"USING 150 INTERVIEWS ON THREE CONTINENTS, THE [NEW YORK] TIMES DESCRIBES THE MURDOCH FAMILY’S ROLE IN DESTABILIZING DEMOCRACY IN NORTH AMERICA, EUROPE AND AUSTRALIA"

With Murdoch’s News Corp mastheads dominating the local newspaper landscape in the NSW Northern Rivers region this should interest readers…….

The New York Times, 3 April 2019:

Rupert Murdoch, the founder of a global media empire that includes Fox News, has said he “never asked a prime minister for anything.”

But that empire has given him influence over world affairs in a way few private citizens ever have, granting the Murdoch family enormous sway over not just the United States, but English-speaking countries around the world.

A six-month investigation by The New York Times covering three continents and including more than 150 interviews has described how Mr. Murdoch and his feuding sons turned their media outlets into right-wing political influence machines that have destabilized democracy in North America, Europe and Australia.

Here are some key takeaways from The Times’s investigation into the Murdoch family and its role in the illiberal, right-wing political wave sweeping the globe.

THE MURDOCH FAMILY SITS AT THE CENTER OF GLOBAL UPHEAVAL.

Fox News has long exerted a gravitational pull on the Republican Party in the United States, where it most recently amplified the nativist revolt that has fueled the rise of the far right and the election of President Trump.

Mr. Murdoch’s newspaper The Sun spent years demonizing the European Union to its readers in Britain, where it helped lead the Brexit campaign that persuaded a slim majority of voters in a 2016 referendum to endorse pulling out of the bloc. Political havoc has reigned in Britain ever since.

[Read the complete investigation into the Murdoch family.]

And in Australia, where his hold over the media is most extensive, Mr. Murdoch’s outlets pushed for the repeal of the country’s carbon tax and helped topple a series of prime ministers whose agenda he disliked, including Malcolm Turnbull last year.

At the center of this upheaval sits the Murdoch family, a clan whose dysfunction has both shaped and mirrored the global tumult of recent years.

The Times explored those family dynamics and their impact on the Murdoch empire, which is on the cusp of succession as its 88-year-old patriarch prepares to hand power to the son whose politics most resemble his own: Lachlan Murdoch.

A key step in that succession has paradoxically been the partial dismemberment of the empire, which significantly shrunk last month when Mr. Murdoch sold one of his companies, the film studio 21st Century Fox, to the Walt Disney Company for $71.3 billion.

The deal turned Mr. Murdoch’s children into billionaires and left Lachlan in control of a powerful political weapon: a streamlined company, the Fox Corporation, whose most potent asset is Fox News…..

The Murdoch empire has also boldly flexed its muscles in Australia, which was for many years Lachlan’s domain.

In Australia, Lachlan expressed disdain for efforts to fight climate change and once rebuked the staff at one of his family’s newspapers, The Australian, for an editorial in support of same-sex marriage (He says through a representative that he is in favor of same-sex marriage). He also became close to the politician Tony Abbott, whose 2013 election as prime minister was given an assist by Murdoch newspapers.

The Murdoch family changed Australian politics in 2016 when it took control of Sky News Australia and imported the Fox News model. They quickly introduced a slate of right-wing opinion shows that often focused on race, immigration and climate change. The programming became known as Sky After Dark.

Last year, Mr. Turnbull and his staff accused Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch of using their media outlets to help foment the intraparty coup that thrust him from office in August. Mr. Turnbull, a moderate and longtime nemesis of his friend Mr. Abbott, was replaced by the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison.

The Murdochs have denied any role in Mr. Turnbull’s downfall.....

The night after his arrival, Lachlan invited a small group of Sky employees and managers to his $16 million mansion in Sydney for drinks. With its new prime-time lineup of hard-right opinion hosts, Sky had become a force in Australian politics. Its audience was still small by American standards, but it was the network of choice in the capital, Canberra, and it was finalizing a deal to expand its reach into the Australian Outback — demographically speaking, the equivalent of Trump country.

It was a mirror of Fox News, with its fixation on race, identity and climate-change denial. Night after night, Sky’s hosts and their guests stirred anger over the perceived liberal bias of the media, “suicidal self-hatred” of Western civilization and the Australian equivalent of the Central American “caravans” that were dividing the United States: asylum seekers coming to the country by boat from Indonesia and Malaysia, many of them Muslim. Days before Lachlan’s arrival, a national neo-Nazi leader, Blair Cottrell — who had recently been fined for “inciting contempt for Muslims” — appeared on one of the network’s shows. Cottrell had been interviewed on Australian TV before, but his deferential treatment by Sky caused a national outcry. Under gentle questioning, he called on his countrymen to “reclaim our traditional identity as Australians” and advocated limiting immigration to those “who are not too culturally dissimilar from us,” such as white South African farmers. (Sky apologized and suspended the program.)

