Murdoch and the A(bbot) Team

You know how people make the somewhat tongue-in-cheek claim that, as the owner of the largest chunk of Australian media, Rupert Murdoch controls national political policy?

Most of the time that's presented metaphorically, suggesting that Murdoch's right-wing, free-market, there-is-still-money-I-don't-own-and-it-makes-me-angry principles leads his publications to take a certain editorial tone, such as demanding that the nation elect Tony Abbott on the front pages of his papers in the weeks leading up to the last federal election.

However, it turns out that sometimes it's not metaphorical at all, as revealed in one of the more "hold on, what?" moments in Diamond Joe Hockey's authorised biography Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (subtitle: "A story of laffs, loves, and definitely not getting into position for a leadership challenge, that's for damn sure") by ex-News Corp journo Madonna King.

You know Abbott's prized Paid Parental Leave Scheme, the one big new spending programme in a budget filled with millions of insane cuts? The one that no-one in the government actually appears to support and that seems horribly at odds with the whole "b-b-but there's a crisis, because Labor!" rhetoric that informs literally every single other piece of budgetary legislation that's currently being thwarted in the Senate?

Well, according to Diamond Joe, Tony did discuss the plan with his most valued colleagues. Just not the ones in the government.

“[N]either the party room nor the businesses who would pay had been consulted," King writes. “Abbott, however, had conferred with one leading business figure, the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch… The new leader, like many before him, had dinner with Murdoch, where he gave the media mogul a full rundown on the scheme … This fact was unknown to members in the party room, who condemned Abbott’s solo policy-making on such a fundamental issue.”

Joe frames all of this as a moment where he was forced to have a firm but loving conversation with Tony about how policies should be formulated and the two became even closer besties as a result. Which seems to rather gloss over the bit where a Prime Minister of Australia ran his cornerstone policy by Rupert Fucking Murdoch rather than the government.

So rest assured, citizens. The government may not really know what it's doing, but Rupert's probably already given it the thumbs up. And as an American based billionaire media magnate, he obviously knows best.

You can bitch and moan, sure, but these policies are Rupert-approved - and he's quietly confident that your kids don't need access to medical care nearly as much as you seem to think they do.