 A video has gone viral this week of an ex-Australian Prime Minister absolutely destroying a senior journalist at a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper. So some context first, Malcolm Turnbull, he's the person who's doing the attack, who's launching the challenge. He was a Prime Minister for Australia's centre-right liberal party, so it's really quite remarkable that he is taking on a Murdoch journalist in such a way. Let's take a look. We have many publications that are dedicated to promoting the cause of climate change and radical action on climate change. So that's okay, is it? It's okay to be a propagandist for one side, but if one is a critic or skeptic about some of these issues, that's not okay. And so what you've just disclosed is the fundamental problem that the company you work for and its friends in politics like Trump and others have turned this issue of physics into an issue of values or identity. Now saying you believe, saying that you believe or disbelieve in global warming is like saying you believe or disbelieve in gravity. You've turned something that should be a question of engineering and economics into undiluted ideology and idiocy and we are paying the price in delayed action to address global warming and your employer, Paul, has got a huge share of the blame for this. It is a shocking legacy. Now listen, I don't think it's correct to say that the votes cast at recent elections where the party that had the more radical and proactive stance in terms of taking action on climate change that they were beaten and those parties have been beaten and this is essentially because of News Corporation, okay? I think you exaggerate the impact that we have. That's what Rupert always is to say to me. Say, oh, we don't have a very big audience, we're not that influential. Talk to Lachlan. Look, I've had all of that flannel for years. The reality is News Corp and Murdoch have done enormous damage to Western democracy and in particular to the United States and Australia and in particular on the subject of global warming. You know, we had 12 million hectares of our country burnt last summer and your newspapers were saying was all the consequence of some arsonists and James Murdoch was so disgusted he dissociated himself from the family business. Now, what does that tell you? How offensive, how biased, how destructive? Does it have to be, Paul, before you will say one of our greatest writers and journalists, it's enough, I'm out of it? I mean, how long will you keep apologising? How dare you start telling me what I should do in terms of my career and lecture me about what moral position I should take? How dare you say that? There I do it. I dare to do it. And I'm saying to you, Paul, it is about time that people that work for the Murdoch organization speak up and say publicly what they say privately, speak up and do what James Murdoch had the courage to do. And clearly too many of the employees I love that. I also love the way that he didn't bulk when he goes, you know, how dare you. It's really the last resort of a chance, you know, someone who's saying, I've clearly lost the argument. So what I'm going to have to do is say the fact you're even making this argument is somehow problematic and it should be out of bounds. But Malcolm Turnbull just says, No, of course I dare to do this. You should speak out against your boss because he's destroying our country. What did you make of it? Yeah, I thought it was a really important moment actually, because you know, Australia is is obviously where Robert Murdoch started. It's the ground zero really for for the tentacles of his business empire. You know, there's some really amazing stories. If you want to know friends when he bought the news the world in this country in the late 1960s, you know, we had something called capital controls. And it was very difficult to get large sums of money in and out of countries. He only could do this because he was owed a political favor by the Australian deputy prime minister, I think at the time, because he'd screwed somebody else over on his behalf. So his entire business model, how he conducts himself, everything he's ever done is based on deception, you know, being nasty, sort of Machiavellian tricks. Right from the get go, whether it was the purchase of the news, the world, whether it was the purchase of the sun, by the way, when he did that was a labor backing newspaper. He promised the print unions when he bought it that the people would always back labor. Well, the last very long that promise didn't. So, you know, that's the guy's modus operandi. And I think, you know, he's he's old enough in his early 80s, right? He might live another 20 years, but, you know, he's clearly coming to the sort of the autumn phase of his career. I think when he does pass away, there will be a serious conversation to be had, you know, how many people is this man, you know, indirectly, indirectly responsible for killing? Right. And of course, we can never we can never quantify that. But the grim reality is, you know, we talk about decarbonizing by 2035 or 2050, you know, Biden is saying 2050, which is a great target by the standards of America, by the standards of a country, which wasn't even in the Paris climate agreement under Donald Trump. But the reality is we shouldn't decarbonize already. You know, the reality is there's more carbon CO2 in our atmosphere today than at any time since primates have existed. And because of that increased concentration of CO2, temperatures will go up, even if we don't, you know, emit a single, you