International:

A reflection on News Limited's abuse of media power in 1997.

A strange calm has returned to Australia since the heady days in the second quarter of 1997 when One Nation and Pauline Hanson were being vilified day after day by Murdoch's editors in the daily press.

In those days reports were pumped out with uncanny regularity across the nation by News Limited. Reports claiming that Pauline Hanson was personally to blame for everything from the race debate to the unemployment problem in upper Woop-Woop.

The reports clearly had one basic objective in mind - to ridicule and alienate Pauline Hanson from the mainstream community.

When the biased, inaccurate reports on her "racist policies" flowed here in Australia our Asian neighbours were fed the same garbage and Hanson became a household name in countries where John Howard was not known. The power of the Murdoch empire in perpetrating these lies and misinformation has been totally ignored by the major political parties who, behind closed doors, nudge-nudge and wink-wink at each other while they smirked about Hanson being done over by the media barons.

While our Asian neighbours believed the garbage, because they accepted what Australian journalists had written in their papers was the truth (after all they should know - shouldn't they?), the Hanson phenomenon gathered pace back home in Australia.

In Asia Australia was suddenly and quite remarkably portrayed as a "racist" country because of the support for Pauline Hanson and back home Australians were told by Murdoch's papers that Ms Hanson's negative image there was damaging our economy and tourism amongst other things. The media's role in spreading the lies across Asia was totally overlooked by those who should know better. The wimps we call politicians.

Now it has got to be understood at this stage that the "racism" issue and its link to Pauline Hanson was a media creation - nothing more, nothing less. The journalists who wrote the unadulterated rubbish should have been called before the Australian Journalists Association (AJA) months ago for breaching their own code of conduct but they never were, because Murdoch has a very strong hold over that too. And why wouldn't he? Very few journalists in Australia do not work for the man described by American media-mogul Ted Turner as being more dictatorial than Adolf Hitler.

Luckily many Australians understood that the Murdoch media had about as much credibility as the President of the flat earth society and the obvious and very public vilification of Pauline Hanson created a following for her One Nation party.

On the other hand many believed what they read - especially in states like Western Australia where she was known as "that woman from Ipswich". Unlike their Queensland counterparts people in Western Australia had little option, because of their isolation, but to believe that trash being churned out by The West Australian newspaper - their only daily day after day.

My mother, a pensioner in a large nursing home, is a case in point.

She refused to talk to me about Pauline Hanson "that woman from Ipswich" who she had told me many months before was racist and was destroying Australia. She told me that all the talk (at that time) in the nursing home was about this topic. She was too embarrassed to mention that her son supported her.

What the media had created was a polarised public - those who supported Hanson and those who hated her. This media inspired polarisation was not what Murdoch had wanted. He had tried, with all his might, to distance her from all mainstream Australians. Somehow this had not happened and by August 1997, at the height of her vilification by his henchmen Pauline Hanson's One Nation support grew to a worrying level.

Worrying for Murdoch because his attack on Hanson had nothing to do with racism or any other negative issue presented by his papers as fact. It was all about the corrupt system currently prevailing in Canberra. A system where the major political parties together with the media barons Packer and Murdoch run the country through their lobbyists and the senior bureaucrats doing their bidding.

It goes without saying that if Hanson was to succeed in getting mainstream Australia a voice this corrupt hold on our democracy would be broken and the open door approach to the select few over and above the many would be under threat.

In what has to be seen as one of the most remarkable and blatant turnarounds in journalism and reporting in Australia Pauline Hanson's One Nation suddenly disappeared from the pages of the News Limited papers.

A lesson had been learnt by Murdoch and his henchmen any publicity is good publicity. The solution? Refuse to cover anything to do with Pauline Hanson's One Nation. Good or bad.

During the last few months we have demonstrated how blatant this new News Limited policy has been used to undermine the ethics of the AJA Code of Ethics.

There is no better reason that I can think of for dramatically diluting the media ownership of Murdoch and Packer. If Australia was able to sell Telstra to the local investor without problem and as Australia compensates farmers for land acquired through native title claim there is a simple solution.

Pass legislation through the Federal Parliament requiring a government controlled sell-off of Murdoch and Packer's interests and limiting the control of any person or group to 10% of any media area.

Packer and Murdoch's media groups can be valued by an independent audit, purchased by the government (we obviously have the cash after all the billions we have poured into Asian currencies) and then re-sold to Australians, just Australian investors.

In conclusion, I sent my mother a copy of Hanson's authorised biography, "Pauline, the Hanson Phenomenon" by Helen Dodd, as a Christmas present. An avid reader she quickly read about a woman the media had failed to represent accurately. The book is now doing the rounds at her nursing home with my mother now talking to me quite freely and openly about "that woman from Ipswich". In fact she is like millions of other Australians now a closet One Nation supporter.

The who's who of the MAI

A conference will be held in a few days time in Dallas Texas by the movers and shakers of the multilateral agreement on investment (MAI).

The story behind the South Korean financial bailout.

Here are some extracts from the Washington Post article Behind the S. Korea Bailout: Speed, Stealth, Consensus :

"As the South Korean economy was careening toward catastrophe a week ago, a top U.S. Treasury official named David Lipton tried to slip unobtrusively into Seoul to negotiate the terms of a new financial rescue package.

"The stakes were enormous. South Korea had become a symbol of an Asian financial crisis that was threatening to widen into a global problem. Its currency was in a free fall, and financial markets in neighbouring Japan were shaky. Seoul had become a test of the ability of international bankers and finance ministers to stanch the bleeding. And as always when the international financial club does its urgent business, secrecy and speed were crucial.

"But when Lipton arrived at Kimpo International Airport last Sunday, the 44-year-old undersecretary of the Treasury was ambushed by a throng of South Korean reporters thirsting for any news about the financial crisis. The next day, newspapers prominently displayed a picture of him in blue jeans and sports shirt, clutching his passport and looking startled. All they got from him, however, was a "no comment" about the reason for his mission.

"By Christmas Day, the world had learned what was behind Lipton's visit -- an emergency $10 billion infusion of cash to avert an imminent default on Seoul's international loans....

"For Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, the crucial issue throughout the South Korean negotiations was maintaining the stability and integrity of the financial markets. Rubin, a former trader with the giant investment banking firm Goldman Sachs & Co., has spent much of his life dealing with financial markets. He believed that half-baked attempts to solve the crisis in South "Korea risked undermining the credibility of the markets themselves.

Rubin and other U.S. officials signed on to the IMF's initial Dec. 3 rescue because they believed it would persuade international banks and global investors to keep money and credit flowing to South Korea. If they did that, most of the $57 billion might not even be needed, Rubin reasoned.

"Rubin cut short a bone-fishing vacation to announce the agreement on Christmas Eve in Washington, grumpily telling a group of reporters that he had spent so much time on the phone the previous day that he had been unable to do any fishing. In Seoul, morning newspapers on Dec. 25 hailed the IMF's "Christmas present" to the nation."

You Say:

Graham Strachan.

Personal trivia, from the global office:

Have a good one.

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