Inside Lachlan’s living room, the talk turned to national politics. “Do you think Malcolm is going to survive?” Lachlan asked his staff. Malcolm was Malcolm Turnbull, the relatively moderate Australian prime minister who took office a few years earlier. Inside the government, a small right-wing uprising had been brewing over his plans to bring Australia into compliance with the Paris climate accord. It is well established among those who have worked for the Murdochs that the family rarely, if ever, issues specific directives. They convey their desires indirectly, maybe with a tweet — as Murdoch did in the spring of 2016 when he decided to back Trump — or a question, the subtleties of which are rarely lost on their like-minded news executives.

In the days that followed, Sky Australia’s hosts and the Murdoch papers — the newspaper editors had their own drinks session at Lachlan’s mansion — set about trying to throw Turnbull out of office. Alan Jones, a Sky host and conservative radio star, called for a party “rebellion” against him on his program. Days later, the Murdochs’ major paper in Sydney, The Daily Telegraph, broke the news that a leadership challenge was in the works. Cheering on the challenge, Andrew Bolt, the Murdoch columnist who was once convicted of violating the country’s Racial Discrimination Act, told his Sky viewers that Turnbull’s “credibility is shot, his authority is gone.” Peta Credlin, the commentator who was Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, chewed out a member of Parliament for the chaos inside Turnbull’s administration. The Australian, the Murdochs’ national newspaper, was soon declaring Turnbull a “dead man walking.”......

It was always difficult to separate the personal from the financial and the ideological with the Murdochs. All appeared to be in evidence in their decision to turn against Turnbull. To begin with, he took office a few years earlier by ousting Lachlan’s friend Tony Abbott, and it was Abbott who helped lead the Turnbull uprising. Turnbull’s policies were also not perfectly aligned with the Murdochs’ interests. For instance, he had expedited the construction of the country’s national broadband network, which directly threatened the family’s highly profitable cable business by giving Netflix a government-subsidized pipeline into Australian homes.

The small number of Australian media outlets that the Murdochs did not own portrayed Turnbull’s ouster as a Murdoch-led “coup.” Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister whom the family had helped push out of office years earlier, described Murdoch in an op-ed in The Sydney Morning Herald as “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Turnbull was replaced by the right-wing nationalist Scott Morrison, who quickly aligned himself with Trump. The two met in person for the first time in late 2018 at the G-20 summit meeting in Buenos Aires. “I think it’s going to be a great relationship,” Trump said afterward. With a national election scheduled for May 2019, Morrison quickly staked his party’s prospects on the polarizing issue of immigration, promising a new hard-line approach. It dovetailed with Sky’s regular prime-time programming. Andrew Bolt, who previously warned of a “foreign invasion,” said in one segment, “We also risk importing ethnic and religious strife, even terrorism,” as the screen flashed an image of Australia’s potential future: rows of Muslims on a city street, bowing toward Mecca. When the opposing Labor Party managed to muscle through legislation that would allow doctors to transfer severely sick migrants in detention centers on the Australian islands of Nauru and Manus into hospitals on the mainland, Sky Australia’s prime-time hosts went on the offensive.

Read the full article here.

The Morrison Government's well thumbed federal election campaign playbook needs updating

With another federal election a little over four weeks away the Morrison Government - a party without a genuine climate change policy - has obviously included a version of the 'hundred dollar lamb roast' in its talking points for the troops as allegation surface here and there that climate change policies held by The Greens or Labor will increase food prices.

Especially any part of these policies which might in the future seek to have industry limit its greenhouse gas emissions by placing a price on carbon.

Here is a rebuttal of those allegations.....

Just a little note ... for all the complaints about food price soaring on the back of carbon pricing, this is food inflation in Sydney since 2011. Pick when the carbon tax was in place... pic.twitter.com/OoeYC7Fp33

— Shane Wright (@swrighteconomy) April 1, 2019

The Gillard Labor Government’s Clean Energy Act 2011 was assented to on 18 November 2011, came into effect on 1 July 2012 and was repealed by the Abbott Coalition Government on 17 July 2014, coming into post-dated effect on 1 July 2014 .

