A dynamic force for change

THE dream was his father’s, but Rupert Murdoch had the passion to build a great national newspaper.

THE creation of a national newspaper had been a long-standing dream of the Murdoch family but it took the frustration and vigour of a young Rupert Murdoch to bring the dream to reality on July 15, 1964. It was the year marked by the Menzies government introducing conscription, the Voyager naval disaster and the Beatles’ visit to Australia.

“My motive was to create a great paper,” Murdoch told me during a recent interview in Los Angeles to mark the 50th anniversary of The Australian. “Actually, I’ve got to tell you, it was my father’s dream. He talked to me about this when I was a teenager. It was a family aspiration.

“Later when I was in my 30s I got impatient and got on with it. We failed to buy The Canberra Times as a basis so we started against it. And I remember every minute of it.”

This is the first time Murdoch has discussed The Australian as an idea originating with his father, journalist and proprietor Sir Keith Murdoch, or revealed that his father had long cultivated such an ambition.

Rupert, 33 in the year The Australian was born, was driven to act by his frustration with Australia’s Establishment in the Menzian twilight. This was a country clinging to racial discrimination, heavy censorship and cultural introspection and resistant to global trends, from Britain’s turn to Europe to the dynamics of Asian independence.

The impulse that seeded The Australian was the commitment to change. It originated in Murdoch’s energy, impatience and radical outlook. From the start the paper was an extraordinary force for reform and dynamic change agent. This was its first and most defining trait. It remains the key to its character and the passions it has aroused.

Talking about the 1960s ruling class, Murdoch said: “We believed they belonged to another age. We were young and aggressive. And we like to think we still are. Menzies, you know, a lot of people think he was a great prime minister and he certainly fulfilled a very important period but towards the end he became a bit of a caricature, taking on all these big titles and that was just symptomatic.” It is a somewhat kinder view of Menzies than The Australian offered at the time.

Surveying the long line of editors-in-chief and editors over the past 50 years, their unifying mission has been the quest to confront and improve the nation. There are no impartial or disinterested views about The Australian. It has provoked fierce support and equally fierce hostility. That is the paper’s DNA. The Murdoch vision as a change agent has endured since the paper’s inception as a pulsating force flowing from the editor’s chair.

Over five decades The Australian has interpreted and reinterpreted its mission as a change agent. It destabilised the tottering Liberal Party edifice in the 1960s, backed the reformist spirit and nationalistic confidence of Gough Whitlam in 1972, pulled the plug on a Labor government that by 1975 had succumbed to indulgence and economic mismanagement, encouraged Malcolm Fraser only to grow disillusioned by his granite-like timidity, agitated for economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s with varying degrees of support for Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard, usually urging them to pursue more aggressively the cause of lower tax, smaller government and freer markets, and backed Kevin Rudd as a responsible change agent at the 2007 election only to become a spearhead of criticism of the Rudd-Gillard era for its dashed promises and misguided directions.

The first issue of The Australian (priced at fourpence in Canberra) radiated a passion for Australia. The page one editorial declared the newspaper’s guiding light would be “faith in Australia and the country’s future”. Asked where this passion originated, Murdoch paused and said: “I think it was a young reaction from being brought up in Melbourne and Adelaide, they were very Anglophile. The idea of Australia being a great independent nation standing on its own feet, we believed that very strongly. And we still do.”

Here is the second enduring mission: a newspaper for the nation and the nation for a newspaper. Murdoch carved The Australian from the timber of his ambition for Australia – he wanted the young and rising country to become great. In the old Australia, such talk was typically frowned upon or patronised as romantic. Yet this purpose has guided the hand of every editor.

“I have tried to keep the paper truly national,” current editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell said. “To reflect the outback, the north, the smaller states and the big themes of national development and prosperity as well as the immediate political and cultural driving forces of the south east corner of the country.”

The paper, ultimately, is unique because it aspires to represent the nation, not just one segment of the nation. The Australian in recent times has resisted the narrow, development sceptic, pro-state intervention values of the Sydney and Melbourne cultural elites, arguing that they fail to encompass the wider nation in its interests and diversity.

Mitchell said: “I have tried not to be seduced into the concerns of the inner- city left intelligentsia of Sydney and Melbourne. In rural Australia I have tried to resist fashionable environmentalism in favour of a committed and broad reporting of the wider issues in agriculture, irrigation, northern development and management of resources.”

Pivotal to the paper’s ethos is its faith in a Big Australia. The Australian has been a resolute champion of a strong,
labour market directed, legal, non-
discriminatory, national interest immigration program. Anxious to maintain public support for immigration, it has tied this to the enduring philosophy of “unity in diversity”. The expectation is that immigrants will accept prevailing Australian norms and new arrivals will be respected for their diversity.

Asked how he felt about the paper half a century later, Murdoch said: “We haven’t followed an absolutely straight path, we’ve made mistakes, we’ve done our best to correct them. But I think overall we’ve come out pretty well.” It is a realistic appraisal, devoid of hubris.

