In a revelation that may confound those who take a hyper-partisan view of politics, Malcolm Turnbull’s new memoir outlines the part he played in the establishment of Guardian Australia.
As Turnbull writes, in the seven years we have been operating, Guardian Australia has only rarely endorsed his or his government’s policies.
Since we are a progressive publication and he is a politician of the centre right, that should hardly come as a shock. But his part in our establishment might surprise some who approach relationships between the media and politicians on terms of mutually beneficial transactions. We don’t work that way.
“I was beginning to despair about the state of Australian journalism,” Turnbull writes in A Bigger Picture.
“I wasn’t especially concerned about the political slant of one outlet or another, but more about the fact that newsrooms were shrinking and editorial standards were dropping to the loopy standards of the twittersphere. Gina Rinehart was threatening to buy Fairfax – no doubt so that its newspapers could emulate her own ultra-rightwing views.
“In June 2012, I suggested to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the UK’s Guardian, that he should establish an Australian edition. For a modest cost, he could start a digital-only edition. That would provide a good base from which to build. Alan was interested. We exchanged some rough numbers and he concluded he’d need $20m of underwriting for three years – if it couldn’t get to break-even in that time, it never would.
“Given my political role, I could hardly participate myself, but I thought I knew someone who would. Graeme Wood had made hundreds of millions of dollars from an online travel booking business called Wotif. He was on the political left and had been generous in the past to the Greens. He’d also recently funded a progressive free online newspaper called the Global Mail. It wasn’t going to make it. So, I suggested to Graeme he drop the Global Mail and instead use his fortune to bankroll an Australian edition of the Guardian.
“Its progressive politics suited him plus it was one of the greatest newspapers in the English language, nearly 200 years old and, unusually, wasn’t controlled by any media mogul but rather an independent trust dedicated to ‘quality, independent liberal journalism’.
“Once Graeme Wood was on board, I introduced Rusbridger to two seasoned Canberra political writers, Lenore Taylor and Katharine Murphy (AKA murpharoo). He sent his deputy, Kath Viner, to Australia to be the first editor. The (digital) paper exceeded expectations, broke even after a few years and Wood got all his money back. Clearly, my deal-making skills remained intact.”
Turnbull’s recollection skips over a long and complicated process that followed those initial introductions, after which Turnbull had no further involvement as far as I know. I had some early conversations with Rusbridger about the Australian media landscape and then waited; first to hear from Rusbridger about whether his discussions with Wood had amounted to anything, then to meet Viner when she came to Australia, and then to find out whether she had appointed me to her team. It took almost a year.
Rusbridger has also written about the process in his own memoir, Breaking News, published two years ago.
“In the autumn of 2012 I had a weekend call from a senior Australian politician. He planted the idea that we should think of starting an Australian edition of the website. The Murdoch domination of the Australian press scene was overwhelming, but it had been historically counterbalanced to some extent by the Fairfax titles, especially the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. But the Fairfax group was at that moment in some danger of being taken over by Australia’s richest person, an iron ore magnate named Gina Rinehart. In 2017, Forbes valued her personal wealth at $16bn: she could have financed Fairfax from her small change. The group’s journalists feared she would turn the papers into cheerleaders for the mining industry. Suddenly Australia’s media scene looked very unbalanced indeed.
“It was a nice idea, but unaffordable, unless a philanthropist, concerned about media plurality, could be found to support the idea. Within weeks, such a figure emerged, Graeme Wood, a digital entrepreneur in his 60s who was passionate about the environment. He was willing to underwrite for the first few years. If we turned Guardian Australia into a going concern, we’d pay him back. If not, he was happy to write the investment off. It was an interesting new model of financing journalism. Wood obviously had to understand he would have no say at all in the editorial stance of the operation. It appeared he did.”
For me, joining Guardian Australia was a career-defining leap into the unknown, from a job I loved at the then Fairfax papers to a digital startup that was at the time more hope and ideas than a reality.
As I’ve written before, my motivation was to introduce a new voice into one of the most concentrated media markets in the world, to help build a quality, independent news option in a media landscape that had already started to crumble.
Even before we learned that Rusbridger and Wood were talking, Katharine Murphy and I had been thinking about ways we might start up a new online political publication, a conversation we paused to see what became of the idea of establishing the Guardian in Australia and whether we would have roles in it.
Three years after Guardian Australia’s 2013 launch I was appointed as editor. Four years later we have 11.6 million Australian readers and we are the fourth most read news site in the country.
It’s true that we often did not see eye to eye with Turnbull politically, but we agree with him that “facts and professional journalism still matter”. We’re determined to continue to provide our expanding readership with exactly that kind of reporting, and we’re pleased he made those introductions eight years ago.