The absurd level to which the faux federal election campaign sinks

An overexcited and breathlessly earnest attempt to assert inherent bias on the part of the public broadcaster against the right wing of politics in the lead up to the federal election.....

And here again @chriskkenny and @australian: The word used was “conservators”, in a light-hearted chat about a murder mystery book set in an art museum. pic.twitter.com/XlHyxvyE7j

— ABC Communications (@ABCMediaComms) April 1, 2019

An increasingly desperate Australian Liberal Prime Minister on the faux election campaign trail in March 2017

Shorter version of most of the dire warnings Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison has been yelling at Australian voters as he faces the prospect of a 51st negative Newspoll in April.

Meme supplied

Liberals taking yet another leaf out of Donald Trump's election campaign play book

During the 2016 US presidential election campaign the Internet was littered with pressure groups which were not who they said they were and whose aims were not those they publicly stated.

Donald Trump and/or his supporters appeared to be behind many of these groups.

It seems the Liberal Party is also forming these faux pressure groups ahead of the 2019 federal election campaign in Australia.......

The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 2019:

A lobby group masquerading as a grassroots organisation of disgruntled retirees is actually a network of professional lobbyists involved in the trucking industry and the Liberal Party, with a history of campaigning against Labor government policies.

Defenders of Self-Funded Retirees says it was formed by "hard-working Australians who reject Labor's proposal to impose double taxation and to demonise us". 

However, the association is managed by Liberal Party member and ACT Senate candidate Robert Gunning, along with a number of Mr Gunning's friends from the trucking lobby.

The network is one of a number of interest groups set up after Labor announced its plan to abolish refundable franking credits, and has contributed heavily to Liberal MP Tim Wilson's controversial parliamentary inquiry into Labor's policy.

It also campaigned against Labor in the Longman byelection and aims to marshal an army of volunteers for the looming federal election, in which the dividend imputation policy is set to be a major battleground.

Company records show Defenders of Self-Funded Retirees Ltd is owned by Canberra-based lobbyist Andrew Higginson, Mr Gunning's Gold Coast friend Robert "Bob" Harrison and a man called John Richard Evans.

Mr Gunning is a lifelong trucking industry lobbyist who headed the Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association and the Livestock and Bulk Carriers Association. He has said his proudest achievement was the abolition of Labor's Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal…..

Mr Gunning quit the LBCA to contest the 2016 election for the Liberals against Andrew Leigh in the Canberra seat of Fenner, one of the safest Labor electorates in the country. His role in Defenders of Self-Funded Retirees was revealed because his name appears beside the posts on the group's Facebook page.

The Morrison Government crossed the line and was caught out

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics was charged by Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on 19 September 2018 with conducting an Inquiry into the implications of removing refundable franking credits.

The Standing Committee is composed of:

Liberal MP for Goldstein Tim Wilson (Chair)

Labor MP for Kingsford Smith Matt Thistlethwaite (Deputy Chair)

Along with committee members

Liberal MP for Brisbane Trevor Evans

Liberal MP for Mackellar Jason Falinski

Liberal MP for Hughes Craig Kelly

Liberal MP for Reid Craig Laundy

Labor MP for Freemantle Josh Wilson

Greens MP for Melbourne Adam Bandt

And supplementary member

Labor MP for Hotham Clare O’Neil.

The Inquiry has received approximately 1,000 submissions and by 8 February 2018 will have held 11 public hearings.

To date no transcripts of those public hearings have been published, just partial lists of those giving 'evidence'.

On 31 January 2019 The Sydney Morning Herald noticed the structure of these public hearings:

With no formal witnesses scheduled for any of the 12 special economics committee hearings to be held across the country before May, Coalition MPs appear set to continue to use the meetings to rally against the Labor policy. At one recent hearing an MP went so far as to hand out Liberal Party membership forms to the audience.

The Standing Committee has issued a total of 5 media releases, 4 of which contained details of where and when Inquiry public hearings would be held.

However, this particular Standing Committee dominated as it is by Liberal Party MPs decided to go one step further.

Its Chairman began to advertise public hearings on social media by directing interested persons towards a privately owned website created in October 2018 which deliberately conceals ownership by using My Private Registration to block full details appearing on its Whois entry.

This is one such invitation on Twitter:

Now a number of people have attempted to take up this irregular invitation to register in order to obtain a seat at a public parliamentary committee hearing and found that registration could only be completed by having their name attached to an anti-removal of funding credits petition.

