Rupert Murdoch is an unequivocally evil person. His company, News Corp, has contributed more than most to Australia’s rightward shift over the last few decades. But News Corp is not the disease - merely a symptom of the disease. The capitalist-run media always will always do everything in its power to promote the interests of its owners and destroy anyone who stands against those interests, whether they’re unions, environmental activists, migrants or indigenous people.

News Corp is far from alone in this. Fairfax - now owned by Nine - has long presented itself as the more sensible, small-l liberal alternative to News Corp. The political climate, as it always does when conservatives are met not with challenge but with appeasement, shifts towards the right. Because of this, Fairfax’s target audience have somehow found themselves on the relative left of the Australian mainstream media landscape.

And just as the ALP’s shift rightward on issues like refugees, climate action and law and order has allowed the Liberals to go even further off the deep end, so too has the more moderate-looking, yet still firmly pro-capital, Age and Sydney Morning Herald created space for News Corp to be as ghoulish as they currently are. The selection by Nine-Fairfax of Peter Costello as chairman makes their true nature very clear. A similar path has, of course, been trodden by other corporate media.

One of the myths most commonly repeated in the last few weeks is that Jacinda Ardern’s success was only made possible by the lack of Murdoch media in New Zealand. But the New Zealand Herald, NZ’s only national paper, with by far the highest circulation in the country, is owned by NZME. And one of the largest shareholders in NZME is none other than News Corp. Murdoch was not absent from the democratic process in New Zealand, simply less effective against a revitalised Labour party who both ran a positive and proactive campaign and extended an olive branch to the Greens .

This combination of strategies has so far been rejected by the Labor party at both state and federal levels in Australia. Victorian Labor did the former in 2018, and for that alone were rewarded with a landslide victory. The latter has proved too difficult for any state Labor party experiencing, for the first time, a genuine electoral challenge from its left. The exception is ACT Labor - who have, partly as a result of this approach, not lost an election to the Liberals this century.

The Labor party has governed Queensland for 25 of the last 30 years, despite the Murdoch papers’ dominance of state media, and at the recent election was able to secure a sizable majority. Instead of celebrating victory, however, senior members of the party have fixated on Jackie Trad’s loss in South Brisbane, trying to attribute the success of Greens candidate Amy MacMahon to a sinister Murdoch plot. The examples set by Labour in NZ and Labor in the ACT suggest that this is wildly unnecessary.

So Kevin Rudd’s proposed Royal Commission into the Murdoch press is aimed at the wrong target. He’s trying to treat the symptom while ignoring the underlying disease. But he’s also using the wrong medicine.

Think of the Royal Commissions we’ve had just this last couple of decades. We’ve had commissions into aged care, disability, banking, child sexual abuse and the building and construction industry. Australia has not lacked for Royal Commissions, and a demand for an RC into a particular topic is an easy way for a politician to demonstrate that they care about the issue.

But it’s an easy way because an RC doesn’t actually have to do anything. Think back to all those RCs and ask - what actually changed? What laws were rewritten, which businesses were shut down, which dodgy operators were arrested? What do we have to show for all of the political capital spent on these RCs but a couple of reports, already gathering dust?

There’s only a single recent RC I can come up with that actually produced outcomes, in the forms of government bills passed to address the findings of the Commission. It was, of course, the RC which found the least about its target - the Abbott government’s 2014 Royal Commission into Trade Union Government and Corruption. This inverse relationship is not a coincidence. The announcement of the other RCs was a strategy to delay action on the obvious problems, visible to the public, in the areas they investigated. The announcement of Abbott’s RC was simply the Coalition’s excuse for attacks on their ancient enemy.

This brings us to Rudd himself. Over the last few years, Rudd has embarked on a crusade of media appearances and opinion-piece authorship, defending the legacy of his time in power. His pieces all have a certain petulance to them, as if he can’t figure out why everyone doesn’t recognise his genius. It may even be News Corp’s reluctance to publish him that’s compelled him to lash out - because before he lost power, Rudd was happy to work with the Murdoch press whenever it suited him.

Kevin Rudd is, in fact, the only ALP leader to be backed by any of the major News Corp papers at a federal election in Australia, having been endorsed on the front page of not only the Australian but also the Courier Mail and Daily Telegraph. Only Melbourne’s Herald Sun still backed the Coalition. Rudd was happy to work with News Corp, particularly the Australian, during his successful 2006 challenge to Kim Beazley for the leadership of the Labor Party, and used them to engage in a campaign of leaks against Julia Gillard leading up to 2013. His campaign to reclaim the leadership of the ALP was capped off by an appearance on the cover of the Courier Mail, the day after the successful spill, with the headline reading “WE RULE”.

The Prime Minister of Australia, far more than anyone else, is uniquely placed to pass laws that might actually mitigate the power Murdoch and News Corp hold in Australia. There is no reason we need an RC to achieve this. Rudd, knowing how much his successful election campaign had relied on News Corp and fearing what they could do if they turned on him, took no such action. As such, his recent demands come off as just a tiny bit self-serving.

All that said, I won’t be upset if this vanity-project petition succeeds and we do actually get a Royal Commission into Murdoch and News Corp. Perhaps it’s even inevitable, given that we so often get these commissions in lieu of real action. If it does happen, I can’t wait to see false equivalences drawn between News Corp’s support for the hard right and The Guardian and Schwartz Media’s support for the centre-left by people who would like to convince the public that these two things are just as bad.

But we can’t expect a RC to undo Murdoch’s toxic influence over Australian media and our political sphere - certainly not in a way which ensures that nobody else will step in to fill Murdoch’s shoes. In promising that it will, Rudd’s fooling no-one but himself.

Simon Burnett is a Naarm/Melbourne based teacher, unionist and activist.

Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash