RUPERT MURDOCH founded The Australian in 1964 as a bold statement of his belief that this country needed a quality national daily newspaper. His action was based on a nation-building vision that he shared with the leader of the Country Party, John McEwen, who deeply influenced him at that time.

For twenty years, The Australian lost money, a strange anomaly in the life of its ruthlessly commercial owner. In a 1994 address to the free-market thinktank, the Centre for Independent Studies, Murdoch mentioned these losses but argued that some things were more important than short-term profits - ideas in society. He went on to quote John Maynard Keynes's famous lines about the significance of political and philosophical ideas to men who regarded themselves as supremely practical. In the media business, 'we are all ruled by ideas', Murdoch added.

Most Murdoch critics see him as a man of crude power interested largely in profits. This significantly underestimates him. He is a man of ideas, and his tenacity with The Australian meant that throughout the 1970s and 1980s it had a major ideological impact on the national agenda. It became the most consistent populariser of hardline free-market economics. Today it is the most important outlet for the culture war being waged by the intellectual right.

One critic who once underestimated Murdoch was Keith Windschuttle. He did so in his book The Media (1984), where he wrote: 'As a publisher, [Murdoch's] track record deserves to be seen as mediocre, the simple reworking of outdated formats and, where this has failed, the aping of others.' Windschuttle must surely have reason to change his mind. The Australian has been the main vehicle for putting his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) on the national cultural and political agenda. This was done through news stories and supportive articles that, while they were not mere boosterism, performed what media theorists call 'agenda setting'. They don't tell readers what to think, but they do tell them what to think about. They confer significance. They create a buzz.

But well before his book's publication, Windschuttle was a celebrity to the neo-cons at The Australian. He had written an article 'exposing' John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) in the US culture war journal New Criterion. Bernard Lane reported this, in an article of 1200 words. But why? There are, after all, many events and opinions aired in wider society on any given day, but few end up in print. The explanation is that, in the eyes of The Australian, Windschuttle had reached the status of celebrity intellectual. Celebrities are people whose most ordinary action is regarded as newsworthy. Nowhere else in the media would the mere fact of his dissident opinion on a sixty-year-old American novel be regarded as newsworthy.

On and after publication, The Australian was the main vehicle for the kind of promotion so important for success. It covered the launch, and a sympathetic personal profile followed. Soon The Australian's columnists and conserv-ative contributors swung into support mode. The Australian was Windschuttle's outlet of choice for responding to his critics. The newspaper smote his detractors, among them, Robert Manne. In December 2002 The Australian recycled a long and critical profile of Manne, previously published in the Courier Mail. It was a churlish act of Goliath against David.

Manne's criticism of The Australian's role again stung it to respond last September. 'The Australian itself has been depicted by Professor Manne … as a committed player in this history war, when all we have really done is provide generous space to all views.' Some might quibble with that claim to neutrality, particularly after the critical profile of Manne. But its defensiveness really is disingenuous. To judge whether The Australian is an ideologically committed player in politics and intellectual life, it is useful to examine the political culture that News Corporation promotes both internally and externally. On this issue, the political and philosophical ideas of its CEO are crucial.

Rupert Murdoch describes himself as a libertarian. Once a term for an anarchic subset of the left, liber- tarianism is today the main ideology of the political and corporate élites of the New Capitalism. Libertarianism, Murdoch told his biographer William Shawcross, meant 'as much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible'. This kind of corporate libertarianism is a key component of US neo-conservatism, to which Murdoch is committed.

He expresses this in a number of ways. In 1997 he joined the board of a Washington-based libertarian thinktank, the Cato Institute, whose newsletter quoted a speech in which he pledged to fight for competition and to oppose monopolies everywhere (except in Australia, presumably, where he has monopolistic press holdings). But Murdoch is more than a figurehead. He supports neo-conservatism in another, much more practical way: he funds it. In 1995 Murdoch's News America outlaid $3 million to start the Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative magazine. The founding editor and publisher was William Kristol, an influential Republican strategist who was chief of staff to Vice-President Dan Quayle. John Podhoretz, a conservative journalist, was the deputy editor. The opinion editor was David Tell, a speechwriter in the Bush Senior and Reagan administrations. The Weekly Standard has quickly created a role for itself as an influential journal of opinion in George W. Bush's Washington. Articles by its journalists and other culture warriors appear regularly in The Australian's op-ed page, along with material sourced to the Cato Institute.