It should be noted that this privately-owned website carries no visible link to a privacy policy. So users of this site receive no undertakings that any personal information they divulge, such as name, gender, postal address. telephone number and address will be protected from exploitation.

One Twitter user remarking on the situation 0nn2 February 2019:

This petition text reads as follows:

Attention: Tim Wilson MP (Chair) & Committee members,

I want to formally register my opposition to scrap refundable franking credits and the attack on full tax refunds.

This policy will:

- Unfairly target retirees who have worked hard and sacrificed for their retirement.

- Unfairly hit many people on low incomes, including hundreds of thousands of retirees that receive full tax refunds and with 97% of people who receive these refunds having incomes below $87,000.

- Unfairly target retirees on low incomes who will now face double tax, while those on higher incomes will be able to reduce their tax bill by the full value of overpaid tax.

The impact of the retirement tax has not been thought through. It will directly harm my financial security. It should be abandoned.

Right at the bottom of the website’s home page is this alleged authorisation:

The placement of this authorisation appears to authorise both the website and the digital petition and, the individual doing the authorisation is Tim Wilson in his role as Chair of the Standing Committee on Economics Inquiry into the implications of removing refundable franking credits.

Under the leadership of the Member for Goldstein this parliamentary inquiry has lost what little legitimacy its Terms of Reference bestowed and it has been turned into a public manifestation of taxpayer-funded Liberal Party political campaigning against one of the Labor Opposition's current policy positions.

The political dishonesty of the Standing Committee on Economics and this blatant attempt to deceive the general public, stack the hearings with people who support the Liberal Party's position and deny registration to those that didn't, cannot be ignored.

It is my honest opinion the Chair of the Standing Committee on Economics by his actions may be guilty of contempt of parliament, and therefore may be liable to be prosecuted under the provisions of the Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987.

Wilson may have shrugged off comment by mainstream media, but he reacted to Twitter (and the fact that at least one person appears to have approached the Australian Parliament to express concern over the Standing Committee's actions).

Here he is alleging an error had occurred when setting up the digital petition which supposedly remained undiscovered for about three months:

UPDATE

An IT savvy journalist Richard Chirgwin has tweeted that the stoptheretirementtax domain is registered to BERFAWN PTY LTD, an  ATO Regulated Self-Managed Superannuation Fund first registered by ASIC in 1993. 

This super fund is possibly associated with Lawrence Gerard Mccrossin.

The Conversation, 8 February 2019:

On Monday, a page for the inquiry was added to the Australian Parliament’s website describing itself as the “the official page of the committee”. It states that submissions to the inquiry can be made via the Parliament’s submission system or by email. It also explains that “pre-registration is not required to participate” in the hearings.

The Guardian, 8 February 2019:

The fund manager Geoff Wilson has admitted to part-funding the website through which the Liberal MP Tim Wilson has coordinated opposition to Labor’s franking credit policy, while chairing an inquiry into it.

Late on Friday Geoff Wilson issued a statement clarifying his involvement in stoptheretirementtax.com.au, after a growing controversy over whether the pair – who are first cousins once-removed – have inappropriately politicised the parliamentary inquiry.

On Friday Labor asked the Australian federal police to investigate whether Tim Wilson inappropriately shared electoral roll information for commercial purposes while campaigning against the opposition’s franking credit policy.

The referral was based on a Fairfax Media report that a constituent of Wilson’s received material both from the Liberal MP and from Wilson Asset Management, the funds management company chaired by Geoff Wilson, after responding to a robopoll.

Political Cartoon of the Week

cathywilcox.com.au

Australian High Court rejects NSW Berejiklian Government's 2018 electoral funding reforms

In May 2018 the NSW Berejiklian Government announced plans to cap election-related spending by unions, environmental groups, and churches at a maximum of $500,000. 

The Electoral Funding Act 2018 No 20 came into force on 1 July 2018.

In December 2018 five unions joined Unions NSW in challenging these laws in the High Court of Australia.

Australian Financial Review, 29 January 2019:

In July 2018, the Berejiklian Government reduced the amount that unions and other third parties could spend in the six months before an election from $1.05 million to $500,000. A political party and it candidates, however, can spend up to $22.6 million if it stands candidates in all 93 seats.

The High Court said NSW proved that aiming to "prevent the drowning out of voices in the political process by the distorting influence of money" was a legitimate purpose.

However, it said "the reduction in the cap applicable to third-party campaigners was not demonstrated to be reasonably necessary to achieve that purpose".