know, whatever the measure is of weighing CO2 into the atmosphere, just by virtue of what we've already done, the planet will probably get 1.5 degrees warmer, maybe more. Now, if we go to two degrees, we've had this conversation so many times, you could go to two to three to four to five, some kind of sequence of feedback, scratch what's called runaway climate change. But even two degrees is really, really catastrophic. You know, people are very open about what the implications of that are. Tens, if not hundreds of millions of climate refugees, glaciers, which melt, which provide clean drinking water for billions of people rising sea levels and so on and so forth. And so I think, like I say, a serious analysis of Rupert Murdoch, the cost benefit of his life in his obituary will be, well, I think, you know, his primary legacy was he destroyed. He undermined, he degraded democracy in a number of countries, but also he set back the conversation. So, singularly, I can't think of a single person who did as much damage as he did when it came to climate change. And that's going to impact our species, you know, probably for centuries, probably forever, because he's been in this game for 40 plus years. And it's not a particularly pleasant record. And that's why, as the gentleman said, Malcolm Turnbull said in that video, that's why his son walked away, you know, earlier this year, I think in January, you had historic wildfires in Australia, you had three billion, three billion animals, were either displaced or killed, three billion. And so even for a centre right politician or a right wing politician like Malcolm Turnbull is a right wing politician, he looks at that and he thinks, look, I want to be popular. I don't want to be remembered as an absolute asshole. He can see the direction of travel. He can see climate change is a very serious threat, but secretly to Australia, right? It's going to face water scarcity, desertification, loss of biodiversity. All of its major cities are on coasts, rising sea levels. And he thinks, Christ, I don't want to be remembered like this. But you can be absolutely sure that's how we're remembered. What's remarkable about that clip is that, you know, obviously it was it was very well articulated. I think it was a very, a very good challenge to that journalist. But everything he said was completely obvious. You know, everyone knows that who works in politics in Britain, in America and Australia, but no one can say it because they're too terrified by Rupert Murdoch, because they know that he is cornered so much of the market. That's why he goes for the high brow paper and the low brow paper so that he can attack you from all angles, which means you can't call out the sun in case he attacks you in the times. Really, really dangerous. It's obviously notable as well that this is an ex-prime minister who's saying that. I don't think a current politician would be able to do that because they'd be too worried about the consequences. I want to go into the context though because Malcolm Turnbull is not the only ex-prime minister in Australia who's currently launching a very vocal campaign against the influence of Rupert Murdoch on Australia. He owns two-thirds of the print press in that country. The only national newspaper is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Some context on Malcolm Turnbull. So he was ousted as prime minister in 2018. That was an internal party coup. So it wasn't, he wasn't dismissed by the electorate, but he was dismissed by back benches to his right who were whipped up by the Murdoch owned press. He, Murdoch in that situation was said to be, again, as Aaron was talking about, outraged that Turnbull was willing to take steps to tackle climate change. This was not radical steps to challenge climate change. Completely inadequate. This is a conservative prime minister. But any steps was too much for Rupert Murdoch. He also is seen to have taken out a Labour prime minister, Kevin Rudd. So like Turnbull, Rudd was ousted in a coup from within his own party. This was back in 2010. We're going to go to an article in which Rudd describes Murdoch as taking his government down because, and this is, again, where it goes into Murdoch protecting his interests at all costs, because as party leader he had planned to roll out fire or optic broadband, which Murdoch saw as a threat to his monopoly on cable news. If you can get high speed broadband, then you go to Netflix. Murdoch doesn't want that. He wants you to rely on his cable channel, also because Kevin Rudd had committed to tackling climate change. Let's go to this piece published in 2018 by Rudd. So he says, Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests in addition to his far right ideological world view of that world view. Rudd says, in Australia, as in America, Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, healing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism. Later in the article, really powerful article actually, Rudd says, Murdoch is also a political bully and a fug who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear, either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically. This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists both left and right too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch's interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them. Aaron, I want to go to you on this because, I mean, obviously, I don't think Murdoch quite owns two-thirds of our print press here, but his influence on British media is phenomenal, extraordinary. The