Murdoch is right: we need more refugees

In a free country, you get to say what you like, subject to a number of regulations that aim to protect other freedoms. Freedom from scurrilous defamation, freedom from racial vilification, freedom from ‘trial by media’ (hence our contempt of court laws) and freedom from the collapse of the nation’s institutions and military defences (via the official secrets act).

And this columnist’s über-boss, Rupert Murdoch, whose company News Ltd owns Business Spectator, celebrated freedom of speech in his address to the Lowy Institute this week.

He said: “You can’t have a free democracy if you don’t have a free media that can provide vital and independent information to the people.”

There are many views on how ‘free’ media markets are in Australia, and we heard a lot of passionate critiques of Labor’s attempt in March to regulate them to greater ‘freedom’ – which, in the opinion of then-communications minister Stephen Conroy, meant reducing News Ltd’s dominance of the metropolitan newspaper market.

On that topic I will let stand what I wrote back in March – the brief version of which is that the national media has, during the Gillard years, blown small issues out of all proportion and skipped some of the bigger, tougher issues that could actually make life better for Australians. In short, journalists need to do much, much better (Who’s afraid of Stephen Conroy?, March 13).

But free speech wasn’t all that was on Murdoch’s mind this week. He addressed two points that have been misused as political weapons in the past four years.

First, he reiterated his belief that Australia should continue a robust immigration program. To demographers and economists, that’s a no-brainer. However, with the complicty of the ‘he-said-she-said’ style of journalism Australians have become too comfortable with, this was seriously raised as a problem at the 2010 election.

At that time, both sides of politics (afraid of losing the xenophobe vote) paid lip service to the idea that Big Australia was something to fear (The invention of cloud campaigning, July 2010).

Thankfully we were spared such silliness at the 2013 election. With Labor’s silly campaign handing power to Tony Abbott on a platter, there was no time to even broach the topic.

And so back to Murdoch’s vision for Australia. He is right to celebrate free speech, right to celebrate immigration as an important lifeblood of the nation. And he is right to point, by implication at least, to the incredible entrepreneurial spirit that arrives in this nation with some its most disadvantaged migrants – that is, refugees.

Murdoch praised former refugee, now billionaire Westfield supremo Frank Lowy, who “came here with a single suitcase. His only real assets were his wit and his willingness to work hard.  It turns out that these are the assets that matter most”.

He added: “We want people to strive, to make the most of their talent and not to be content with their lot.  That is the essence of an egalitarian meritocracy.”

He is right on that score. But there are tensions between those three themes of Murdoch’s speech.

The Abbott government has just won a landslide election that, after the carbon tax, was fought on the mantra of ‘stop the boats’.

Australia’s ‘free’ media did not do enough to disambiguate (as Greg Hunt’s favourite research tool Wikipedia likes to call it) the separate notions of ‘stop dangerous seaborne arrivals’ and ‘stop refugee arrivals’.

Had we teased these issues out during the election, a party such as Abbott’s could, in theory, have been both pro-refugees and anti-boats.

In the event, that did not happen. Voters largely went to the polls answering the dog-whistle call that ‘stop the boats’ also meant ‘stop the refugees’.

Australia needs free speech. It needs migration. And it needs the driven entrepreneurs that have so often emerged from the large cohorts of refugees Australia has taken in over the past six decades.

Perhaps, in Murdoch’s own papers as well as their Fairfax competitors, it’s time to have a serious debate about taking in more refugees – and the huge contribution they make to this nation – without mentioning ‘boats’ at all.