Bill Shorten says he rebuffed invitation to meet Rupert Murdoch in US
Bill Shorten has reportedly rejected an invitation from Rupert Murdoch to meet the media tycoon, promising to deal with News Corp through its Australian management.
The comments to ABC’s 7:30 on the Labor leader’s tour of Queensland last week signals that Shorten will break with a tradition of Australian political leaders courting Murdoch’s favour, as former Labor leader Kevin Rudd did before his 2007 election victory.
After a standing invitation from Murdoch to meet in New York, Shorten reportedly politely told the Australianborn media proprietor that it would not be necessary.
“News Limited and Mr Murdoch shouldn’t take that as any view on him in particular,” Shorten said.
“I’ll deal with their local management just as I deal with the local management of the ABC.
“But my real conversation is not with the rich and powerful in this country.”
The comments mark a cooling relationship between Labor and News Corp. Launching the second volume of his autobiography in October, Rudd accused Murdoch of prosecuting a “direct agenda” through his newspapers, which he says toppled Rudd himself and then Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister.
Shorten has rejected Rudd’s call for a royal commission into News Corp’s influence, telling ABC’s 7.30 that ownership of newspapers is “not something I can change or affect”.
“I worry about the things I can change and I don’t worry about the things I can’t change,” he said.
“Some elements of the media are very aggressive critics of Labor but I’m not going to whinge about that.
“When you’re on the Labor side, the working people’s side, you don’t own the big banks, you don’t own the big private health insurers and you don’t own the big media, so that’s sort of a fact of life.”
Before losing the leadership in August, Turnbull blamed “an insurgency” in his own party and “outside forces in the media” as the architects of his demise, with sources close to Turnbull later claiming Kerry Stokes warned him Murdoch and News Corp were intent on removing him from power. Stokes disputed that account.
In August the deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek told ABC Radio that “clearly News Limited and some other media organisations have been on the campaign to get rid of Malcolm Turnbull or frankly anyone who wants to do anything about climate change at all”.
“I don’t think News Limited’s campaigning for a Labor win, let’s put it that way, but does it influence our policies? No.”
ALP president Wayne Swan has accused the “rightwing press” of supporting widening inequality, framing unions as “inherently corrupt” and helping mining companies campaign against higher taxes.
In September the shadow housing minister, Doug Cameron, said the Australian newspaper was “an absolute disgrace”, accusing the newspaper of “pushing an agenda from Rupert Murdoch”.
“If Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like the prime minister they turn all their guns on that prime minister whether its Labor or Liberal and I just think it’s a real problem for democracy,” he told ABC Radio.
Before the 2016 election, Murdoch’s stable of capital city newspapers uniformly endorsed Turnbull, arguing Shorten’s agenda of “high spending” should be rejected.
Only Fairfax Media’s the Sunday Age and Guardian Australia did not endorse the Coalition before that contest.