by Fia Cumming
Sun-Herald November 14th 1999
Battle lines have been drawn in a war that;s coming to a TV screen near you
For media tycoon Rupert Murdoch's opening of his multi-million Sydney film studio, organisers chose a Star Wars theme.
The use of the George Lucas epic was particularly apt. Particularly in the light of what has been happening in the midst of his Australian empire.
For while Prime Minister John Howard was one of the guests allowed to "walk the red carpet" at the glittering Fox Studios celebration party, Murdoch's Australian newspapers have been training their Darth Vader light sabres on the PM for weeks.
And even The Daily Telegraph - the paper which claimed to be the PM's favourite - has taken to training its guns on Howard's performance.
The divisions with Howard were most obvious over the Republic. The campaigning by Murdoch's Australian papers for the YES case before the referendum was embarrassingly blatant.
Son and heir Lachlan weighed into the debate with bouquets for pro-republic Treasurer Peter Costello and brickbats for his boss.
But with the referendum out of the way, Murdoch's antagonism towards Howard and his Government is barely dimmed.
While The Telegraph is unlikely to ever go as far as its scornful dismissal of Opposition Leader Kim Beazley during the last Federal election ("Like being savaged by dead sheep"), the undertones are ominous.
It will be hard for Howard to forget The Australian's cartoon last Monday of a man in a portrait gallery saying "And this one is John Howard, son - the man who singlehandedly turned the country into the laughing stock that it is today."
But criticism is not limited to the Republic issue.
Rupert Murdoch also weighed into foreign policy with a not so veiled criticism of the Howard Government's Asian policies, although he defended the decision to send peacekeeping forces to East Timor.
He said Australia had to be very careful about intervening in other countries for moral reasons, and what was dressed up as morality was often just emotionalism.
"This is real problem for Australia as it reinforces an image, a stereotype, which Australia has sensibly and strenuously been trying to move away from for 30 years," he said.
In September, Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of News Limited Australia, had also ventured into domestic politics with a left hook at Howard, contrasting his resistance to the Republic with Treasurer Peter Costello's support.
"The same individual (Costello) who had the courage to drive through economic reform has also found the courage on this issue and, in doing so, has again laid his leadership credentials in front of the Australian electorate," Lachlan declared.
To many close observers, Rupert Murdoch's long held support for a Republic was just an excuse to get stuck into a government, and a Prime Minister, with whom he is increasingly impatient.
Murdoch and Howard are both wily, long term and highly successful operatives in their respective fields, business and politics.
But at the interface of business and politics is the media, and that is what this brewing fight is all about. Digital television, to be precise, and Murdoch's ability to make money out of it.
Murdoch wants quick and unrestricted access to digital TV, either via a fourth commercial TV channel or through datacasting, providing Internet-style text and pictures to your TV. Howard so far has refused to give it to him.
Government officials at the sharp end of media policy will not talk about the lobbying by the Murdochs, except to say they have been lobbied "by everyone" (including John Fairfax publishers of The Sun Herald).
But one minister admitted: "I know News Ltd feels miffed by our decision on digital TV.
"Murdoch has long been a republican of sorts, so I don't think that can be explained and other way; but I think there is continuing tension over digital."
Murdoch's lobbyists including Lachlan and Grahame Morris, Howard's former confidante and senior adviser, have worn out the carpet in Parliament House.
But the tensions will mount in the next few weeks because the Prime Minister has an opportunity to change his mind when Cabinet considers its digital policy.
So far, in a bid to share digital as widely as possible, the government has given the free-to-air broadcasters a head start on the new technology and an incentive to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to make it available free.
From January 2001, the five TV networks TEN, Seven, Nine, the ABC and SBS will be given extra space on the TV spectrum to simulcast their programs in digital and analogue.
By law they must broadcast minimum levels of High Definition TV, or HDTV, the super high quality TV, and in return are guaranteed no competition from new TV operators until 2008 at the earliest.
From January 2001, other companies interested in multimedia, including Pay TV operators, wil be able to buy spectrum space to provide datacasting services.
But datacasting has yet to be defined. Cabinet will soon decide whether to limit it to text and pictures (which Nine's owner Kerry Packer wants) or allow much livelier images including video, which Murdoch wants.
Murdoch could also get his way through another avenue. Although the transition to digital TV is currently locked into law, the Productivity Commission is holding an inquiry into broadcasting in the digital age.
Its draft report issued last month was an invitation to News Ltd and other would-be digital players to redouble their lobbying efforts.
It recommended that regulatory restraints on new digital services should be minimised, and the law preventing any new commercial TV licenses before the end of 2006 "should immediately be repealed".
Murdoch, who once owned the TEN Network but had to sell it because of cross-ownership laws, is angry about Communications Minister Richard Alston's laws because he wants to set up a new network.
They want the digital technology to be open to all and sundry, including newcomers involving possibly a fourth commercial television network, and used for datacasting and interactive uses as well as HD-TV.
Murdoch, invigorated by the marital double of his new wife Wendi and Lachlan's wedding to Sara O'Hare, will not take no quietly.
But Howard the "Lazarus with a double bypass" who came back from defeat as Opposition Leader by Andrew Peacock in 1989 to become one of the Liberal Party's most successful leaders, is as stubborn and tenacious as Murdoch is brash and swashbuckling.
Few, if any, Prime Ministers of the past two decades have dared to stand up to Murdoch for long, fearing the wrath of his newspapers.
All but two of the nation's 20 national and capital city newspapers supported a YES vote, but the people said NO.
"It says to all those who say the media is all powerful that they've always been wrong," said David Armstrong, editor-in-chief of The Australian, "The media do not have power."