The Weekly Standard, like its allies in the Bush administration, was one of the boosters for the invasion of Iraq. But whereas the Standard packs a punch with the pundits, the real muscle in media politics comes from television. Here, Murdoch's commitment to neo-conservatism is in the shape of a string of television stations, Fox News, Fox Sport and Fox Broadcasting. Murdoch's motive for founding the Fox News component of his Fox network was strongly political. In 1996, as he moved to found Fox News, he described CNN as too 'liberal' and moving 'further and further to the left'. His dispute with Ted Turner, who founded CNN, is legendary. To run Fox News, Murdoch chose Roger Ailes, a Repub- lican strategist for Presidents Nixon, Reagan and George Bush Senior. During the 2003 Iraq war, commentators pointed to the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the top left-hand corner of the Fox news feed, to advertisements 'saluting our brave and courageous' soldiers, and to references to 'us' and 'them' in the reporting. A political journalist on The Australian, Matt Price, referred to Fox this way: 'This is war as a mix of sport and soft porn. Spectacular graphics see a soaring Stealth bomber morph into an American eagle. There is only one side in this desert contest, the US of A.' Chat programmes on Fox News also provide opportunities for a wider neo-conservative network, including writers from The Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and a bevy of Republican ideologues, advisers and speechwriters.

The notorious right-wing slant of Murdoch's Fox News has even become the subject of popular satire. Recently, Matt Groening, the creator of the popular satirical cartoon series The Simpsons, claimed that Fox News had threatened to sue The Simpsons because of its parody of Fox News. This showed a rolling subscript on the bottom of the screen with news headlines such as 'Do Democrats cause cancer?' and 'Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple'. The Simpsons is broadcast on Fox Entertainment (and shown locally on the Ten network), and it is thought that the threats came to nothing partly because it would have involved one Fox outlet suing another. Groening told National Public Radio: 'But now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers.' Yeah, right.

Perhaps the best description of Murdoch's politics comes from one of his former editors. In 1983 Murdoch appointed Andrew Neil as editor of the Sunday Times. In his account of those days, Full Disclosure (1996), Neil said: 'Rupert expects his papers to stand broadly for what he believes: a combination of right-wing Republicanism from America mixed with undiluted Thatcherism from Britain … the resulting potage is a radical-right dose of freemarket economics, the social agenda of the Christian Moral Majority and hard-line conservative views on subjects like drugs, abortion, law and order and defence.'

Today, The Australian employs some of the best journalists in Australia. Its neo-conservative political line comes largely from its columnists, its leaders, its invited contributors and a handful of deeply ideological staffers. Paul Kelly, who did much to revitalise and transform The Australian into a readable newspaper, acknowledged an earlier ideol-ogical bias in his response to a parliamentary inquiry in 1991. Questioned by an MP about the newspaper's 'right-wing bias', he responded diplomatically: '[I]t is an obvious point to make that over quite a long period of time, The Australian has established itself in the market place as a newspaper that strongly supports economic libertarianism […] and it is certainly true that a number of commentators, some employed by the paper and others who are outside contributors, might reflect those sorts of ideas.'

To understand this earlier ideological bias and its rela- tion to the present culture war being waged by the right through Murdoch's newspapers, one has to go back some twenty years to the rise of what was then called the New Right.

The pivotal moment was the defeat of the Fraser government at the 1983 federal election. This precipitated a crisis in the defeated Liberal and National Parties. Over the next five years, the minority 'dries' became the dominant force within conservative ranks, echoing Margaret Thatcher's victory within the Conservative Party. Political and philosophical ideas were central to The Australian during this period. For example, it pinpointed the problem on the Liberal side as a lack of a 'clear-cut ideological position' and a failure 'to argue their basic philosophical concepts' (6 July 1983).

As the 1980s progressed, these views synchronised with those of the dry wing within the Liberal Party, and the newspaper supported its candidate for leadership, John Howard. It was also one of the first significant voices to call for large-scale privatisation (23 July 1985). This was the subject of several news stories, including one about the visit of the founder of the Adam Smith Institute. During this period, The Australian was by no means the only publication supporting economic rationalism. It was, however, the most enthusiastic and gave columns to many supporters of the New Right, covering the activities of the thinktanks in its news pages and campaigning on key issues.

In a speech to the Institute of Directors in 1983, the editor of The Australian, Les Hollings, called for more business support for conservative thinktanks 'which do a good job in promoting the system we all believe in'. Hollings's role in the shaping of the ideological agenda of The Australian in the 1970s and 1980s is crucial. Unusually for an editor, he took part in many public events and participated in party political debate. After he left The Australian, he was appointed deputy chairman of the conservative Sydney Institute in 1989.

