OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott has strongly backed mining magnate Gina Rinehart's increasing investment in Fairfax Media.

''Good on Gina for being prepared to invest in journalism at a difficult time,'' Mr Abbott said. ''It's not a bad thing - it's a good thing.''

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/political-news/abbott-backs-rinehart-bid-20120617-20id9.html#ixzz1yHb8GjYC

One should be concerned... We all agree with Tonicchio that jounalism should preserve a vibrant intellectual culture, but with the ritewing-nuttery controlling the media at full bore, this is likely to decline at warp speed and be a one sided affair... Gina is welcome to own bits of the Fairfax media and to have her 3 seats to plonk her large derriere on the board but SHE HAS TO SIGN and aggree to the independence of the Fairfax journalists who are to a great extend the last of the unbiased bastions in this country — apart from a few at the ABC, who are being flogged — or pushed over hot coals — by the Chadwick team...

Even if she feels she could do better "editorially", she will have to hold her horses... Though she can do an "Uncle Rupe" and only hire people that only agree with her about thrashing the planet...

The nation's economists, commentators and business people got caught with their pants down last week. They'd convinced themselves the economy was weak, but the Bureau of Statistics produced figures showing it was remarkably strong.
It's not the first time they've failed such a reality test. They prefer not to think about such embarrassing, humbling occurrences, but it's important to ask ourselves why we got it so wrong.
The bureau told us real gross domestic product grew by 1.3 per cent in the March quarter and by 4.3 per cent over the year to March. Then it produced labour force figures for May, showing employment has been growing at the rate of 25,000 a month this year, with much of that growth in NSW and Victoria.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/economists-fail-the-reality-test-again-20120610-204bq.html#ixzz1yHfz6jn7

I am worried that the best analyst of the economy, Ross Gittins, will be bowled over or "retired" (Ross may be in "retirement" age? — we've lost Alan Ramsey to retirement a while back) by a feisty Gina-led board... This would be the collapse of reality... So far the Abbott so-touted "incompetent" government of Julia Gillard is producing remarkable figures in a very difficult period of global "recession"... It is easy to make fun of the Julia and Swanie team by pushing Slippers and Thomsons, but with Julia's ability to smile under constant ritewing attack and Swan to bean-count with minimum trauma, the country is better poised than most others — and this not only due to the mining fury in Western Australia...

I can see that Julia's near permanent smile is pissing Tony off big time...

For years, in the tabloid media and on talkback radio, we’ve been hearing about the domination of Australian politics by a “new class” of left-wing “cultural elites”, but the Rinehart ascendancy at Fairfax confirms quite a different trend: a new conservative elite now rules the roost. One backed by cold hard cash and reported demands for control of editorial agendas.

To see this new elite at work one only has to look across the hard-line conservative network that seeks to dominate public debate on a range of scientific, economic and social issues such as global warming, taxation, and human rights.

It stretches from Lord Monckton’s (Rinehart-sponsored in 2010) global-warming-denialist roadshows, to think-tanks such as the Institute for Public Affairs, to the Liberal Party and the Labor Right, through to the news and opinion pages of the Australian, to Alan Jones’ radio shows, to the opinion pages of the Telegraph, to Andrew Bolt’s columns and blog in the Herald-Sun and television show on (the part-Rinehart owned) Channel Ten.

Just as the old left toed a party line, so this new media machine offers a more-or-less homogeneous, and entirely predictable, view of the world. The rhetorical strategy is clear. Rather than being debated on their merits, every issue, now, even those founded in science, is refracted through the culture wars of the 1990s as a do-or-die battle between left and right.

This most recent push by miners for influence comes at a bad time for print newspapers. They face a perfect storm. The “rivers of gold” from classified advertising that once underwrote journalism now run through the corridors of Seek, eBay and Craig’s List. News values have suffered in the long-term shift away from proprietor to shareholder ownership and “shareholder value”. Cost-cutting and staff cuts, such as those announced at Fairfax this week, are a response to the remorseless logic of shareholder-driven markets. Their share price rose almost immediately the announcement was made, closing up 7.44% at 65 cents – although these gains were promptly reversed yesterday when shares slid back under 60 cents.

But in crisis there is opportunity. As Naomi Klein wrote in The Shock Doctrine, at least since the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973 opened the door for the Milton Friedman-inspired “Chicago Boys” to forcibly open up the economy to “shock treatment”, so hard-line conservatives have leveraged the instability that comes with economic crisis and fiscal weakness, into new influence.

And for those that think that this is a battle between old media and new, and that new media and its democratic hordes will out as surely as iPad software updates come through, they might want to think again. What conservatives understand is that beyond established brands that have moved on-line, new media — from blogs to Twitter to Facebook activism — is highly fragmented and polarised, and reaches the already politically converted. Whereas old media and its on-line versions still reach the undecided.

