. I want to urge the young Turks to carry on, and I wish them well in their endeavours. (Time expired)