In yet a further example of the intertwined and unhealthy relationship between the corporate media and the Federal Government in Australia, goons from Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal Party have threatened members of Canberra’s Press Gallery to not provide media coverage of The New Liberals Party ahead of the upcoming federal election, writes the party’s leader Victor Kline.
Members of the Canberra Press Gallery have been quietly told by the Prime Minister’s Office that if they give The New Liberals (TNL) any air, they can expect to receive no cooperation from Ministers or their staff, and may even find themselves barred from Cabinet room briefings. This is what I was told by an inside informant just a few days ago.
I have little doubt it is true, and in all honesty the leak didn’t come as a surprise to me. Over 12 months ago, on two separate occasions, guests on Peta Credlin’s program, when starting to talk about us, were abruptly halted by her with the word: “Stop! Don’t give them any air.”
And ever since then, no matter what we do, despite significant interest from independent media, social media, and podcasters, the main stream media remain by and large silent.
For example, we announced back in June that we would be working towards launching a private criminal prosecution against the former Attorney General Christian Porter for rape. We have a solicitor, one of Australia’s leading QCs and two former Sex Squad detectives working on the case.
This announcement caused enormous excitement in the alternative media, all of whom reported it. We even had the legal press reporting it in the USA. I was asked on to several high-profile podcasts to talk about it. And social media went insane.
On my own Twitter account, I had several million views of the tweets relating to it in just a few days. But apart from a small mention at the end of a Guardian article on something else, silence from the press gallery.
More recently I announced that the traction for TNL had got so great that I was moving from running for the Senate and would take a tilt at the lower house seat of North Sydney. The old Liberals, by a series of challenges to our very existence, through litigation which they lost, and then the introduction of legislation to try to get us deregistered, which failed, had caused an enormous furore on social media and in the alternative press.
It had caused such a wildfire of word of mouth, that I thought there was a real chance we could do in 18 months what it took the Greens 25 years to do, and win a lower house seat straight off the bat. This of course would be a game changer for Australian politics.
This announcement put the old Liberals in a bit of a spot. A seat which they would normally have spent next to nothing on, because it was a ‘safe’ seat, was no longer safe. So now they would have to decide whether to put money into North Sydney to save the incumbent Trent Zimmerman, and take money away from one or more of the marginal seats they hoped to take off Labor. Or let Trent go and set a horrifying precedent for their future. They were, and are, in a Sophie’s choice situation. Now one would have thought that was a story worth reporting. But from the press gallery there was silence.
TRUE OPINION: Would Scott Morrison let Christian Porter go debating with his daughters?
However shortly after the announcement that I was going to run for North Sydney, an independent also announced her candidature. She was supported by a local group much like the ‘Voices of’ movements. I knew that the old Liberals would not be worried about her. They understand that for an independent to get up, the electorate needs to detest their local member, as they did with Mirabella in Indi and Abbott in Warringah. Or they need to be otherwise angry as Wentworth was when Malcolm Turnbull was dumped.
But Zimmerman is a ‘nice guy’ and will be under no threat from independents. The only threat to him will be from a real liberal party like ours, which offers the electorate the party they feel has been stolen from them by the old Liberals converting themselves into arch conservatives.
Nonetheless both The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald reported the independent’s challenge. In The Age, the journalist, did not mention TNL at all, making it sound like the only challenge to Zimmerman was from the independent. In the Sydney Morning Herald, the journalist said words to the effect that “the LNP will be under threat in North Sydney from an independent and from small ‘l’ liberal parties,” which was quite amusing because not only wouldn’t she use our name, but she referred to small ‘l’ liberal parties in the plural, as though somehow that would be protective of any suggestion she might be referring to us.
I tweeted what I was told about the press gallery by my informant, and the tweet received 300,000 views. Hundreds of people tagged their favourite journalist(s), asking them to confirm that they would treat TNL like any other party – that there was no truth to the idea that they were freezing us out. But they received not one response from anyone in the mainstream media, not even from the ABC.
Of course, this is frustrating for us, and makes our job harder, but I don’t think it is merely self-serving to suggest that a muted media is also a very real danger to our democracy.
We entered this race because we were determined to do something about all the other threats to our democracy, the lack of control on donations to parties from corporations who then dictate policy to the governments they have bought, the newspaper concentration into the hands of largely one foreign owner, the coalescence of the two major parties into a duopoly, (what is being called alternative authoritarianism), and corruption within government which is the worst this country has seen since the Rum Rebellion.
Help from a courageous and robust press corps (even just from those not controlled by Rupert Murdoch), which reports on us, good or bad, without fear or favour would be a great help in our struggle.
But we started as a grass roots party, depending on the spread of our message from friend to friend and from neighbour to neighbour, and it seems that is how we will have to do it all the way to the ballot box.
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