Murdoch hating is Crikey’s core business model. Which, hilariously, makes it just as bad as Murdoch, across some imaginary divide that has little to do with any identifiable value system beyond monkeys throwing poop.
Bernard Keane is so lost in Murdoch hate that he has embraced the most vicious autocracy on earth.
You might find it odd that the US-owned tax dodgers of News Corp have taken a break from their normal business model of undermining Australia’s social cohesion to spruik manufacturing, via its creatively named “Back Australia” campaign. But dig a little deeper and News Corp’s political agenda emerges — and a bizarre kind of circular logic.
The claim that the “hollowing out of domestic production of essential goods in favour of often inferior imports has been a strategic mistake” is a little hard to take from one of the organs that so assiduously promoted neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s. But it aligns News Corp with the right-wing nationalism now being espoused by the company’s candidate for the next Liberal leader, Andrew Hastie, who has called for a return to the era of Australian manufacturing of muscle cars as an alternative to being a nation of “flat white makers”.
Such winner-picking is fundamentally at odds with the Liberal Party’s traditional free market ideology, but completely consistent with MAGA Republicanism’s angry protectionism. Ironically for a company spruiking Made In Australia, News Corp is borrowing its economic ideology — like the conspiracy theories and culture wars it peddles — from its US owners.
News Corp’s campaign urges ordinary Australians — the vast majority of whom ignore the company’s dying newspapers — to “redirect $100 a week from the existing family budget with Australian businesses”. Put another way, News Corp wants Australians, instead of buying the product that is cheapest and best suited to their needs from under-pressure household budgets, to buy more expensive, less suitable, locally made products.
Let’s call it what it is: voluntary inflation. And for what? Fewer than 40,000 new jobs and an additional GDP of $16 billion, News Corp claims, without evidence. However, 40,000 new jobs comprises just 0.25% of the jobs market; some months see far more than 40,000 jobs added anyway.
…We could recite, again, all the reasons why such protectionism — whether in the form of witless voluntary protectionism, or Labor’s Future Made In Australia project, or Trump’s tariffs — is economically harmful and means higher taxes, higher costs and lower productivity for consumers and businesses. We could ask for the umpteenth time where the workers are going to come from to staff the manufacturing nirvana this nostalgia for the 1970s requires. We could note the dismissive misogyny that underpins this obsession with manufacturing.
…Let’s reprise again how the West ended up facing the reality of Chinese dominance of critical minerals and rare earths. Not merely was China prepared to take on the environmentally toxic nature of extracting and processing such minerals when the West wasn’t, but its leadership also recognised that climate change was real and that decarbonisation would have to happen — meaning control of the renewables and storage technologies that enabled decarbonisation would be crucial.
While China was investing in its goal of taking control of those technologies, countries like Australia and the US were claiming climate change didn’t exist or nothing could be done about it — led, of course, by the climate denialists of News Corp, who are still campaigning against net zero.
My god, the necessity to throw turds at Murdoch turns the argument into an impenetrable shitstorm.
To name a few contradictions:
- China is virtuous for rare earth pollution, while Murdoch is evil for climate denial.
- China is virtuous for its “free market” embrace of critical minerals when everybody other than Crikey knows its dominance is down to a Communist quango.
- Manufacturing is misogyny. Come again?
- Yes, buying Australian is a form of protectionism. But rebuilding manufacturing isn’t if it’s done right. By far the best thing we could do is restore our cheap energy advantage via gas market reform. This would end the cost-of-living crisis. Never mentioned at Crikey. Better to blame Murdoch.
- Since when has Chinese manufacturing been high quality? Many business models in developed economies successfully charge a premium for quality local widgets because Chinese output is so consistently crap.
- For that matter, whatever happened to workers’ rights at Crikey? Are we all virtuous only if we grasp the whips of CCP slave drivers ourselves?
The truth of it is that the News Corp vs Crikey false binary is the idiocy. They are as bad as each other. Stuck in vertical market business models that provide succour for the intellectually weak on both sides of an imaginary line.
This kind of makes sense, given the codependent history of Eric Beecher and Rupert Murdoch.
I’m not sure who taught whom!
