The day before the Farrer byelection on May 9 in which Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party delivered a seismic shock to the Australian political landscape, her party apparatchiks banned the ABC from attending its election-eve press conference.

Thirteen days later, another party apparatchik told a journalist from Guardian Australia to “shut up” during a press conference in Adelaide about the party’s policy on oil and gas. Hanson was later heard describing the journalist as a “nasty bitch”.

And a week before Farrer, at the byelection in the Victorian state seat of Nepean, the One Nation candidate, Darren Hercus, refused to speak to the ABC because, he said, the ABC was biased.

The response of the media industry and the profession of journalism to these antidemocratic outbursts has been supine: a shameful abrogation of their obligation to defend the freedom of the press.

In Farrer, the other journalists stood by and watched as the ABC reporters were ejected. In the ensuing two weeks, not a single word of condemnation has been uttered publicly by any industry or professional leader as one abusive episode followed another.

Yet across the Pacific we see exactly how this plays out in Trump’s America.

A far-right populist leader attains power and then turns on those elements of the media he does not like, branding them the enemy of the people, undermining public trust in their reporting, and shutting them out from the access they need to do their job.

Hanson is not there yet, but her party’s instincts are clear. The ABC and Guardian Australia have put her and her party under close scrutiny, and this is her party’s response. (Although in fairness it should be added that in terms of the Farrer incident, Hanson herself said the ABC should not have been ejected.)

However, the ABC has been in Hanson’s gunsights for years. As far back as 2017 she made a deal with Malcolm Turnbull’s government: you give me an inquiry into the ABC and I’ll support the changes you want to make to media ownership laws.

It was simply a stunt to divert resources within the ABC and generate negative headlines for the national broadcaster. It led to no change because there was no basis for change.

The proximate cause of her wrath this time was an ABC story revealing a One Nation candidate in the recent South Australian state election was wanted for questioning in the United Kingdom on allegations of sexual touching.

So less than 24 hours before the polls opened in Farrer, Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, ejected two ABC journalists from the party’s press conference, saying contemptuously, “Bye, bye to the ABC”.

As The Age’s media writer later noted, it was straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.

Yet we have not heard a word of condemnation from the ABC’s editor-in-chief, Hugh Marks, or the broadcaster’s chair, Kim Williams. Nor has there been editorial commentary or an opinion column in any of our major daily newspapers. What about the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance? Silence.

To its credit, the ABC TV program Media Watch did not pull its punches. Its presenter, Linton Besser, described One Nation’s attitude to the press, and in particular the ABC, as ugly. Alarm bells should be ringing, he said, because the slurs about “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” might very well be hurled at others too.

Tellingly, he reported the ABC had declined to comment on the Farrer incident.

Otherwise, the nearest any of Australia’s main media outlets came was an article in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald describing the events in Farrer and setting out the background. Useful as a reference, but it did nothing to defend the principle at stake: that in a democracy, the media must be free to cover matters of public interest, and their scope to do so must not be subject to the whims and vagaries of political leaders or parties.

Instead, the media has been consumed by One Nation’s historic victory and the prospect that it will make further gains.

Hanson is presented in an heroic light: the Nine papers quote the London Telegraph referring to Hanson as “Australia’s flame-haired answer to Farage”, a reference to the UK’s far right leader Nigel Farage, who also made historic gains in recent local government elections there.

Less heroically, she is also characterised by these newspapers as “mother duck”.

The Australian tells us “the shake-up is just starting”.

And The Age and SMH capture the mood of the electorate: “Voters tell Canberra: ‘Get stuffed’.”

None of this is to say her party’s result in Farrer, its winning of four seats in South Australia and its continuing high ride in the opinion polls is anything other than a story of immense significance. It deserves all the attention it is getting.

But to ignore her party’s anti-democratic behaviour shows wilful blindness to what is happening in the United States, and suggests a complacency that it can’t happen here.

Ironically, an American journalist, Sinclair Lewis, has a lesson in this for Australia’s media. In 1935 he wrote a novel called “It Can’t Happen Here”, predicting with terrifying accuracy what Trump is doing to the American republic.

On the face of it, the exclusion of the ABC from a party press conference may appear to be a small thing. Moreover, there is a healthy belief in newsrooms that the public are not interested in journalists writing about journalists.

But this is not a story about journalists. It is a story about the functioning of the Australian democracy. It is a story requiring the insight to see a large principle in a small thing, a quality we are entitled to expect in the leaders of the fourth estate.

Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is bankrolling the acquisition of a 9.5% stake in Southern Cross Media by Bruce McWilliam, who worked for Murdoch’s News Corp for nine years and is also a former Seven Network executive.

This venture is costing Rinehart $26 million. It does not buy her a direct stake in Southern Cross, but if McWilliam cannot uphold his side of a security deed he has signed with her, she could take control of it.

Southern Cross is one of Australia’s biggest media organisations. It owns the Seven Network, 7news.com.au, the Triple M and Hit radio brands, a raft of regional radio stations, and West Australian Newspapers.

The Rinehart-McWilliam-Murdoch axis is a formidable force, part of a new combination of media, political and mining interests, reminiscent of that which formed the Liberal Party in the 1940s. The other key figures are News Corp chair Lachlan Murdoch, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and Liberal Party director Tony Abbott.

This is the lens through which it is instructive to assess the media’s coverage of One Nation’s rise since the Farrer byelection on May 9.

To see the parallels with the 1940s, we need to join a few dots.

Rinehart is a benefactor to Hanson. She recently bought her a light aircraft worth $1 million.