The question for those interested in progressive politics is how to mobilise in what many have failed to understand is a completely new environment. Certainly this will be a David v Goliath struggle. One factor in the struggle is that magnates seeking to control the media isn’t a good look, and in PR terms risks an own goal. Not that the Rinehart camp probably cares: PR disasters are for financial minnows. For the progressive side, hoping your opponent makes an own goal is hardly a winning strategy.

The left will more or less predictably bleat about these latest developments. There is good reason for their concern: concentration of media ownership should concern everybody. But the left are unlikely to offer solutions. Part of the problem — and these are the new rules of the media game — is that the left are already typecast the moment they open their mouths. The other part of the problem, as the failures of the Occupy movement and the debate on global warming show, is that the left is good at identifying problems, but is unable to create compelling stories that shift people’s views on important issues.

The fragmentation of new media is in some ways a metaphor for these failures. In a climate of hyper-democratisation where diversity is an end in itself, the left has failed to formulate or coalesce around compelling universal narratives that provide explanations, hope and a basis for mutual progress. Disaster stories coming in scatter-shot from every point of the electronic compass just don’t cut it.

Being able to tell a story about the importance of fixing the mainstream media is part of that project. It is also vital so that such stories can be told. The risk in the case of Fairfax is that not only does Australia look more and more like little more than a quarry, soon two of its major newspapers will look like quarry newsletters.

With Gina Poised, A New Class Of Conservative Elites Now Rule The Roost

picture from somewhere...

Rinehart's comments have provoked a furious reaction in Australia, with critics quick to point out she is not a self-made billionaire.  

Ged Kearney, the head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, told News.com: "Gina Rinehart's comments are the product of someone who has never had to earn a living and an insult to millions of working Australians who didn't have the head start of inheriting a fortune from their father and of being able to bully politicians by virtue of their inherited wealth."

Irina Cattalini, head of the Council of Social Service in Western Australia, a state that is booming thanks to investment from mining companies, told ABC News: "It's really difficult for people who haven't grown up in situations of disadvantage and poverty to really understand what the lived experience is like for people across Australia, who have really struggled to come up against the barriers to their education and the barriers to their employment."

Meanwhile, deputy prime minister Wayne Swan, of the ruling Labor Party, took the opportunity to highlight Rinehart's links to the opposition, right-wing, Liberal Party.

"The big question is whether [Liberal leader] Tony Abbott will endorse Gina Rinehart's social policies as he has endorsed her tax, industrial relations and environmental policies," he said.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-business/48759/lazy-australians-tell-worlds-richest-woman-rack#ixzz259wx0Tns

See toon at top and the picture of a silly smiling idiotic Abbott getting his instructions from Gina, above...

Tony Abbott might be trying to downplay a bombshell "discussion paper" aimed at creating a tax utopia at the top end of Australia but mining magnate Gina Rinehart won't be.

The proposals detailed in the 30-page document sing from the same songsheet that Rinehart and her father Lang Hancock have been playing for decades.The fact that the coalition has gone to such lengths to create a discussion paper speaks volumes about the growing political influence of Rinehart and her lobby group Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision (ANDEV), which she formed in 2010, around the time the mining tax was about to be hijacked.

The notion of a special economic zone with special tax and regulatory concessions dates back to the 1950s when Hancock was trying to overturn legislation that banned exports on iron ore. It took him almost a decade to get the ban lifted and pegging rights granted.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/top-end-tax-utopia-all-right-for-rinehart-20130207-2e0qc.html#ixzz2KBllfsIo
see toon at top...

A television show about billionaire Gina Rinehart is potentially malicious and defamatory, her lawyers have told a court.

Mrs Rinehart's lawyers have asked for a copy of part two of Channel Nine's The House Of Hancock to see if there are any grounds to stop it going to air on Sunday night.

The first part, which was broadcast last Sunday, portrayed details about her childhood and her father, the late Lang Hancock.

Her lawyers have asked the NSW Supreme Court for an urgent preliminary discovery against the Nine Entertainment Company.

Tom Blackburn SC told the court about alleged inaccuracies in the first instalment, and said the second was potentially malicious and defamatory

He said Chanel Nine's A Current Affairs (ACA) program on Wednesday ran a segment promoting the second part, which gave rise to concern about the "dishonesty of the content" and enormous "concern" about accuracy.

Mr Blackburn said when interviewed on ACA, one of The House Of Hancock series producers openly admitted some of the show was made up and compared it to the television series Dynasty.

He said host Tracy Grimshaw also described the second episode as a "war of words".

"It is apparent Channel Nine knows some of it is made up," Mr Blackburn said.

In opposing the application, lawyers for Nine Entertainment told the court most of Mrs Rinehart's family history had already been made public before the series was made.

The hearing continues.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-13/gina-rinehart-applies-to-court-for-access-to-house-of-hancock/6091222

Meanwhile, from old Gus' collections of old newspapers and magazine stuff: This picture of Gina and her parents from an old The West Australian circa 1963...