The court did not accept NSW's argument that $500,000 was still a substantial sum that would allow third parties to "reasonably present their case".

The lead judgement of Chief Justice Susan Kiefel and Justices Virginia Bell and Patrick Keane said "no enquiry as to what in fact is necessary to enable third-party campaigners reasonably to communicate their messages appears to have been undertaken".

The reforms also sought to ban third parties from acting "in concert" by pooling money into multi-million-dollar campaigns, such as the "Stop the Sell-off" campaign against energy privatisation for the 2015 poll. Those who breach the act would have faced up to 10 years' jail.

Former Commonwealth solicitor-general Justin Gleeson SC was lead counsel for Unions NSW and the five unions which also signed up for the challenge.

BACKGROUND

HIGH COURT OF AUSTRALIA, Judgment Summary, 18 December 2018:

UNIONS NSW & ORS v STATE OF NEW SOUTH WALES [2013] HCA 58

Today the High Court unanimously held that ss 96D and 95G(6) of the Election Funding, Expenditure and Disclosures Act 1981 (NSW) ("the EFED Act") are invalid because they impermissibly burden the implied freedom of communication on governmental and political matters, contrary to the Commonwealth Constitution.

Section 96D of the EFED Act prohibits the making of a political donation to a political party, elected member, group, candidate or third-party campaigner, unless the donor is an individual enrolled on the electoral roll for State, federal or local government elections. The EFED Act also caps the total expenditure that political parties, candidates and third-party campaigners can incur for political advertising and related election material. For the purposes of this cap, s 95G(6) of the EFED Act aggregates the amount spent on electoral communication by a political party and by any affiliated organisation of that party. An "affiliated organisation" of a party is defined as a body or organisation "that is authorised under the rules of that party to appoint delegates to the governing body of that party or to participate in pre-selection of candidates for that party (or both)".

Each of the plaintiffs intends to make political donations to the Australian Labor Party, the Australian Labor Party (NSW Branch) or other entities, and to incur electoral communication expenditure within the meaning of the EFED Act. The second, third and sixth plaintiffs are authorised to appoint delegates to the annual conference of the Australian Labor Party (NSW Branch) and to participate in the pre-selection of that party's candidates for State elections. A special case stated questions of law for determination by the High Court.

The High Court unanimously held that ss 96D and 95G(6) burdened the implied freedom of communication on governmental and political matters. The Court held that political communication at a State level may have a federal dimension. The Court accepted that the EFED Act had general anti-corruption purposes. However, the Court held that the impugned provisions were not connected to those purposes or any other legitimate end.

· This statement is not intended to be a substitute for the reasons of the High Court or to be used in any later consideration of the Court’s reasons

Australian Federal Election Campaign 2018-2019: And so the lying begins......

First cab off the rank with a monumental political lie is the Institute of Public Affairs, a Melbourne-based privately-funded, hard right, elitist and racist lobby group with close ties to the Liberal Party of Australia, dedicated to the denial of climate change, suppression of wage growth, abolition of unions and the dismantling of the universal welfare system along with around 71 other divisive policies.

Recruiting John Lloyd will be a boon for @TheIPA. There are more than 680,000 unemployed Australians and the IPA is their effective union. No one else in the public debate is prepared to stand up for people who are locked out of work. https://t.co/GzxqSd2PoK

— Simon Breheny (@Simon_Breheny) December 17, 2018

Anything less like a union for the unemployed it would be hard to imagine. 

Something to remember every time a Liberal or Nationals politician opens his/her mouth in 2019

With both a NSW state election and a federal general election in the first half of this year the Murdoch press and Coalition spokespersons will at some point turn their thoughts to the allegedly oppressive burden of welfare payments on Australian taxpayers and the prevalence of so-called 'welfare bludgers' that are supposedly ripping off the taxpayer.

Leaving aside the fact that every single person in Australia pays one or more forms of tax, even welfare recipients, what is the truth about who gets what from government tax concessions or cash transfers?

In 2018 Australia’s richest 20 per cent of the population owned est. 68 per cent of national private wealth, which means that they owned 80 times more in assets and savings than the poorest 20 per cent of the population.

They also received higher tax and transfer amounts from federal government coffers than welfare recipients.

Here is how that comes about......

Per Capita, The Cost of Privilege Report #7, Executive Summary excerpts, 29 March 2018:

The modelling assessed the various tax concessions and other benefits available to high-income earners and contrasts them with well-understood direct income support measures for low-income earners and those reliant on our social security safety net.

