Is it a Coalition, or a real estate, media monopoly?

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Via the Coalition’s apologist, The Australian:

Nine Entertainment chief executive Hugh Marks hosted a $10,000-a-head Liberal Party fundraising event on the set of the network’s Today show, prompting an angry backlash from the company’s newspaper journalists.

Australia’s biggest media union said journalists from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial ­Review raised serious concerns “about the impact on their newspapers’ charter of editorial independence” following the event, which raised $700,000 for the ­Liberal Party.

…“We strongly object to our reputation for independent journalism being compromised by the hosting of party political fundraisers,” said journalists serving on the MEAA union house committees at the three newspapers in a letter to Mr Marks and Nine’s managing director of publishing, Chris Janz.

“The former Fairfax mastheads have a long history of political independence. If this has changed and we are now associated with the Liberal Party, this should be conveyed to staff. Our mastheads have done much to ­expose the corrupting influence of money on politics. It is vitally ­important that we remain independent of the political process.”

There has not been any obvious shift in editorial policy at the metropolitan mastheads since the Nine takeover. That said, these things are usually thin-sliced and it will take time. I expect it will come.

However, the ownership of the Smage is not the key issue. What is is that they long ago lost their editorial independence as they became cross-subsidised by Domain. This has led to editorial policy settings that are highly damaging to Australian living standards.

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Nine is now a fully fledged member of the real estate cartel that runs Australia. This long ago curtailed robust discussion around the role of immigration in the Australian political economy, the resulting distortions of real estate, the warping of policy to service all interests that benefit from both, even to the point of selling out national security.

This is a bipartisan corruption.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.