The headline on the inside editorial on day one was: “Facing the challenge of Adulthood.” The piece argued that Australia had “made a lot of money” and put distance between itself and Britain but on the test of adulthood it had not yet grown up. “In a number of ways we are still not quite prepared to face life,” the editorial said. The Vietnam War had just begun, Britain was joining the European Common Market, China was a brooding presence and Indonesia was unstable yet a nation with which Australia had to work and live. The paper warned that Australia had no option but to recognise “that now, as never before in our short history, we stand alone”. That required fresh reserves of sacrifice, self-control and maturity.

This is the third element of the paper’s enduring mission: the quest for adulthood. Indeed, a direct line can be drawn from this inaugural 1964 leader to paper’s editorial response 50 years later to the first Abbott-Hockey 2014 budget. The Australian thinks adulthood dictates a viable trajectory to a balanced budget. Adulthood requires living within one’s means. This is the paper’s benchmark for judging the budget. In a wider sense the adulthood test – language adopted by Tony Abbott as PM – means the maturity to accept responsibility for national survival and advancement.

This philosophy has underpinned The Australian’s approach to politics for half a century. The paper does not exist to serve either the Labor or Liberal parties. Murdoch emphasised this guiding principle, yet again, in our interview. The paper’s first edition declared on page one: “The paper is tied to no party, to no state and has no chains of any kind.” The Australian assesses both sides of politics according to its own vision and aspirations for the nation.

That vision of adulthood requires a competitive and productivity-driven economy. Australia’s future is that of a stand-alone nation state in the 21st century integrated into global markets with close financial and trade ties to Asia, America and Europe. With Australia increasingly measured against the Asia-Pacific, it means avoiding the welfare state sclerosis of Europe, keeping a lean public sector, a competitive tax regime, an ethic of private entrepreneurship and a premium on investment in education and technology, two abiding themes of The Australian’s coverage over much of the past 50 years.

The mid 1970s constituted a turning point for the newspaper. Murdoch said that The Australian’s campaign against the Whitlam government in late 1975 “hurt it badly” in circulation terms. But he had no regrets. “I think we were right,” he said. Global stagflation and the failure of Whitlam government policies triggered a deeper commitment from the paper to policies to buttress a deregulated and productive economy.

The Australian has supported the winding back of trade union coverage, a more job-creation friendly labour market system, a social safety net for the disadvantaged, not for the middle class, and a business community operating on a competitive basis, not on corporate subsidies. Asked what he felt best captured the paper’s legacy, Murdoch nominated its belief in “free markets and free people” along with its faith in Australian qualities. These values have seen The Australian deliver broad support to governments during the Hawke-Keating-Howard reform age. They constitute the test the paper will apply to the Abbott Government.

Aware of the pitfalls of power, the paper never delivers unqualified support. It signalled its dissatisfaction with the Fraser era, the Hawke/Keating era and the Howard era before these governments fell in the hope of securing democratic renewal. Mitchell described this process: “We judged the Howard pork barrelling of the electorate with the same eye we used to judge the service delivery failures and anti-reform blundering of the Rudd and Gillard governments. And whether standing up to Howard over the AWB and Dr Haneef, Rudd over pink batts and the BER or Gillard over the AWU slush fund stories, I think we have been courageous.”

The paper has always been prepared to back leaders who take courageous decisions: Howard on tax reform and industrial relation reform; Hawke on Australia’s commitment to the first Gulf War; Keating on his push to the republic; Rudd on his national apology to the Stolen Generation.

Basic to the paper’s identity has been its striving to see the world as it exists. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its reporting of indigenous issues and its support for both symbolic and practical actions. “I have deliberately driven the coverage away from white guilt to the central issues surrounding disadvantage, potential solutions and new leadership in the Cape, the NT, the Pit lands and the Kimberley,” Mitchell said.

A feature of The Australian has been its tradition of strong editors, sometimes leading to fiery departures. Indeed, the paper could not tolerate weak editorship. That would be foreign to its aspiration to set the national agenda. Pivotal to its endurance has been the support of the company’s Australian chief executives, above all Ken Cowley, without whose leadership, dedication and support the paper could not have survived, let alone thrived.

In a country plagued by the tyranny of distance and ingrained provincialism, the notion of a national paper in 1964 was seen as technologically improbable and financially dangerous. Initially, Murdoch did not have deep pockets. The losses began from the first week. In the end, the financial strength of the company via its TV licences carried the paper through difficult early years.

The Australian’s impact on the media was immediate and far-reaching. Murdoch said: “What motivated me to finally doing it was frustration at what was happening; the papers hadn’t changed for years, papers like The Melbourne Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday only had four or five pages of news before their pages of classifieds. And I’ve got to say this for them. I think overnight everybody changed. News coverage got a lot better.”

The Australian has been a unique project in collaboration: a visionary proprietor who launched the paper and its mission, Australian-based chief executives dedicated to the cause, aggressive editors who felt sufficiently confident to reinvigorate the mission and dedicated journalists, artists and photographers.

How long will it last? As a brand it will last forever, or at least as long as Australia lasts. That’s official.