This report quantifies the annual cost to the federal budget of various measures that allow Australians in our wealthiest quintile to minimise their taxable income, thereby reducing government revenue that pays for services for all citizens.

These measures include superannuation tax concessions, negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions, the use of discretionary trusts, the exemption from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) of private health insurance and education, and the exemption from Capital Gains Tax (CGT) of the principal place of residence. All of these concessions disproportionately benefit high income and high wealth households. 

Our analysis shows that, in combination, these measures impose a cost on the federal budget that easily outstrips that of any single welfare recipient group.

According to our calculations, the cost of foregone tax revenue from the richest 20% of Australians is over AU$68 billion per annum. That’s around $37 a week from every worker in the country.¹

In contrast, the cost of income support in the 2016-2017 financial year was, by group:

Age Pension $44.468 billion ($35 a week per worker)

Assistance to families with children $36.404 billion ($20 a week per worker)

Assistance to people with disabilities $31.721 billion ($17 a week per worker)

Newstart (unemployment benefits) $10.994 billion ($6 a week per worker)

1 Calculated using the methodology outlined in Answer to Question On Notice No: 257, Taxation paid and 2016-17 Financial Year, what was the total government spend? Senate Economics Legislation Committee, Treasury Portfolio, Budget Policy Division, Supplementary Budget Estimates 2017 – 2018

Here is a practical example of the value of tax concessions to the third family above who fall within the top 20 per cent of the population:

Household Three – Michael and Gillian

Michael and Gillian have two children, Isabella, aged 12 and Max, aged 8.

They paid off their mortgage two years ago and live in a four bedroom house in a bayside suburb of Melbourne. 

Isabella and Max go to the local Catholic primary school and will go on to Catholic secondary college. The family has intermediate hospital and extras private health insurance.

Michael is a Team Leader at a large telecommunications company, and earns $230,000 per year. Gillian works 20 hours a week, during school hours, in the HR department of a major bank, and earns $60,000 per year.

Both Michael and Gillian salary sacrifice into their superannuation accounts up to the $25,000 concessional cap. While Michael can only contribute an extra $3,150 of his pre-tax income to super on top of the $21,850 in compulsory contributions already made by his employer, Gillian can contribute $19,000, reducing her taxable income to $41,000.

They own a three bedroom house in Rye, which they rent out through AirBnB as a holiday home and negatively gear, allowing them to reduce Michael’s tax by a further $9,400.

The value of the capital gains tax concession on their holiday home gives them $4,500 in concessional benefits annually, and the tax exemption of their family home in Melbourne provides another concession of $23,500 per year.

Michael and Gillian also receive GST tax exemptions on their private health and education costs to the value of $3,250.00 per year.

Their combined family income after tax is $215,446 per annum, or $4,143.19 per week.

The total amount received from the taxpayer in tax concessions for this family is $71,705 per year, or $1,378.94 per week.

This imbalance in the value of government assistance received by different groups in society, which is so strongly biased towards giving most to the affluent, is a perfect example of Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison's social and economic policies structured to give to those who already have.

Giving to those he appears to believe are 'good' or 'worthy' because they have high levels of income and assets, as opposed to those who are 'bad' or 'unworthy' because they have little in the way of income and assets.

When I was young this attitude was simply described as the Protestant Ethic, now it appears to be known as the Prosperity Gospel.

Under either name it is not the mark of an egalitarian society or of a nation which prides itself on giving everyone "a fair go".

Something readers might care to think on as they decide who to vote for this year.

July 2018 was not a good month for Zuckerberg and Facebook Inc - Channel 4 undercover investigation, a lawsuit, falling user numbers, sudden 19% drop in company value & US$12 billion hit to personal fortune

As the fall-out from manipulated US presidential campaign and UK Brexit national referendum continues try at it might Facebook Inc just can't give a cursory apology for its part in these events and mover on - users and mainstream media won't cease scutiny of its business practices.

News.com.au, 27 July 2018:

Shares in Facebook plummeted 19 per cent to $US176.26 at the end of trading on Thursday, wiping out some $US120 billion ($A160 billion) — believed to be the worst single-day evaporation of market value for any company....

Founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has a 13 percent stake in Facebook, saw his fortune dropped by more than $US12 billion ($A16 billion) in less than 24 hours, to around $74 billion ($A100 billion).

The fall came after the social media giant revealed three million European users had closed their accounts since the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The record decline pushed the tech-heavy Nasdaq more than one per cent lower.

