News Corp jumps on One Nation bandwagon

News Corp’s growing support for One Nation follows a familiar strategy: Dr. Victoria Fielding is protecting the interests of billionaires by repackaging far-right politics as a movement for ordinary Australians.

HABER A.Ş. FOUNDER Rupert Murdoch He hates the US President Donald Trump.

It was in 2023 reported Murdoch hates Trump so much he wishes he were dead. But that personal hatred didn’t stop Murdoch from jumping on News Corp to the Trump MAGA bandwagon. Murdoch has used powerful media channels throughout the decade. Fox NewsTo help keep Trump’s base squarely in the MAGA camp.

This includes the spread of MAGA-flavored hate and lies. So why would Murdoch do this when he hates Trump so much? Simple. Murdoch loves power that benefits himself and his fellow billionaires more than what a despicable person Trump is. As long as Trump serves the billionaires (which he does), Murdoch will be on his side.

The same calculation lies behind News Corp Australia’s sudden switch of sides from the Liberals and Nationals to One Nation. Just like the mining magnate Gina Rinehart stuck in MP Barnaby Joycebut dropped the Nationals and now buys the Senators Pauline Hanson Australia’s billionaire mining, oil and gas class has a new political project: electing One Nation.

This News Corp project is not as simple as using the same strategy to build support for One Nation that has been used to elect the Liberals and Nationals over the last 50 years. But since they’ve played this game before, moving from the neoliberal right to the far right in the US, they have a plan for how they can do it again.

To explain how the News Corp One Nation project is different from the Liberal-National project but ultimately the same outcome, I will first outline how News Corp has used its media power to help right-wing parties in the past.

Use the worker case mining tax As an example, the ultimate goal of this project was the same as the One Nation project: to undermine Labour’s ability to address wealth inequality and strengthen the power and wealth of billionaires.

For my honors thesis in 2015, I examined the political discourse used in the mining tax debate and the news coverage of this debate.

What I found is the same thing I’ve found in every political debate since. I have seen News Corp’s media power used to run a misleading and in many respects false scare campaign to kill redistributive Labor policy, and therefore the Labor Party, by claiming the tax would harm the economy.

When people think a tax will harm their livelihood, they vote against it, regardless of the facts.

But, obviously, wealth redistribution helps the public. This is the main purpose of redistribution policies. The mining tax was designed to return more of the wealth derived from Australia’s resources to every Australian, and was ultimately a policy designed to address wealth inequality. But these facts were destroyed by a powerful three-pronged attack consisting of a billionaire-funded public relations campaign aligned with the News Corp campaign, which worked with the Liberal-National Party to successfully dismantle the policy.

Rinse and repeat with the carbon price, rinse and repeat with franking credits, and of course we’re seeing the same tired strategy recently with Labour’s negative gearing and capital gains tax changes. The public always benefits from these changes. But the right-wing polygraph tells them that any redistributive policy will harm them. It was a simple but surprisingly effective campaign for decades.

Until it wasn’t. What received little attention during the 2025 Election was that the Liberals attempted to destroy Labour’s electoral chances with another scare campaign claiming that the cost of living crisis was Labour’s fault and that the economy was always worse under Labour.

However, this campaign ended in failure. As I have written before, a generational shift has occurred and the majority no longer accept the idea that pro-Liberal billionaire policies are good for them. This shift is evidenced by Labor being named as the major party best placed to manage the economy for the first time in the 2025 Election.

Now we move on to News Corp’s transition to One Nation. Following the MAGA plan, News Corp promotes One Nation using two big lies.

First, One Nation stands up for those who are economically left behind. This is clearly a lie, because if One Nation cares about the workers left behind, how do you explain that? not supported even once A policy that defends workers’ rights or raises the minimum wage, or anything that would make those suffering from wealth inequality better off? It didn’t happen. Its members are busy flying on Gina Rinehart’s plane.

The second big lie, linked to the first, is that News Corp didn’t need to worry about the Liberal-Nationals, but added One Nation to its program after seeing how well it worked for the far right globally. This lie is that left-wing parties are radical elites who do not care about workers.

Yes, it’s true, the Labor Party, the political arm of the Labor Party, which has been criticized by right-wing parties for over 100 years for caring too much about workers, appears to be not on the side of those left behind. Instead, it consists of woke, inner-city “elites” who don’t care about ordinary people.

The truth is that every policy Labor has ever produced has been designed to address wealth inequality and every single one of those policies, including One Nation, has been opposed by the Right in the interests of billionaires, that is the claim of the far right and they are sticking to it.

To illustrate how this upside-down world works, consider this piece that would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. AustralianHis favorite hack is posing as a journalist. Chris Uhlmann.

In an attempt at the undergraduate MAGA narrative, Uhlmann argues that One Nation is—wait for it— Martin Luther-esque does not rise because:

‘…just a rebellion against the political class. ‘This is a rebellion against the permanent ruling caste of progressive elites who reside in state and federal bureaucracies, universities, courts, commissions, NGOs and much of the media.’

This clumsy attempt to characterize the progressive Left as “elites”, as well as any institution that can call out the blatant lies of people like Uhlmann who claim One Nation is on the side of ordinary people, is exactly what we will see going forward from News Corp.

Just as Murdoch does with Trump, News Corp Australia sees a huge opportunity in One Nation. Because One Nation’s ultimate goal, like the MAGA movement, is to govern on behalf of billionaire elites by undermining the workings of Australian democracy – a form of plutocratic minority rule.

It doesn’t matter what Murdoch thinks of Pauline Hanson. After all, she’s just his tool. And he had used tools like this before.