Psst! Forget the grassy knoll and the truth about 9/11, here's the great Guthrie conspiracy

BRUCE Guthrie in The Sunday Age yesterday:

Budgets are pretty dull affairs for mass-market tabloids. So it's not entirely surprising the country's biggest-selling dailies would seek to portray it as a heartless document that disadvantaged families, even those earning $150,000 a year. That's one explanation for the approach taken by the News Limited papers. The other is much more politically significant: that Rupert Murdoch has let it be known within his organisation that Australia needs change in Canberra and his editors were simply doing his bidding. Certainly there's a growing paranoia within Labor circles and elsewhere that the Murdoch press is against them and there's little or nothing that can be done to change that. [It's] a fight most politicians want to avoid. Not Bob Brown though, it seems. The Greens leader last week took aim at the Murdoch press, in particular The Australian. Brown and other conspiracy theorists might have a point, particularly when they consider this: just days before the overwhelmingly negative coverage of the budget by News outlets, Murdoch and his most senior Australian editors and columnists gathered in California for one of his semi-regular confabs on the state of his media business. If the conspiracy theorists are right, it would have been here or at a local resort he sometimes uses for such conferences that the word went out: it's Tony's time now. It certainly wouldn't have been a direction. That's not Murdoch's style. It would more likely have been an observation expressed by him or a lieutenant during or after dinner or at a coffee break between sessions. Of course, it would be open to an editor to ignore the boss's preferences, but as I discovered, that can sometimes come at a cost.

Did someone forget to tell The Australian ? Our editorial of May 12:

MR Swan gets full marks for starting to scale back middle-class welfare, a cause The Australian has been fighting since the 1980s. However, Mr Swan stops half way. For too long, governments on both sides of politics have encouraged the entitlement mentality and discouraged people from looking after themselves.

And this? The Australian editorialises last Thursday:

THE Australian supports a market-based mechanism for pricing carbon because it ensures CO2 is abated at the cheapest possible cost and encourages technological innovation to develop increasingly efficient abatement, energy production and energy use. The logic of this approach is so compelling that politicians as diverse as John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and Ms Gillard found it impossible to resist. The odd man out is Tony Abbott. By thumbing his nose at the market approach, he almost guarantees his carbon abatement will cost more per tonne than under an emissions trading scheme or carbon tax. And it involves picking winning projects, a process fraught with the risk of costly mistakes.

Meanwhile, Tony is in big trouble in ABC land . . . hypothetically. ABC1's Insiders yesterday:

MARK Kenny [of the News Limited owned The Advertiser in Adelaide but possibly not in on the great Guthrie conspiracy?]: IF you scroll forward say, 12 or 18 months from now, and assuming the government does get the carbon tax in, and assuming the sky doesn't fall in, and the government can then point to having actually done something, something the government's struggling with at the moment.

Cassidy: And the polls improve.

Kenny: And the polls have therefore improved for the government a bit. I know there's a lot of "ifs" there.

Cassidy: Well put it this way. I think that Julia Gillard at the moment can withstand being six, eight points behind in the polls. If Tony Abbott was six or eight points behind in the polls how do you think he'd be travelling?

Niki Savva [of The Australian]: But he's not.

Cassidy: No, no. But I'm putting that hypothetical case. I think when you're talking about who is most vulnerable I think Julia Gillard can withstand a hit in the polls but I don't think at the moment Tony Abbott could.