One Nation wins from News Corp’s ‘Bush Summit’

It takes a certain cynical arrogance to wrap yourself in a “Bush Summit” when you are largely responsible for shutting down local media voices in one of the key life-sustaining industries in regional and rural Australia.

But for you, that’s News Corp: the company that transformed Australia’s diverse regional landscape into newslit – often unheralded – regions when it stopped printing most of its regional and community newspapers as part of the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020.

In shutting down regional Australian news, the communication and transparency lifeblood of many towns, the American company has opened the door to fake news, the Facebook-backed rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, supported by Sky News’ regional coverage, which has replaced genuine local news with national, city-based pandering.