DAVID WOIWOD: There are new calls to action this morning for a nationwide shift in spending habits to support Australian made products.\u00a0<\/p>\n
MONIQUE WRIGHT: Now the \u2018Back Australia\u2019 campaign is highlighting how everyday buying choices can boost local jobs and industries adding $16 billion to the economy \u2026\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
– Weekend Sunrise, Seven, 26 October 2025<\/p>\n
Hello, welcome to Media Watch, I\u2019m Linton Besser.<\/p>\n
And yes, it\u2019s time once again to drape ourselves in the flag and pour pocket money into Aussie businesses to rescue the country\u2019s future, with News Corp\u2019s capital city tabloids leading the charge:<\/p>\n
LET\u2019S BACK AUSTRALIA<\/p>\n
PM and business leaders pledge to help us rebuild our great nation<\/p>\n
– Sunday Herald Sun, The Sunday Mail, The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Mail (SA), Sunday Territorian, Sunday Tasmanian, 26 October 2025<\/p>\n
With pages and pages of rah-rah for a restoration of good old Aussie-made:\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
RETURN TO A NATION THAT MAKES THINGS<\/p>\n
Buying local could generate an extra $16 billion<\/p>\n
– Sunday Herald Sun, 26 October 2025<\/p>\n
All of it proudly supported by a list of everyone\u2019s favourite companies from retailers to boot-fitters to one of the big four banks.<\/p>\n
The impassioned campaign led by News Corp personality Joe Hildebrand, who appeared not just on the News Corp-owned Sky News but also on rival Seven, along with some \u2018Back Australia\u2019 livery and Westpac-supplied stats:<\/p>\n
JOE HILDEBRAND: We need to be able to make stuff here not just for the sake of our economy but for the sake of our national security and our sovereignty as well\u00a0<\/p>\n
– Seven News 6pm (Sydney), 26 October 2025<\/p>\n
With a whole week of nightly packages on Seven featuring local businesses as well as campaign partners like Twiggy Forrest and Harvey Norman boss Katie Page.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And a week of green-and-gold banners splashed through the pages of the tabloids.\u00a0<\/p>\n
News Corp has said its campaign had its genesis in feedback from readers eager to back Australian companies, and well may that be the case. \u00a0<\/p>\n
But it is also plain to anyone with half a grey cell that this was also a mega-money-spinner designed to salvage News Corp\u2019s ailing balance sheet, and which\u00a0as The Australian Financial Review\u00a0pointed out somehow overlooked several tenets of modern economics: \u00a0<\/p>\n
Australia\u2019s economic future depends not on romanticising industries the world has long since left behind, but embracing innovation, competition and openness.<\/p>\n
– The Australian Financial Review, 26 October 2025<\/p>\n
Despite his investment in famed local boot-maker R.M. Williams, Andrew Forrest, as well as Dick Smith and Katie Page, were in the eyes of the financial press a curious trio to help push Australia\u2019s return to manufacturing.<\/p>\n
And why might that be?<\/p>\n
Smith made millions selling repackaged Chinese electronics \u2026 Page makes a fortune selling Chinese and Korean TVs and gadgets \u2026 and Forrest is a billionaire because China buys his iron ore by the tonne \u2026<\/p>\n
– The Australian Financial Review, 26 October 2025<\/p>\n
\u2018Back Australia\u2019 also provided a glowing halo for sponsors who have suffered the odd\u00a0reputational hiccup including Qantas, fined for the illegal sacking of staff, Westpac, in trouble for alleged insider trading, and Coles, which was recently found to have underpaid staff to the tune of tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n
With his usual subtlety, Crikey\u2019s firebrand Bernard Keane put it this way:<\/p>\n
Doubtless all are grateful to News Corp for helping them whitewash their reputations.<\/p>\n
– Crikey, 27 October 2025<\/p>\n
Come to think of it, are all of these sponsors really so dinky-di?<\/p>\n
What about Cadbury, which is owned by multinational confectionary colossus Mondel\u0113z?<\/p>\n
Or Vodafone, whose majority owners are variously domiciled in Britain and the Cayman Islands?<\/p>\n
Or, dare I ask, News Corporation which despite all them fighting words is in fact an American company headquartered in Manhattan, as this exchange on Sky News rather delicately acknowledged:<\/p>\n
ROSS GREENWOOD: So we should say one thing, that is News Corporation is a global business \u2026 \u00a0<\/p>\n
How do you reconcile that with a Backing Australia campaign?<\/p>\n
MICHAEL MILLER: Our origins are in Australia. We are, regardless of where we operate in the world \u2026 \u00a0<\/p>\n
We are \u2026 (indistinct) quartered here.\u00a0<\/p>\n
– Business Now, Sky News Australia, 2 November 2025<\/p>\n
Nice save, Michael.<\/p>\n
It might also be worth pointing out that neither News Corp nor Vodafone has deigned to pay any corporate income tax in Australia for the better part of a decade:<\/p>\n
To \u201cBack Australia\u201d the least a corporation can do is pay its basic corporate income tax to help fund essential public services, rather than abusing loopholes to shift profits offshore.<\/p>\n
– Email, Jason Ward, Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability & Research, 31 October 2025<\/p>\n
Economists have told Media Watch the News Corp campaign suffered a couple of, shall we say, blind spots which:<\/p>\n
\u2026 ignore the economic reality about the cost of living \u2026 The confection of buying Australian made quickly disappears when your money doesn\u2019t stretch as far as it did \u2026<\/p>\n
– Email, Prof Paul Kofman, University of Melbourne, 31 October 2025<\/p>\n
And as Saul Eslake explained, a larger manufacturing sector would mean:<\/p>\n
\u2026 our overall standards of living would be lower \u2026 \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2026 Why would we want to do that, just for whatever \u2018warm inner glow\u2019 might be generated from knowing that we were \u2018making more stuff\u2019?<\/p>\n
– Email, Saul Eslake, Corinna Economic Advisory, 31 October 2025<\/p>\n
These are of course mere inconveniences which could never have stood in the way of this freight-train of sponsored content.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In fact, campaigns like this appear to have become a core feature of the tabloid\u2019s business model with no fewer than four other examples in the past year alone where news pages, once-sacrosanct, were happily transformed into rallying cries for energy insurance, education and mining industries and which have raked in millions. \u00a0<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for News Corp told us:<\/p>\n
Back Australia is not calling for a simplistic, cross-the-board resurrection of the manufacturing industry \u2026 it is advocating for governments at every level to get policy settings right to unleash investment and innovation in areas where Australian enterprises can win.<\/p>\n
– Email, News Corp Spokesperson, 3 November 2025<\/p>\n
We asked Seven News if its stories were also sponsored and a representative told us:\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our involvement was purely editorial – no payment, no sponsorship – just stories we covered because they mattered to our audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n
– Email, Seven News Spokesperson, 3 November 2025<\/p>\n
Last month News Corp filed its latest financial results and they weren\u2019t pretty, with falls in circulation, advertising and subscription revenue and an after-tax loss of more than $27 million.<\/p>\n
So whatever merit there might be in this patriotic feel-good campaign, let\u2019s not mistake this for anything but a cash-grab by a 20th century newspaper business doing what it must to survive in the 21st.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DAVID WOIWOD: There are new calls to action this morning for a nationwide shift in spending habits to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":["post-259678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}