CNet, 27 July 2018:

It began Wednesday with Facebook, which announced that daily active user counts had fallen in Europe, to 279 million from 282 million earlier this year. Facebook also indicated it was no longer growing in the US and Canada, two of the most lucrative advertising markets. Just as Facebook was working through its second year of nearly nonstop scandals over unchecked political meddling and data misuse, it was becoming clear that the days of consistent and relatively easy growth were fading.

Reuters, 28 July 2018:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Facebook Inc (FB.O) and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg were sued on Friday in what could be the first of many lawsuits over a disappointing earnings announcement by the social media company that wiped out about $120 billion of shareholder wealth.

The complaint filed by shareholder James Kacouris in Manhattan federal court accused Facebook, Zuckerberg and Chief Financial Officer David Wehner of making misleading statements about or failing to disclose slowing revenue growth, falling operating margins, and declines in active users.

Chanel4.com, news release, 17 July 2018:

Dispatches investigation reveals how Facebook moderates content

An undercover investigation by Firecrest Films for Channel 4 Dispatches has revealed for the first time how Facebook decides what users can and can’t see on the platform. (Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network, Channel 4 Dispatches, 9pm, 17 July). 

Dispatches’ investigation reveals:

       *Violent content such as graphic images and videos of assaults on children, remaining on the site, despite being flagged by users as inappropriate and requests to have it removed.

·         *Thousands of reported posts remained unmoderated and on the site while we were filming, beyond Facebook’s stated aim of a 24-hour turnaround, including potentially posts relating to suicide threats and self-harm.

·        * Moderators told not to take any action if content shows a child who is visibly below Facebook’s 13-year-old age limit, rather than report it as posted by underage users, even if the content includes self-harming.

·         *Allegations from an early Facebook investor and mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, that Facebook’s business model benefits from extreme content which engages viewers for longer, generating higher advertising revenue.

·         *Pages belonging to far-right groups, with large numbers of followers, allowed to exceed deletion threshold, and subject to different treatment in the same category as pages belonging to governments and news organisations.

·       *  Policies allowing hate speech towards ethnic and religious immigrants, and trainers instructing moderators to ignore racist content in accordance with Facebook’s policies.

      Dispatches sent an undercover reporter to work as a content moderator in Facebook’s largest centre for UK content moderation. The work is outsourced to a company called Cpl Resources plc in Dublin which has worked with Facebook since 2010. The investigation reveals the training given to content moderators to demonstrate how to decide whether content reported to them by users, such as graphic images and videos of child abuse, self-harming, and violence should be allowed to remain on the site or be deleted. Dispatches also films day-to-day moderation of content on the site, revealing:

      Violent content:

      One of the most sensitive areas of Facebook’s content rulebook is about graphic    violence. When dealing with graphic violence content, moderators have three options – ignore, delete, or mark as disturbing which places restrictions on who can see the content.

      Dispatches’ undercover reporter is seen moderating a video showing two teenage schoolgirls fighting. Both girls are clearly identifiable and the video has been shared more than a thousand times. He’s told that Facebook’s rules say that because the video has been posted with a caption condemning the violence and warning people to be careful about visiting the location where it was filmed, it should not be deleted and instead should be left on the site and marked as disturbing content. Dispatches speaks to the mother of the girl involved who tells the programme the distress and impact the video had on her daughter. She struggles to understand the decision to leave the video up on the site. “To wake up the next day and find out that literally the whole world is watching must have been horrifying. It was humiliating for her, it was devastating for her. You see the images and it’s horrible, it’s disgusting. That’s someone’s child fighting in the park. It’s not Facebook entertainment.”

      Facebook told Dispatches that the child or parent of a child featured in videos like this can ask them to be removed. Richard Allan, VP of Public Policy at Facebook said, “Where people are highlighting an issue and condemning the issue, even if the issue is painful, there are a lot of circumstances where people will say to us, look Facebook, you should not interfere with my ability to highlight a problem that’s occurred.

      Online anti-child abuse campaigner Nicci Astin tells Dispatches about another violent video which shows a man punching and stamping on a toddler. She says she reported the video to Facebook in 2012 and received a message back saying it didn’t violate its terms and conditions. The video is used during the undercover reporter’s training period as an example of what would be left up on the site, and marked as disturbing, unless posted with a celebratory caption. The video is still up on the site, without a graphic warning, nearly six years later. Facebook told Dispatches they do escalate these issues and contact law enforcement, and the video should have been removed.

