Images (clockwise from top left): Jordan Shanks-Markovina (@FriendlyJordies, Twitter), Peter Dutton (Alex Ellinghausen, Gizmodo) Insets: left – Eddie Kocwa, right – Ryan Shaw (via Twitter), Montclair Socioblog, montage courtesy of the author.

“Sex, Drugs, Big Cars, Papua New Guinea, Peter Dutton. This story has it all.”

So said Friendly Jordies host Jordan Shanks-Merkinova as he revealed shocking new details around a near-broke but politically-connected Papua New Guinea (PNG) company paid $82 million in taxpayer money in 2018 to look after Manus Island refugees.

In a YouTube report posted on Friday, Friendly Jordies revealed that NKW Holdings of PNG, awarded the Manus Island contract while Dutton was Home Affairs Minister and believed by its own bank to be a credit risk which sent inflated invoices to Canberra while making millions of dollars in profits, was in turn buying cars from SCD Remanufactured Vehicles, a Brisbane company owned by LNP donor Eddie Kocwa, a close friend of Dutton’s.

The report went on to claim the LNP’s candidate for the Queensland seat of Lilley at this year’s Federal election, army veteran and trained sniper Ryan Shaw, had held various positions with Kocwa’s companies, before airing photos of Kocwa “at SCD headquarters, with what appears to be lines of white powder in front of him”, and a woman in the attire of a sex worker on the SCD premises.

White powder and scantily-clad women aside, the main point of this international intrigue is that it could easily be confused with the kind of scheme used to launder money. Footyology is not accusing any of the abovementioned of nefarious or illegal activity, we are merely pointing out these arrangements are, well, eyebrow-raising.

Yet to this point, it appears no eyebrows have been raised in the newsrooms of Australia’s mainstream media (MSM). The ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday morning had an ideal opportunity to raise it when host David Speers interviewed Dutton; instead, the former Sky News host settled for safer topics like Ukraine and nuclear submarines.

Let’s recap for a moment: new strands have been added to the web of intrigue surrounding millions of taxpayer dollars Dutton was involved in sending to a PNG company whose own bank was reluctant to offer loans.

These ‘new strands’ reveal an Australian connection whose proprietor (i) has close LNP connections as a donor and friend of Dutton’s, (ii) sells cars (at considerable profit) to the same PNG company we’re sending $82 million to, (iii) has employed an LNP candidate for a marginal Federal seat and (iv) seems ambivalent (at best) towards the possibility of hedonistic pursuits on his factory floor.

Friendly Jordies submitted a series of written questions to the LNP candidate, Ryan Shaw, who withdrew his candidacy not long after, citing “mental health” issues. If that isn’t enough for MSM news hounds to sniff out a story, I don’t know what is.

Young journalist Leo Puglisi (quoted above) has a point when he says MSM outlets must dot their legal ‘i’s and cross their ‘t’s before they publish, but at the time of writing – more than 48 hours after Friendly Jordies broke the story – commercial media have pretty well ignored the issue, as has the ABC, which had more than enough time to get its legal ducks in a row before Speers interviewed Dutton. Budget cuts have put Aunty ‘on the dole’ in a number of departments, but surely its news division chasing good, incisive and impactful stories isn’t one of them.

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Am I sounding naive?


The MSM hounded Bill Shorten for years over political donations to activist group GetUp! Photo: The Australian.

Oddly enough, legal considerations weren’t a major factor when it came to the media’s pursuit of former Opposition Leader Bill Shorten over political donations made to activist organisation GetUp! when he was national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union.

Some donations made before and during Shorten’s tenure were not approved by the union and some weren’t disclosed to members, but in late February, union watchdog the Registered Organisations Commission (ROC) decided not to prosecute Shorten or others due to a lack of evidence.

“After a five-year-long political witch hunt that has cost taxpayers millions of dollars, this government has used the cover of the Russian invasion of Ukraine story to quietly just drop everything because of ‘the absence of sufficient evidence’,” Shorten said.

“That says it all,” he added. “(It was) an ideological smear job by a pack of gutless cowards.”

Irrespective of the guilt or innocence of those involved in either of the abovementioned controversies, the media coverage of a matter dropped by the ROC has to this point dwarfed that of the Manus Island-Brisbane connection. The Shorten coverage in turn hurt his popularity with voters, who narrowly elected his opponent, PM Scott Morrison, in 2019.

Why the massive disparity in coverage? For fear of labouring a point I’ve made in several previous articles, Australia’s concentration of media ownership is the worst in the developed world, putting us on a par with such beacons of freedom as Mexico and Chile; budget cuts and political pressure on the ABC have likewise taken their toll.

The effect of this, according to former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, is to render Australia an oligarchy, in which members of an untouchable elite (arguably including Dutton but most definitely not including Shorten) benefit from a media protection racket.

“The most powerful political actor in Australia is not the LNP or the Labor Party, it is News Corp,” Turnbull told a Senate inquiry last year.

Not only have News Corp mastheads ignored the Manus Island-Brisbane connection (which has been common knowledge in certain circles since 2020) but for the most part so too have the other major media players, Seven West Media, the ABC and Nine Entertainment, whose chairman is none other than former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello.

This fundamental imbalance erodes democracy and abets corruption, in case SCD Remanufactured Vehicles hadn’t convinced you of this. Not only do we need a Federal ICAC, but – perhaps even more urgently – we require a Royal Commission into Media Diversity, with the teeth to make fundamental changes.

Over to you, Albo.