Phone hacking prompts Australian debate over Murdoch's power

Calls for full inquiry into media ownership and regulation in tycoon's birth country, where News Ltd has 150 newspapers

Guardian, Alison Rourke in Sydney, Thursday 14 July 2011

Julia Gillard, the Australian prime minister, has said the phone-hacking
 scandal raises questions about the role of the press in a democracy.
Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images

Pressure is mounting in Australia, where Rupert Murdoch built his first newspaper empire, for an inquiry into the media in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

The prime minister, Julia Gillard said she was "truly disgusted" by the intrusions of privacy carried out by the Murdoch papers in the UK and that she was open to the idea of a review in Australia.

Gillard also said she was not surprised events in Britain were raising questions about the "role of the media in our democracy and the media's role generally".

The leader of the Green party, Bob Brown, called for a full inquiry into the ownership and regulation of Australia's media. "Following events in Fleet Street it's very clear that there is sufficient concern about the potential of similar events (happening) in this country," he said.

"There's been a massive abuse by News of The World and we need to learn from that and not just sit on our hands and hope it doesn't happen here," said Brown. According to Brown, he had been given conflicting advice as to whether hacking into people's phone messages was illegal in Australia.

"You can't hack into a server or a servant of a server but the law appears to be silent on hacking into someone else's message bank," he said.

In Australia, News Ltd, which is wholly owned by News Corp, runs around 150 national, capital city, regional and suburban news outlets, including the only national newspaper, the Australian. Murdoch owns the only daily newspaper in four capital cities: Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide and Hobart. News Ltd dominates the Sunday newspaper market with about 70% of readership. There has been no formal suggestion of phone hacking by any employee of News Ltd in Australia.

Nick Pullen, a media lawyer and partner at the firm HWL Ebsworth in Melbourne, said Australian law on hacking voicemails was grey, partly because there had not been any litigation on phone hacking in Australia.

"There's no court findings into the interpretations of the current law on the ability to get into a person's message bank by trying out pin numbers once you get on to their server," Pullen said.

Brown has called for a statutory watchdog to replace the self-regulation of newspapers in Australia. At the moment, according to the Australian Press Council, self-regulation "rests on the willingness of publishers and editors to … adhere voluntarily to ethical standards and admit mistakes promptly".

News Ltd's chariman, John Hartigan, told ABC television an inquiry into the operation of the media in Australia was "totally unnecessarily". He said regulation by the Press Council, which is an industry-funded body, was sufficient.

On Wednesday Hartigan announced a review of all News Ltd editorial expenditure over the past three years to confirm payments to contributors and other third parties were for "legitimate services". He said he had no reason to suspect any wrongdoing. "I've worked in newspapers for 45 years, a lot of that as an editor," Hartigan told ABC TV.

"I know the newsrooms, I know how cultures develop and I'm hugely confident that there is no improper or unethical behaviour in our newsrooms."

News Ltd has said the review at its newspapers will have an "independent element". But Brown questioned whether any findings would "suffer the same fate as the many boxes of documents which went to the Metropolitan police".

The proposed inquiry will also look into the concentration of media ownership in Australia. "It warrants a look at who owns the media and why we have the biggest concentration of press ownership, by News Ltd, in the democratic western world," Brown said.

Chris Nash, professor of journalism at Melbourne's Monash University, said: "The fact that the Murdoch papers have a clear political agenda on very specific issues is a problem for democracy."

Over the past few months News Ltd papers have been waging a forceful campaign against the Gillard government and its alliance with the Greens. "The way it operates is [conservative opposition leader] Tony Abbott creates headlines and News Ltd prints them," Nash said.

Hartigan has denied there is any company-wide directive to try to oust the Gillard government.

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