      One moderator tells the Dispatches undercover reporter that “if you start censoring too much then people lose interest in the platform…. It’s all about making money at the end of the day.”

      Venture Capitalist Roger McNamee was one of Facebook’s earliest investors, a mentor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the man who brought Sheryl Sandberg to the company. He tells Dispatches that Facebook’s business model relies on extreme content:

      “From Facebook’s point of view this is, this is just essentially, you know, the crack cocaine of their product right. It’s the really extreme, really dangerous form of content that attracts the most highly engaged people on the platform. Facebook understood that it was desirable to have people spend more time on site if you’re going to have an advertising based business, you need them to see the ads so you want them to spend more time on the site. Facebook has learned that the people on the extremes are the really valuable ones because one person on either extreme can often provoke 50 or 100 other people and so they want as much extreme content as they can get.”

      Richard Allan told Dispatches: Shocking content does not make us more money, that’s just a misunderstanding of how the system works …. People come to Facebook for a safe secure experience to share content with their family and friends. The vast majority of those 2 billion people would never dream of sharing content that, like that, to shock and offend people. And the vast majority of people don’t want to see it. There is a minority who are prepared to abuse our systems and other internet platforms to share the most offensive kind of material. But I just don’t agree that that is the experience that most people want and that’s not the experience we’re trying to deliver.

      Underage users:

      No child under 13 can have a Facebook account. However, a trainer tells the undercover reporter not to proactively take any action regarding their age if the report contains an image of a user who is visibly underage, unless the user admits to being underage: “We have to have an admission that the person is underage. If not, we just like pretend that we are blind and we don’t know what underage looks like.” Even if the content contains images for self-harm for example, and the image is of someone who looks underage the user is treated like an adult and sent information about organisations which help with self-harming issues, rather than being reported for being underage: “If this person was a kid, like a 10-year-old kid we don’t care, we still action the ticket as if they were an adult.” Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that its policy is not to take action about content posted by users who appear to be underage, unless the user admits to being underage.

Hate speech:

       Dispatches’ undercover reporter is told that, while content which racially abuses protected ethnic or religious groups violates Facebook’s guidelines, if the posts racially abuse immigrants from these groups, then the content is permitted. Facebook’s training for moderators also includes a post including a cartoon comment which describes drowning a girl if her first boyfriend is a negro, as content which is permitted. Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that the picture violates their hate speech standards and they are reviewing what went wrong to prevent it from happening again.

     “Shielded Review” – Popular pages kept up despite violations:
Our undercover reporter is told that if any page is found to have five or more pieces of content that violate Facebook’s rules, then the entire page should be taken down, in accordance with the company’s policies. But we have discovered that posts on Facebook’s most popular pages, with the highest numbers of followers, cannot be deleted by ordinary content moderators at Cpl. Instead, they are referred to the Shielded Review Queue where they can be directly assessed by Facebook rather than Cpl staff. These pages include those belonging to jailed former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson, who has over 900,000 followers, and who has been given the same protected status as Governments and news organisations. A moderator tells the undercover reporter that the far-right group Britain First’s pages were left up despite repeatedly featuring content that breached Facebook’s guidelines because, “they have a lot of followers so they’re generating a lot of revenue for Facebook. The Britain First Facebook page was finally deleted in March 2018 following the arrest of deputy leader Jayda Fransen.

      Facebook confirmed to Dispatches that they do have special procedures for popular and high profile pages, which includes Tommy Robinson and included Britain First.

      They say Shielded Review has been renamed ‘Cross Check’. Lord Allen told Dispatches: “if the content is indeed violating it will go….I want to be clear this is not a discussion about money, this is a discussion about political speech. People are debating very sensitive issues on Facebook, including issues like immigration. And that political debate can be entirely legitimate. I do think having extra reviewers on that when the debate is taking place absolutely makes sense and I think people would expect us to be careful and cautious before we take down their political speech.”

      Delays in moderating content:

      Facebook’s publicly stated aim is to assess all reported content within 24 hours. However, during the period of the undercover filming, Dispatches found a significant backlog. Moderators told the undercover reporter that due to the volume of reports, or tickets, they are supposed to moderate, they are unable to check up to 7,000 reported comments on a daily basis. At one point there is a backlog of 15,000 reports which have not been assessed, with some tickets are still waiting for moderation up to five days after being reported. Facebook told Dispatches that the backlog filmed in the programme was cleared by 6 April.

…/ends

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