Our Media Glass House teams have previously noted the manner in which News Crap Australia’s outlets and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton are working hand in glove in his or their campaign to promote the adoption of nuclear power.
Dutton’s efforts are a blatant example of right-wing wedge politics, so it’s also an ideal cause for the Murdoch media to embrace or sponsor.
Dutton is trying to disown renewable power options by throwing red meat at his supporters – and those in the National Party – who don’t accept that climate change is actually real by putting “zero emissions” nuclear power on the national agenda as a supposedly climate friendly alternative.
Recently their combined efforts to spruik nuke and condemn federal Labor for not doing so have been remarkably transparent.
The Opposition Leader’s reply to the federal budget gave a mention to nuclear power which resulted in a front-page lead in the next day’s national broadshit The Australian and eerily similar front page pointers in Murdoch’s Adelaide and Melbourne turdbloids. (below)
Our MGH teams always stand back in awe when they observe such identical treatment of a story by what we are incessantly told are independent editors.
Brisbane’s Courier-Mail joined its interstate sister papers in giving a big play inside to Dutton’s (or Murdoch’s) nuclear campaign. (below)
Just last Friday Murdoch turdbloids carried an eight-page advertorial liftout ostensibly built around the multi-multi-billion-possibly-trillion-dollar deal to buy new nuclear submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. (below)
Admittedly those advertisers paying for the publication would have a say in its content, but no doubt News Crap Australia’s advertorial experts had a hand in the heavy pro-nuclear messaging that was evident from its front page and in stories inside. (below)
Also on Friday one of Dutton’s frontbenchers, Queensland LNP MP Ted O’Brien, who is heading a Coalition committee investigating the possibility of Australia adopting nuclear power (we suspect the recommendations were written before his work started) suddenly appeared on the op-ed pages of the Sydney turdbloid, The Daily Telegraph. (below)
More on Mr O’Brien later. But also out of the blue on Friday was an op-ed in The Australian on the same day by noted pro-nuclear industry advocate Tony Grey plugging so-called small modular nuclear reactors. (below)
If you need convincing that there is some sort of organised editorial campaign to soften up Australians for going nuclear, consider stories by News Crap Australia’s resident political novelist and Liberal Party spokesperson James Morrow.
On Tuesday Morrow had a story in the Daily Tele having a go at Labor and ridiculing the party’s climate change frontbencher Chris Bowen in particular basically for not being fully behind nuclear power. It ran big on page 5 and was backed by an editorial no less. (below)
It was based on comments by the former CEO of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Dr Adrian Paterson, whom Morrow told readers had been “giving evidence before hearings on whether Australia’s nuclear ban should be lifted”.
But then, oddly, on Friday there appeared in two Murdoch turdbloids, The Advertiser in Adelaide and the Daily Tele another story penned by Morrow based entirely on a letter sent to PM Anthony Albanese by the same Dr Paterson. (below)
The story in The Daily Tele was even backed up in the Tele by an op-ed by Dr Paterson. (below)
But wait, what’s that on the same page. It’s the op-ed by Ted O’Brien mentioned above.
It turns out the “hearings on whether Australia’s nuclear ban should be lifted” at which Dr Paterson appeared and featured in Morrow’s stories are hearings by the politically partisan committee of Liberal and National Party MPs established by Peter Dutton last August to investigate the use of nuclear energy and chaired by Ted O’Brien.
Stay tuned as the Dutton/Murdoch pro-nuclear campaign rolls on.
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