Under Hollings, The Australian gave favourable coverage to the oldest Australian thinktank, the Institute of Public Affairs. From the late 1970s it had undergone a conversion from old-style conservatism to become a key ally of the 'dries' in the Liberal Party struggles of the 1980s. In late 1982 The Australian carried several news stories on the IPA's wage policy, from speakers such as Dame Leonie Kramer. In 1983 it reported IPA statements about the privatisation of the national phone company, rises in government charges and opposition to a Labor plan to increase the size of parliament. In January and March 1984 several news items generously covered the IPA's calls for tax reform, accomp-anied by editorials praising them, and in June 1984 it published more news items that were largely advertisements for an IPA forum on tax.

Such favoured treatment was perhaps explained by the personal support of Hollings, who addressed an IPA forum where he attacked Australia's wage-fixing system: 'What people who want to change this system must do is to show as forcibly as possible that it is an immoral system, it is a heartless system and it is downright un-Australian,' he said. In the struggle for a 'flexible Australia', he pledged that, 'The Australian will do its part in promoting a sense of national identity and purpose so essential in preparing the ground for dreams to be realised'. Rarely has an editor been so publicly ideologically committed in modern times.

Hollings was not alone in his personal identification with the thinktank. A number of prominent journalists on The Australian contributed regularly to the IPA Review. One was its Washington correspondent, Peter Samuel, who wrote many enthusiastic articles on Reaganite policies in the 1980s. Samuel's involvement in the early years of neo-liberalism has been noted by Professor Marian Sawer in her early study of the New Right. Samuel was associated with the Foundation for Economic Education and was a member of the Board of Advisers of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) in 1979. He contributed to an early CIS pamphlet, 'Wage-Price Control: Myth and Reality'.

The CIS, founded in 1976, was modelled on the London-based Institute for Economic Affairs, a key policy contributor to the strand of conservatism that Thatcher adopted. CIS founder Greg Lindsay was the subject of a sympathetic profile in The Australian at a time when the new centre had almost no public presence that would normally justify such an article (22 December 1980). Later, CIS was consistently praised in editorials. From then until now, its policy statements have been treated reverentially by The Australian.

Another journalist who contributed to the thinktanks was current foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, who addressed an IPA forum on education in April 1985 and wrote for the IPA Review and for Quadrant magazine. Some of his notable contributions constitute the real beginnings of the 'culture war' in Australia. One famous alarmist piece damned left-liberal bias in education ('The Lies They Teach Our Children', January 1985). Sheridan also contributed to the activities of the Centre for Independent Studies. In The Australian, he promoted the CIS with laudatory articles such as 'Think Tanks Fire Away with Ideas' (16 March 1985) and 'Time for the Right to Unite' (12-13 July 1986). Few other prominent journalists display such overt ideological bias. The culture war was also waged by the direct republication of articles from the IPA Review, such as a 1985 piece by Ken Baker on the themes of the forthcoming Bicentennial, which, he argued, reflected 'special interest groups', especially the trade union movement.

The heart of The Australian's ideological intervention has always been its columnists and its invited con- tributors. Perhaps most significant for us today was the conduit for the ideas and the debate among American neo-conservatives. This came after Murdoch's entry into the US newspaper market and especially his purchase of the New York Post, which meant that The Australian began publishing articles by Norman Podhoretz, editor of the right-wing Commentary magazine (which itself was partially funded by Murdoch, according to Henry Kissinger). Podhoretz's column was syndicated through the New York Post and a number of Murdoch publications. Another American neo-conservative columnist was Irving Kristol. Their sons helped found Murdoch's Weekly Standard in 1995. Local columnists were notable for their boosterism of the burgeoning thinktanks. The activities of the CIS, for example, were regularly reported by two prominent columnists of the New Right, both former Liberal MPs: John Hyde and Bert Kelly. Shortly after his defeat at the 1983 elections, Hyde had set up a personal thinktank, the Australian Institute for Public Policy, whose statements were regularly covered by The Australian. Hyde protested against attacks on the New Right, including one from Brian Powell from the Chamber of Manufactures, who had described it as 'fascist'. Incredibly, Hyde argued that the New Right was 'the real human rights movement of this century'.

Hyde's mentor, Bert Kelly ('The Modest Member'), was the doyen of free-market advocates, having fought a lonely battle within the Liberal Party since the early 1960s. He used his column to promote, among other things, the 1986 visit of Lord Harris, president of the Institute for Economic Affairs, which famously influenced Thatcher.

By the mid-1980s these columnists had been joined by many others who consistently articulated a New Right political and social agenda reflecting a uniformity of view quite different from the spread of political positions among columnists on other quality dailies. These columnists included Maxwell Newton, a free-market economist who had been the founding editor of The Australian and who later wrote a Friedmanite critique of the US Federal Reserve. In late 1984 The Australian introduced a new columnist, Peter Shack, a Liberal frontbencher, a 'dry' and someone it described as 'a possible future leader'. His weekend column joined that of regular Liberal columnist Fred Chaney. Political scientist Katherine West was another columnist in the mid-1980s, following a period working for Andrew Peacock after his election as Liberal leader in 1983. West held some of the most extreme populist views, such as the abolition of the dole. In 1985 she called for a new party of the right.

