Journalism for sale? Not on my watch

It has been an incredible week for the newspaper business in Australia, and through blood ties, for the New Zealand media also. News International, owned mostly by Rupert Murdoch, is restructuring, with the loss of about 1000 positions, and Fairfax Media, which owns The Press, has had its own ructions with the announcement the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are to go to tabloid format and 1900 jobs are to be axed.

Also in the cocktail of worry for Australian journalists is the fact Western Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has increased her tranche of Fairfax shares to about one in five. Rinehart, who is extremely media shy but apparently a woman of strong Right-wing views, is suspected of buying into Fairfax, not because the company is a great commercial proposition, but because it gives her an opportunity to shape public opinion.

With two or three mates in the hot seats, Rinehart will, critics say, be able to appoint like-minded editors and set editorial direction on a more pro-mining, Right-wing, anti-Green trajectory. Some Fairfax newspapers in Australia have a charter enshrining editorial independence and journalists have asked Rinehart to sign on the dotted line with no great success to date.

Rinehart has no reason to love the media. Just a few months ago Aussie papers delighted in running pages of intimate material about her dysfunctional family, thanks to a court judgment which allowed the media to print material from papers filed in a court action taken by some of Rinehart’s children against her and one of her daughters.

In light of these developments, first of all, as a Fairfax journalist, I want to assure readers that Iwill continue to uphold the highest standards of journalistic integrity. I will stand steadfast against any attempt to change the way I write columns and will not be cowed by fear or fouled by favour. Each week you will get a truly objective and independent view, unswayed by thoughts of losing my job or elevated position within the echelons of The Press newspaper.

Allow me to outline a few of my bedrock editorial positions. I’m not sure I have said much about mining or mining taxes or environmental policies in the past but there are some lines in the sand Iwill not cross.

First of all the carbon tax. People who believe in climate change are in my view victims of alarmist propaganda, put out by a few scaremongering and ambitious academics with the hidden agenda of wanting to destroy capitalism. No-one can say the Earth is warming and even if it is, that it’s the result of hard-working people burning coal and making steel from Western Australian iron ore. Of course the media has bought the climate change baloney hook, line and sinker, mainly because it is full of pinko liberals who wouldn’t know how to drive a dump truck to save themselves.

The mining tax that the Australian Government will impose on the only wealth-creating industry in Australia, is I believe, in all sincerity, an abomination. Here we have an industry creating employment, building infrastructure and wealthproducing plant only to be told the stuff dug from the ground will attract another exorbitant tax to be spent for the good of all Australians.

This is outrageous and simply daylight robbery. Mining already pays more than its fair share. The minerals may belong to all Australians but who is taking the risk and doing the work? Not those doing comfy desk jobs on the eastern seaboard.

Instead of taxing mining more heavily, the Government should be giving the industry tax breaks and owners of mining companies special tax privileges like tax exemptions on the first billion or two earned.

This would properly recognise the completely integral place of mining in the Australian and New Zealand economy. Rinehart may want to look at some of our Southland coal fields and we should welcome her.

On a wider note, rich people need to be respected and revered by society and not continually have their wealth challenged as though they didn’t earn it with the sweat of their brow. I fully support a move to stop themedia printing personal details of rich people. All it achieves is envy and bitterness. The private details of their family lives should be completely out of bounds for the sticky beaks of the prying media.

As for environmental protections and safeguards against mining, letme be blunt. A complete waste of time. Give land to the people who know how to extract wealth from it. What is the use of millions of hectares sitting there drying out under the hot sun when it can be dug up and make people money?

So all I can say in conclusion is: Mrs Rinehart, I ain’t for the buying.