How healthy is our democracy?

The 2019 Australian federal election was for Labor to lose.

Opinion polls agreed that Labor would win but the Coalition still fell over the line.

Mr Morrison called it a miracle.

Many others saw that defeat at least partially due to the traction on the electorate of a combined scare campaign, whipped up mainly by the Coalition, Clive Palmer and the Murdoch media against Labor.

John Howard never stopped asserting to the electorate that the Coalition was the superior economic and security manager of Australia.

Labor was depicted as a disaster in both.

This scare campaign seems to have worked for Mr Howard for 12 years and was retained as the mantra for subsequent coalition governments.

However, Mr Howard seemed to eventually get out of touch with public opinion and he lost the trust of the majority of the electorate to such extent that even the anti-Labor scare campaign could not get him re-elected.

This may have happened to Mr Morrison too now.

He is seen as a bully and one who refuses to take responsibility for his mistakes.

Even Morrison is trying to distance himself from Morrison.

He is preoccupied with religious rights but not with religious discriminations against non-heterosexuals.

He loves coal and his government lags behind other developing nations in climate change action.

He has a record of doing too little too late to mitigate the effects of climate change-induced disasters of record droughts, bush fires and floods.

He has dragged his feet on taking action against the abuse of women in Parliament.

He refused to order vaccines early enough to reduce the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on Australia.

He has a history of repeated pork barrelling to gain electoral advantages.

He refuses to support the establishment of an Independent National Crime Commission to scrutinise federal politicians.

He will not contribute to remedying the reduction in real wages by refusing to advocate that wage levels should not be below the level of inflation even for those on minimum wages.

His government's getting caught off-guard about the China-Solomon Islands protection deal is seen as a major national security failure.

Hence the credibility of the claim of the Morrison government as being a reliable economic and national security manager has been substantially reduced.

Yet this has not stopped the Coalition and its dominant ally, the Murdoch media, from going into overdrive to whip up a well-tried last minute scare campaign to discourage voters from choosing the Opposition on the ground that they cannot be trusted for good economic and national security management.

So, how can the voters find out the truth?

Political literacy requires engaging in critical thinking to distinguish between fact and fiction, but most people tend to be vulnerable to political manipulation by self-serving, powerful anti-democratic propagandists.

Most popular tech platforms are designed, somewhat like poker machines, to be highly addictive to capture our attention to maximise advertising revenue. Often the media seeks attention at all costs, even when this involves providing misleading information. 'Fake news' often results from a race for ratings, which often settles for the superficial and outrageous over fact-informed, measured and in-depth analysis.

The low media diversity in Australia threatens to entrench the domination of a small number of loud voices in public discussion. The narrow range of views undermines the ability of the media to fulfil its role of providing the quality information that underpins democracy.

For example, the Rupert Murdoch media empire owns two-thirds of the country's metropolitan print mastheads and some of Australia's most popular news websites. Its power arises from the combined effect of its outlets, functioning as an "echo chamber" of opinions and themes.

After the Whitlam Labour government was dismissed by the Governor General, the journalists at the Murdoch owned 'The Australian' went on strike in 1976 during the subsequent election campaign, over what they saw as the newspaper's biased coverage. A letter from journalists to management protested against 'deliberate and careless slanting of headlines, seemingly blatant imbalance in news presentation, political censorship and, more occasionally, distortion of copy from senior specialist journalists, the political management of news and features, the stifling of dissident and even palatably impartial opinion in the papers' columns.'

But the Murdoch media's consistent anti-Labor campaign has continued unabated to date. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd branded Rupert Murdoch's media empire a 'cancer on democracy'. And the previous Coalition Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull called it 'the most powerful political actor' in Australia, 'an absolute threat to our democracy'. Mr Rudd lodged a petition to establish a Royal Commission into media diversity in Australia. It received a record number of signatures of more than half a million within a few weeks and led to a Senate Inquiry into the concentration of the news media in Australia and Mr Murdoch's role in it. The executive summary of the Inquiry's findings acknowledges that Australia has one of the highest media concentrations in the world, citing the Murdoch media empire's dominance as the most glaring.

The committee recommended 'that the Commonwealth initiate a judicial inquiry, with the powers of a royal commission, to determine whether the existing system of media regulation is fit-for-purpose and to investigate the concentration of media ownership in Australia…' The committee further recommended 'that the judicial inquiry's terms of reference include consideration of a single, independent media regulator to harmonise news media standards and oversee an effective process for remedying complaints.'

However, even though the Senate Inquiry published its recommendations

already in December 2021, neither the Coalition Government nor the Opposition has so far acted on the recommendations.

Could this be because of a fear of an adverse Murdoch media empire reaction to accepting the Committee's recommendations?

Yet the consequence of the apparent fear of both the Coalition and of the Labor Opposition of substantially deviating from the Murdoch media positions seems have been a further shift to the right of both major parties.

And such policies, especially on climate action, media diversity, gender equality and living wages are increasingly out of touch with the popular electoral views, especially amongst young people of whom more than one million and six hundred thousand are enrolled to vote in 2022.

Results from Triple J's "What's Up In Your World" survey, which was conducted in April 2022 and surveyed more than 1,600 18-29 year-olds, show that young Australians are highly politically engaged but extremely disappointed with the leadership of the major parties.

The survey found the top five issues for young voters are the environment, climate change, general health, mental health and housing.

On all these issues they demand more radical policies than either of the major parties offer.

In so far as the general electorate also shares their views, there could be a shift in electoral support to the left, which may also include support for more independents.