Her scandal sheet of Andrews “legacies” is well worth consulting. The National Civic Council’s list and my own merely scratch the surface. It is truly numbing.

Barnett also refers to the Australian Financial Review’s sober assessment of Andrews’ fiscal rectitude:

Aside from mismanaged pandemic spending, the AFR notes that Andrews essentially flushed public money down the toilet: “He blew $1.1b cancelling Melbourne’s East-West Link road project and$380 million on compensation for cancelling the 2026 Commonwealth Games.”

All this is hard to believe. Spending a billion and a half on literally nothing. That takes more than a little chutzpah.

And it is hard to believe he won three straight elections, with ease.

It isn’t often that you lose three men of consequence from the workforce and the front pages in such short order. A little like losing Marsh, Lillee and Greg Chappell on the same day (as Australia’s cricket team did in 1984).

As well as Andrews, we have also lost Alan Joyce and Rupert Murdoch. Much has already been said about each.

Joyce, I have already written about at length.

Which brings us to the third retiree, K Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of The Australian newspaper, aka The Daily Vaccinator.

LAUDED

Others have rightly lauded Murdoch’s ambitious and fruitful quest in starting, nurturing and continuing to support the standout Australian broadsheet.

As John Ruddick MLC opined recently: “The Oz has been responsible both for truly great journalism (Hedley Thomas, Greg Bearup, Janet Albrechtsen), as well as appalling ignominy during COVID.”

One of its columnists, Angela Shanahan, contrived (in 2020) to praise Dan Amndrews for his lockdowns in Victoria. The world’s worst and longest.

No mean feat for a journalist apparently ensconced on the Right of politics and with some aspiration to objectivity and common sense. She trumpeted: “Andrews did well, so did Melbourne.”

Andrews did well? This is insanity on steroids.

Not content with her effort in 2020, Shanahan rounded back in support of Andrews earlier this year: “Hold a pandemic inquiry, but leave politics out of it.

“If the public had really opposed Dan Andrews’ response to COVID, his government would have been thrown out.”

Again, this is rubbish – an inadequate understanding of the dynamics of Victorian electoral politics, and an alarming example of “might is right” thinking.

Andrews won an election. Ergo, people supported his lunacy. Ergo, this makes Andrews’ regime defensible.

None of these things follow. Sadly, she is right, though, about the absence of any meaningful popular protest against regimes like that of Andrews.

(Does the deep Catholic Shanahan think that gay marriage is fine because most Australians supported it in a plebiscite?)

The go-to hit man conducting a war on the un-vaxxed was also a Murdoch employee, Peter Hoysted, aka Jack the Insider, who was unleashed on a regular basis with his particular pro-vaxx line in elitism, anti-science sarcasm, abuse and lies.

Murdoch’s executives also managed to shut Alan Jones out of mainstream journalism, first firing him from The Daily Telegraph and then from Sky News.

Jones had been, as is his wont, a rare voice of sanity and perspective during the plandemic. When he got a little too close to straight-out denying the narrative that Murdoch supported, he was suddenly gone. 

Perhaps Murdoch’s greatest contribution to the pandemic narrative (aka State lies) was to not allow one single word in nearly three years to be said against the precious vaccines.

The jabs that were unnecessary, useless and dangerous, and in the cause of which effective, safe treatments were denied to people. A lethal sin of omission for which Murdoch ultimately should be held responsible.

He is no less responsible than Daniel Andrews.

DEFAMATION

Most recently, the Murdochs managed to lose their star US journalist (Tucker Carlson) from Fox News, apparently to ensure that Murdoch was kept off the stand in the defamation case with the folks who (allegedly) helped to rig the 2020 US Presidential election.

Carlson was also, infamously, too fond of speaking truth to Big Pharma.

It was another former Murdoch employee, the late Roger Ailes, who spread the (now oft quoted) word that Big Pharma was responsible for three quarters of all mainstream media revenue.

This explains just about everything you need to know about global health policy. No wonder Carlson was shown the door. A massive own goal from the supposedly canny Murdochs.

The estimable Conrad Black, in one of his usual, highly informed, sober analyses, this time about Murdoch, stated: “ ‘I’m calling to celebrate the demise of Maxwell’,” said Rupert Murdoch down the phone to me on the morning Robert Maxwell’s private effects were being auctioned in a bankruptcy sale.

“I acknowledged that Maxwell had been a frightful scoundrel, but that he was an unforgettable character and I didn’t like to think of him floating around dead in the Bay of Biscay. ‘I do’, was the reply. Murdoch, as I was often reminded over many years, was a fierce competitor.”

Black’s assessment overall was more restrained than Black was a decade or so ago, when he referred to Murdoch as a “psychopath”.

But he did argue that Murdoch presided over a culture of “total war”. A culture that found a place for Jack the Insider, for example.

Not an especially nice man, then.  Someone who would dismiss his wife (number four, Jerry Hall) from the marriage by email clearly has priorities other than being a decent man.

While he was married to number two, Anna Torv, the mother of Lachlan, Murdoch was made a papal knight! Perhaps it was for his services to the institution of marriage?

During the seedy News of the World phone hacking affair, some questioned Murdoch’s high honour.

There are calls from all sides in British politics for Rupert Murdoch to hand back – or be stripped of – his papal knighthood.

“If it transpires that Rupert Murdoch was aware of these goings on then, yes, he ought to hand the papal knighthood back,” said former Conservative government minister and Catholic convert Ann Widdecombe on July 13.

John Ruddick also noted: “In the 1990s, when Rupert had a minor cancer scare, he was asked at his next press conference if the episode had made him think of retirement and he responded, ‘No … my recovery has only strengthened my belief in my invincibility’.” 

No doubt he believed that. And possibly still does, even now, in his post-retirement.

But for me, Murdoch will also be forever the guy who managed to destroy all three rugby league teams that my family members supported in the 1990s, during the super league war that he alone instigated.

FORGIVE

Where he participated massively – though he wasn’t the only one – in turning football from a sport into a business, just as Kerry Packer had done with cricket. That, you don’t easily forgive, or forget.

So, three giants have left the stage. 

Flawed people who carry, or should, their fair share of guilt over many of the things they have done in pursuit of their manic career objectives.

Have they each left the world a better place than they found it? This is often said to be a just measure of a person’s worth.

This we might best leave to the historians, but the first draft of history hasn’t left any of them looking all that sharp.PC

– Paul Collits