COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Here is a reliable indicator that you are being managed rather than informed.

When the story gets complicated, when the real cause of your pain points uncomfortably toward power, toward allies, toward the architecture of foreign policy that cannot be questioned, the Murdoch press reaches for a scapegoat.

And so, as Australians watch fuel prices surge by approximately 40 percent, a direct consequence of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, as ABC News has itself reported, the editors and columnists of News Corp’s Australian outlets have a different culprit in mind.

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Not Netanyahu. Not Trump. Not the war that has sent energy markets into convulsions and supply chains into chaos. Not the illegal military campaign that blocked one of the world’s most critical shipping arteries and sent insurance premiums for tankers into the stratosphere.

No, their preferred villain is Chris Bowen.

Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who did not bomb Iran. Chris Bowen, who does not set the global price of oil. Chris Bowen, whose energy policies, right or wrong, are entirely debatable on their merits, has precisely nothing to do with a US-Israeli military campaign that closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the worst fuel price shock in years.

The Bowen beat-up is not journalism. It is misdirection of the most deliberate and dishonest kind. It is the Murdoch press doing what it does most reliably and most effectively — running cover for power, redirecting the public’s legitimate anger toward a safe domestic target, and keeping the real architecture of the crisis, the geopolitical decisions, the alliance commitments, the illegal war, safely out of frame.

Because here is what the Murdoch press will not tell you, and what the mainstream media in general has failed to say with anything like the clarity the situation demands.

Australians are paying more for fuel because a war closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Doh!

That war was launched on February 28 of this year by the United States and Israel against Iran.

It was not sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. It was not authorised by any provision of international law that serious legal scholars recognise as applicable. It was not preceded by any meaningful consultation with allies, including Australia, whose economies would absorb its consequences.

It was a unilateral act of military aggression by the most powerful country on earth and its primary regional client, conducted because they had the weapons to do it and had calculated, correctly, that nobody with the power to stop them would try.

Puppet on a string
And when it happened, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went on the ABC’s 7:30 programme and told Sarah Ferguson that what Australia supported was the American decision to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and to address Iran’s role in destabilising the region.

Read that answer carefully. It is not an answer about Australian interests. It contains no reference to Australian sovereignty, Australian economic security, or the fuel price increase already beginning when those words were spoken.

It is a recitation, clean, fluent, almost word for word, of the American and Israeli justification for the strikes, delivered in the Prime Minister’s voice, on Australian public television, as though it represented Australia’s own sovereign and independently arrived at conclusion, which it didn’t.

He later described Australia’s contribution to the conflict as “constructive”. He has since said he wants more certainty about the war’s objectives and acknowledged there needs to be an end point.

This is the man who endorsed the war before its objectives had been defined, now asking what they are.

Managed complicity and Murdoch
This is what managed complicity looks like up close. You sign on. You use the ally’s language. You call it constructive. And then, when the consequences arrive in the form of 40 percent fuel price increases and small businesses collapsing under freight surcharge pressure, you allow the media ecosystem you have never seriously challenged to redirect the public’s fury at your own Energy Minister.

The Murdoch press is doing its job. That job is not to inform Australians.

That job, in this specific context, on this specific story, is to protect the US-Israeli alliance from the accountability it deserves and to ensure that the legitimate rage of a population being economically punished for decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem never finds its proper target.

The proprietor of that press empire has spent decades cultivating proximity to exactly the power centres that prosecuted this war.

Murdoch newspapers in the United States were among the most consistent cheerleaders for the military adventurism that set the conditions for what is now unfolding. His Australian mastheads take their foreign policy cues from a worldview that treats American and Israeli strategic interests as essentially synonymous with the interests of the English-speaking world.

That worldview is not Australia’s sovereign foreign policy. It is an ideology dressed as common sense, distributed at scale through the country’s most-read newspapers, and deployed most aggressively when the connection between geopolitical decisions and domestic pain threatens to become too obvious to ignore.

Chris Bowen did not block the Strait of Hormuz. A war did.