The mid-1980s also saw the publication of a regular column by a key right-wing figure in the education field, Professor Lauchlan Chipman, who still occasionally contributes today. His views on declining educational standards and the imposition of left-wing curriculum were regularly reported and supported in editorials. Another conservative academic, Geoffrey Blainey, also joined the newspaper as columnist, damning, among other things, the movement for Aboriginal land rights. By 1987 Gerard Henderson, who had recently been an adviser to John Howard, was also writing a column in The Australian. Henderson, who had coined the popular New Right term 'the industrial relations club' was at that time running the Sydney branch of the Institute of Public Affairs.

Dissenting voices were few at The Australian, apart from occasional columns by Labor MPs such as Gary Punch, and the left-liberal Phillip Adams's long-standing weekly column.

Thus, throughout the 1980s, The Australian was a parti- san and player in the offensive by the reborn right. At a dinner celebrating The Australian's twenty-first birthday, editor-in-chief Les Hollings noted: 'On big government, the tragedy is that we all know what has to happen. We all believe in smaller government and lower taxes. We know it cannot be achieved without some pain when those who can look after themselves and the members of their own families are weaned off government support.' Surprisingly for the editor of a major newspaper, in 1985 Les Hollings personally participated in a Liberal Party sponsored conference. His own newspaper reported the conference and his urging that 'the labour market should be deregulated to complement moves in other sectors'.

By 1986 the ascendancy of the New Right within the Liberal Party was nearly complete. The key event that sealed the fate of the 'wets' was their loss in opposing a new, more aggressive industrial relations policy, whose elements the newspaper had supported for many years. Not surprisingly, a leaked 1986 strategy document from the Liberal Party Secretariat discussing potential supporters for this new hardline Liberal industrial relations policy singled out columnists such as John Hyde, Bert Kelly and Des Keegan, as well as Hollings, as potential supporters.

Another campaign for the New Right in the mid-1980s was Aboriginal land rights. This was strongly taken up by The Australian, and on assessment of its coverage proved revealing. In 1983 the newspaper had published an article, 'Aborigines Lay Claim to All of Western Australia', which brought censure from the Australian Press Council for errors and omissions of important facts. In August 1985 it had reported several news stories on the issue that earned it further reprimands from the Press Council. On August 28, The Australian published a story on a leaked government poll under the headline 'Few Support Aboriginal Land Rights'. But the poll results were not clear, said the Press Council. Eighteen per cent were strongly in favour and twenty-four per cent were strongly opposed, but fifty-two per cent 'tended to opposition or were in favour with reservations'. The Council commented: 'the striking result was that the majority of Australians did not have strong views one way or another.'

The day after the poll results, the paper published a map of Australia with large areas blacked out, with a headline 'Land Right to Cover 25% of Country'. This headline, the one on the poll and another were 'misleading' and 'consistently reflected the least favourable interpretation of the subsequent articles from an Aboriginal standpoint', the Press Council said, although it dismissed the complaint that they jointly constituted racist matter. Later that year, after a ceremony in which Uluru was handed over to its traditional owners, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that 'an executive of The Australian had asked News Ltd photographers to be sure to get photos of "abos lying around drunk with flagons in sight of the rock"'.

Hostility to land rights was shared by those who contro-lled the publishing company. At the annual general meeting of News Ltd in November, its chairman, Richard Searby, a childhood friend of Murdoch's, attacked 'ever-increasing legislation [which] closes off Aboriginal land, parks, wildernesses - vast tracts of the Australian countryside - from use'. News Ltd owned several prime merino stud properties. By early 1986 it was described as the biggest vendor of stud merino rams in Australia. Today the newspaper's columnists and contributors continue to wage their one-sided culture war against what they call the left, albeit in a more sophisticated way. In the 1980s The Australian called for a world ruled by markets. We now live in that more selfish and less egalitarian world. But throughout this upheaval, in which The Australian played such a significant role, there was a striking paradox: if the newspaper itself had been judged by strict market criteria, it would have folded within a year of its birth.

In the end, then, Rupert Murdoch scored an own goal for the left. His tenacity with his flagship newspaper demonstrated that some things are worth doing for their intrinsic value, regardless of whether they are inefficient or not commercially viable when merely left to the market to judge. The newspaper allowed Murdoch to project his changing political views on the nation, and the nation in turn was changed.