CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The nightmare that has been the government’s media bargaining code is starting to look like the type of self-sabotage that a Prime Minister only engages in when he wants to dash the political ambitions of a colleague.
This comes as the Federal Government continues to get rinsed down by an uncharacteristically critical NewsCorp, who won’t stop reporting on the growing number of alleged sexual assaults and rape scandals within the Liberal Party.
This bizarre alternative universe where conservative politicians are held to account by Rupert Murdoch is likely due to the fact that the highly influential media dynasty is not happy with Morrison for bungling the media bargaining code laws so badly.
Last week every single news publisher, except for this esteemed Outback Newspaper, was banned from Facebook, as the Government was unable to successfully negotiate a scenario where social media platforms pay money to outdated and technologically illiterate traditional media companies, for no reason other than the fact that they are accelerating their irrelevance.
But it wasn’t the Prime Minister that buggered this up, it was his much more affable and popular Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who was given an impossible task well and truly outside of his ministerial responsibilities, by an embattled Morrison.
The fact that Frydenberg is now the most hated man in the Australian media, and the tech world, as well as amongst social media users – almost seems like a plan.
While he was able to magically negotiate payments from Google to the Nine and Murdoch oligarchs, Frydenberg appears to have had his name heavily tarnished by this clusterfuck – that realistically should have been left with the nameless Communications Minister.
As a well-spoken moderate, Frydenberg looks good to replace a scandal-riddled Morrison when the pile-on crushes him. Just like Turnbull did to Abbott.
Political analysts are starting to note how similar this binfire is to the time when the embattled Prime Minister Abbott gave his factional rival Malcolm Turnbull the extremely unpopular task of downgrading the NBN to a 500 billion dollar web of copper wire – while simultaneously slashing funding to the ABC.
These two hospital passes are so similar that they are both a result of the government doing what Rupert Murdoch told them to do, as both Facebook and the NBN have been seen as threats to the outdated NewsCorp business models of print newspapers and cable television subscriptions.
Turnbull’s hospital pass, however, was not even enough to save Abbott from being ousted. It is not yet known if Frydenberg will save Scott.
MORE TO COME.