An illegal war. Conducted without Australian consent. Endorsed by an Australian Prime Minister on national television, using the language of the people who started it.

And the newspapers owned by a man whose commercial and ideological interests align entirely with the people who started it are telling you it is the Energy Minister’s fault.

That is not a coincidence; it is the system working exactly as designed.

The question is whether Australians are going to keep letting it work.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern today offered a “formal and unreserved apology” to the Pacific communities left traumatised by the Dawn Raids in the 1970s

The practice saw immigration officials target the homes of Pacific Islands people in the early hours of the morning, beginning in the 1970s, in a crackdown on alleged “overstaying” on their visas.

The policy followed a period where many people from the Pacific Islands were encouraged to come to Aotearoa to fill roles in growing industries as the nation experienced a boom in jobs after World War II.

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However, during the following economic recession, an Immigration Act amendment in 1968 allowed those overstaying their work permits to be deported and gave police the power to ask people to immediately produce documentation confirming they were legally allowed to be in NZ.

The move unfairly targeted the Pacific community, Māori and other people of colour

“I stand before you as a symbol of the Crown that wronged you nearly 50 years ago,” Ardern said in her opening remarks at the Auckland Town Hall this afternoon.

“We have experienced the Pacific Aotearoa journey shift from one of new settlement to the present day – Pacific diaspora in New Zealand.

Integral part of Aotearoa
“Pacific people is an integral part of Aotearoa’s cultural and social fabric, and are active contributors to our economic success.

“However, in the multiple chapters of Pacific people’s story in New Zealand — the chapter of the Dawn Raids stands out as one that continues to cast a long shadow.”

Ardern said the Pacific peoples were used as “scapegoats” as the economic boom of post-World War II saw a downturn in the 1970s.

Prime Minister Ardern speaks of remorse. Video: TVOne News

“While these events took place almost 50 years ago, the legacy of the Dawn Raids era lives on today in Pacific communities. It remains vividly etched in the memory of those who were directly impacted; it lives on in the disruption of trust and faith in authorities; and it lives on in the unresolved grievances of Pacific communities that these events happened and that to this day, have gone unaddressed.

“Today, I stand on behalf of the New Zealand government to offer a formal and unreserved apology to Pacific communities for the discriminatory implementation of the immigration laws of the 1970s that led to the events of the dawn raids.

“The Government expresses its sorrow, remorse and regret that the Dawn Raids and random police checks occurred and that these actions were ever considered appropriate.

“Our government conveys to the future generations of Aotearoa that the past actions of the Crown were wrong, and that the treatment of your ancestors was wrong. We convey to you our deepest and sincerest apology.”

Apology also for impact on Māori
Ardern also apologised for the Dawn Raids’ impact on Māori and other ethnic communities.

“We acknowledge the distress and hurt that these experiences would have caused,” she said.

“As a nation, we expect everyone in New Zealand to be treated with dignity and respect, and we expect that all individuals are guaranteed their rights without distinction of any kind. Unfortunately, these expectations were not met in this case and inequities that stem from direct and indirect discrimination continue to exist.

“We’re committed to eliminating racism in all its forms in Aotearoa New Zealand, and affording everyone the right to be treated humanely and with respect and with dignity.”

She also outlined a raft of changes as part of the government’s apology as a “way of expressing our deepest sorrow, whilst recognising the wrongs of the past and to pave the new dawn and a new beginning for Pacific peoples in New Zealand”.

As part of its formal apology, the government will provide $2.1 million in academic and vocational scholarships for Pacific communities; $1 million in Manaaki New Zealand Short Term Scholarship Training Courses for delegates from Samoa, Tonga, Fiji and Tuvalu; and for resources to be made available to schools and kura who choose to teach the history of the Dawn Raids.

The Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Ministry for Pacific Peoples will also provide support to enable Pacific artists and/or historians to work with communities in developing a comprehensive historical record of the Dawn Raids period.

Republished with the author’s permission. Read and view Barbara Dreaver’s full TVOne coverage here.