Times, The Sun, Talk Radio used to own part of Sky News. Why don't we see politicians or especially, you know, ex-prime ministers, why isn't Gordon Brown out sort of attacking senior Sky journalists and talking about, sorry, not Sky journalists now, Times journalists or The Sun journalists or Talk Radio hosts, talking about the pernicious influence of of Rupert Murdoch on our politics because it's very similar. I said Australia is a grand zero and that's true because he has a huge control over local media. And of course, in the U.S., people think about Fox News, but also, you know, the U.S. has a huge, he also has The Wall Street Journal, but it has Washington Post. You know, there are also other oligarchs, right? You can be a billionaire in the U.S. and still not be a big deal. There's Jeff Bezos with The Washington Post. There's The New York Times. There's a really rich ecology of new media. There's MSNBC, CNN, you know, so he can't dominate in the way he does in Australia. I think in Britain, actually, I think he dominates in some ways more than anywhere else. So you have The Sun newspaper, which like I say, and the News of the World, which one out of business, you have The Sun newspaper. In 1977, Larry Lam was the editor of The Sun newspaper. He was advising Margaret Thatcher on her speeches, right? He was the editor of The Sun newspaper. 1979, on the day of the election, people say, oh, The Sun loves to write short form digestible content, you know, not overthought. There was a leader article written by Larry Lam in The Sun newspaper. It was around 1500 words. It was like an LRB essay, right? Saying, you must quote from Margaret Thatcher today. Now, who becomes Sir Larry Lam in the very first New Year's Honours list of Margaret Thatcher? 1979, 1980. It's so obvious. It's so clearly corruption, right? We think, and this is what really irritates me. We see it on Twitter when it happens now. This is corruption. It's new. It's not the Britain I know. Are you kidding me? This has been happening for at least 40 years. That's Larry Lam. There are many more like him. Calvin McKenzie is another one. But like you say, Murdoch's strategy is to go both to the bottom end of the market, The Sun newspaper, The News of the World, but also the top end. He bought The Sunday Times in the early 1980s. He shouldn't have been able to buy that, by the way. Margaret Thatcher bypassed the Monopoly's commission. They almost certainly would have stopped him buying it. What happens very quickly, you see the end of Harold Evans' regime. I think Harold Evans probably, very few would dispute him being the finest newspaper editor in post-war Britain. He was the guy that broke, for instance, the Thalidomide story. He was a tenacious editor, came up through the ranks of local media. Very quickly, Robert Murdoch says, I don't want this guy running The Sunday Times. Get rid of him. Somebody else comes in pre-year. Who comes in after that? The one and only Andrew Neal. His first ever job, Andrew Neal, was at the Conservative Research Department. His second job was at the Economist. He said in his own biography he was to the right of Margaret Thatcher. So you have Harold Evans, an incredibly scrupulous man, full of journalistic integrity as well as talent, moving aside effectively for a Thatcherite Rottweiler in the form of Andrew Neal. Sadly, that's the world we all still inhabit, 40 years later. Who was the BBC's interview and command in the last general election? It was Andrew Neal. What was still no longer a thank god, but what was the most widely read tabloid newspaper? It was the Sun newspaper. Who are the right-wing outriders like Julia Hartley-Brua who get to move the whole debate right on the BBC? Where is their primary platform? It's talk radio. Who publishes David Cameron's autobiography? You know, it's the publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch. It's a very, very, very damaging presence which he has in British public life. And I think people really need to understand, there's a very, almost Gramscian worked out, you know, strategy he has, the Sunday Times, the Times, the Sun, talk radio, publishing house. He also has his people, not just in private media, but you can see how they dominate the BBC and public broadcasting. And the BBC is terrified, if it doesn't make concessions to these people, they'll come after them and they'll get cut after cut after cut, which of course they're getting anyway, being a salami slice in 15 years, but you can see how the whole thing moves right. And I think Rupert Murdoch's presence in this country is so incredibly corrosive. Before he buys the News of the World in 1969, it is an entirely different country. Now, I'm not saying that chrism happens because of Rupert Murdoch, of course it doesn't. But again, going back to what is his legacy, I think it'll be being remembered as somebody uniquely responsible for indirectly, you know, killing many people as a result of the nine climate change for decades. In this country, you know, if Britain no longer exists in 10 years time, if the Scots go their own way, if we see this ever deeper dive into this abyss, frankly, with a fragmented public culture of an economy in disintegration, again, I think that's really a lot of that is down to Rupert Murdoch. And I think, yeah, you know, yes, okay, great, they should have an inquiry in Australia. We should have one here. We should have an inquiry into the presence, the corrosive, decaying, decadent, unwelcome, pernicious presence of Rupert Murdoch and Britain. It's only made a poorer, angrier, weaker country.