The concentration of media power in print and on TV in the hands of Rupert Murdoch in Australia is the worst in the world.

Australia is no longer a free democracy. It is, instead, an oligarchy whose political leadership kowtows to an elite of media moguls and multifarious magnates.

This is, perhaps, the only conclusion one can reach after listening to the words of former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at Monday’s media diversity inquiry in Canberra. A member of the elite himself, Turnbull should know.

“The most powerful political actor in Australia is not the Liberal Party or the National Party or the Labor Party, it is News Corporation,” Turnbull told the Senate inquiry.

“It is utterly unaccountable. It is controlled by an American family and their interests are no longer, if they ever were, coextensive with our own.”

Turnbull’s words, given fair coverage everywhere bar News Corp outlets, shouldn’t shock Australians as much as they probably did. That “we are young and free” line from our national anthem, long a catalyst for cultural cringe, is more likely to engender embarrassment these days because – more and more – it seems like a falsehood.

“News Corp has … an acute influence with politicians,” said Kim Williams, who ran Rupert Murdoch’s Australian arm from 2011 to 2013. Perhaps the first large-scale demonstration of that power came with Paul Keating’s media deregulation in the 1980s, which allowed Murdoch to expand his media reach into Melbourne by acquiring the Herald and Weekly Times.

That’s right, Labor politicians were as vulnerable to Murdoch’s power as conservatives. The benefits to Murdoch of his new media rules won’t have escaped Keating, who in turn enjoyed relatively positive coverage from News Corp outlets while Treasurer.

More recently, Murdoch’s ideological soulmates in the LNP coalition effectively nobbled the National Broadband Network – which delivers Netflix and other competition to News Corp’s Foxtel – by leaving the last section of the NBN unconnected unless customers paid for it. This has rendered our broadband one of the slowest and least reliable in the world.

Decisions like these are what you get from an oligarchy, not a free democracy. They are not made in the interests of the voters, but of a small clique to whom the decisionmakers bow on pain of venomous retribution from Murdoch’s well-drilled editors, scribes and commentators at Sky News Australia and an array of metropolitan, regional and suburban print outlets representing more than 70 per cent of our newsprint circulation.

You’d think the general public would be up in arms over such skulduggery, but in many instances they’re busy blaming migrants or greenies or LGBTQ+ for their woes. There are no prizes for guessing which media outlets distract their attention with stories of scary brown people and other easy targets.

It gets worse. In an interview last October, Murdoch’s son James Murdoch told the New York Times he left his father’s empire because of outright disinformation.

In the US, such falsehoods helped convince 79 per cent of Republicans that last November’s election was “stolen” for Democrat Joe Biden through illegal voting and fraud (source: Politico). That in turn helped incite a mob of Donald Trump supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January in an attempt to overturn his defeat, leading to the deaths of five people, including one police officer.

If you think it can’t happen here, check out the opinion pages of the Herald Sun or Daily Telegraph, or the primetime line-up of far-right talking heads on Sky News. The concentration of media power in Murdoch’s hands here in Australia is the worst in the world.

PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.

Turnbull faced a ferocious campaign from News Corp just last month, after which he was removed as head of a climate advisory board in Sydney. He scoffed at the NSW government’s denials that Murdoch was to blame.

“This is like somebody who is taken down to the police station, beaten over the head until they finally sign a fake confession, the last line of which says: ‘I confirm that I did so of my own free will’,” Turnbull told the Senate inquiry.

It’s true that both Turnbull and another former PM and anti-Murdoch campaigner, Kevin Rudd, have axes to grind after both were targeted by News Corp. Notably, both refrained from Murdoch-bashing as they ascended in politics.

But their criticism checks out. “Being as candid as I have been today is something that you would do at your peril if you were Prime Minister or a minister or you wanted to keep staying in parliament, because the retribution would be very intense,” Turnbull told the inquiry, explaining his earlier silence on the Murdoch menace.

Of course, it isn’t just Murdoch conducting himself like an untouchable oligarch. On Sunday night, Seven West Media’s Kerry Stokes refused to stand down an executive of his, former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith, after 60 Minutes alleged the latter dug a hole in the backyard of his Sunshine Coast house and buried evidence of his horrific war crimes.

“It’s bizarre. Other businesses would have just gone, ‘Mate, it’s not tenable’. I offered to resign [over the war crimes scandal] and they said, ‘Nah’,” Roberts-Smith told an associate in a secretly-recorded conversation. Roberts-Smith vehemently denies the war crimes allegations.

Who refuses to at least act like a good corporate citizen by keeping an alleged war criminal on the payroll? Who perverts government decision-making for his own commercial interests, or winds up a mob against incoming governments who might have other ideas? A member of an oligarchy, that’s who.

Winston Churchill once famously described democracy as “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. He’s right: of all the modern forms of government we’ve tried, only one gives the governed a glimpse of participatory input, with all the benefits that flow from that.

It’s far from perfect, but it’s what we’ve got. Democracy is under serious assault by the onset of oligarchy, which renders democracy a shell of its former self and leaves the governed mere spectators with no real voice in Australia’s future.

Leading the assault on democracy are media moguls with deep pockets and prodigious power. Standing in their way isn’t the Labor Party in any serious sense; rather, it’s a couple of ex-PMs and plucky activists like former Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Milner, whose “Don’t Read the Herald Sun” stickers are popping up guerrilla-style around Melbourne, not unlike ‘Release Navalny’ graffiti in Moscow.

Milner probably won’t be poisoned any time soon, but the odds he faces are almost as daunting. If you care about Australia clinging to the vestiges of democracy, you might want to subscribe to his cause.