Labor hasn’t commented on the prime minister’s reported meeting with Lachlan Murdoch. But if it has met with the News Corp billionaire, why is the government dealing with such a company?
So we can take it as a “yes” that Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Penny Wong, as reported by Nine newspapers last week, met with Lachlan Murdoch and News Corp executives on Wednesday. While the office of Communications Minister Michelle Rowland was happy to confirm her non-participation, all we got from the prime minister, deputy prime minister and foreign minister was stony silence — despite repeated efforts to draw an answer.
Not getting an answer from the PMO is of course something we at Crikey are used to — we were persona non grata with Scott Morrison’s office as well, so maybe the old email filters and phone blocks are still in place. But the general silence is more interesting for what it says about Labor’s embarrassment about dealing with a company committed to supporting the Coalition at every turn — and which remains deeply antagonistic to even the unambitious climate action agenda Labor is pursuing.
As we noted last week, we don’t exactly know the purpose of the meeting, so Labor partisans can hold out hope it was some unprecedented laying down of the law from a Labor PM to the Murdochs. The rest of us, more cynical and jaded perhaps, can suspect that in new boss Albanese, we have someone with some traits in common with the old boss Scott Morrison — in particular, a hostility to transparency about which special interests may seek to influence policymakers and what deals might be being done to facilitate that.
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