She is also a benefactor to Lachlan Murdoch. Her company Hancock Prospecting is sponsoring Sky News, owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation, to the extent of a little over $1 million for a Sky event in Dubbo called the Bush Summit.

Lachlan Murdoch is chairman of News Corporation. In 2023, he appointed Tony Abbott to the board of the News subsidiary, Fox Corporation, a day after Rupert Murdoch announced his retirement. In May this year, Abbott was elected unopposed as federal president of the Liberal Party.

Lessons from the 1940s

The parallels with the 1940s can be seen in volume two of Sally Young’s magisterial two-volume history of the Australia media, Media Monsters, where she describes the machinations that led to the formation of the Liberal Party.

The right was in disarray. Robert Menzies’ comically ill-named United Australia Party had been trounced by Labor at the 1943 election. In the aftermath, Menzies was re-elected leader but made it a condition that he had the right to form a new party.

He was backed by an entity called Collins House. This was a collection of companies connected by networks of powerful business figures who dominated mining and manufacturing. An influential figure was Lachlan Murdoch’s grandfather, Keith Murdoch. As managing director of the all-powerful Herald and Weekly Times (HWT) newspaper group, he provided a vital connection between the Collins House group and the most senior level of politics.

The HWT and other major media proprietors of the day anointed Menzies and his proposal for the new Liberal Party, at a dinner of Collins House magnates in Melbourne in 1944.

The difference between the political circumstances of the 1940s and those of today is that today there are two right-wing political parties contending for supremacy: the Liberal Party and One Nation.

Rinehart seems to be having a million quid each way on which will prevail. By contrast, if the recent coverage of One Nation by The Australian is any guide, Lachlan Murdoch has already cast his vote decisively for the Liberal Party.

The media sober up

For a fortnight after One Nation’s historic win in Farrer, the media, including News Corp media, were intoxicated by the attendant excitement and controversy: the shredding of Liberal Party support; Hanson’s ambition to be prime minister; the possibility of a Liberal-One Nation coalition.

Then, led by The Australian, the media began to sober up. On May 23, its editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, wrote that the Nationals, Liberals and One Nation were locked in a bitter competition with “life or death” consequences.

From that point on, The Australian applied the blowtorch of journalistic scrutiny to One Nation, and The Age and Sydney Morning Herald swiftly followed.

With its customary disregard for journalistic ethics, The Australian made a point of reporting that One Nation’s South Australian parliamentary team was looking like a “rainbow coalition”, one of its MPs having come out as gay with a partner who was an Indonesian Muslim.

But then it got into some serious public-interest journalism. For two days it pursued the party over its handling of rape allegations against an adviser, Sean Black.

It accused Hanson of shirking her parliamentary duties by being absent from 88% of Senate estimates hearings over the past decade. It also drew attention to the fact One Nation had failed to lodge audited financial records for three years in Queensland, and disparaged its policy proposal for citizen-initiated referendums.

On June 3 it drew on all this to publish a thundering editorial. One Nation was drifting further out to the fringes. It would be divisive and disruptive. It had appeared to lurch into blind confusion. Hanson was “not fit in any sense” for the role of prime minister.

On June 6, it led page one with a full-frontal attack, carrying the self-revealing headline: “Hanson hit”. It said Hanson had been caught out misleading voters, raising further questions about her capacity to be prime minister.

The Age and SMH were by then taking up the theme.

Suddenly Hanson was reportedly not sure if she would pitch for the prime ministership. She had admitted having had to close down party branches that had been “infiltrated by extremists”. She had insisted she would not be influenced by Rinehart despite having adopted one of Rinehart’s key policies. In other words, she was all over the place.

On June 6, the papers’ political and international editor, Peter Hartcher, described her as a firebrand provocateur who specialises in grievances without solutions and turns to scapegoats instead – Asians, First Nations people, Muslims. He pointed out that Hanson had answered “no” when asked by another journalist whether she could think of any error that Donald Trump might have made since taking power.

The same day another Age/SMH commentator, Paul Sakkal, wrote about what he called the collection of right-wing forces barracking for Hanson: openly white supremacists, people who rallied alongside neo-Nazis, supporters of the so-called sovereign citizen Dezi Freeman, who had killed two policemen. “A serious governing party cannot retain these relationships.”

A right mess

The big question after all this is how the forces brought together through the new media-politics-mining combination will resolve the obvious tensions involved in creating an effective force on the right of Australian politics.

Murdoch, through The Australian, has clearly signalled his contempt for One Nation, and already has Abbott on his team through Fox Corporation.

Rinehart, with her substantial holdings via McWilliam in Southern Cross Media, could go either way: backing Hanson or the Liberals. And her record indicates she would use her power to influence editorial decision-making to support her choice.

In 2012 she became the largest shareholder in the Fairfax company, with 14.99%. However, she refused to sign the company’s charter of editorial independence, and as a result was refused a seat on the board. She sold out in 2015.

Her history in refusing to sign the Fairfax charter is a strong indicator she would want the option of using her position on any media board to influence editorial decisions.

The old Fairfax newspapers, The Age, the SMH and the Australian Financial Review, are now owned by the Nine Entertainment Company, and stand outside the new cabal. A crucial question is whether they might prove to be a countervailing force.

One Nation set off this earthquake in Australian politics, but how the media play into the aftershocks will be a significant factor in the shaping of the new landscape.

Correction: this article originally referred to Gina Rinehart as “billionaire heiress to the Lang Hancock mining empire”. This has been amended to “mining billionaire”.

Denis Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.