(Image: Mitchell Squire/News Corp)

Remember when we thought COVID-19 would change everything? Turns out, it’s not even changing governments. With Labor retaining a third term in power on Saturday, this was true in Victoria — just as it was true in the midterm elections in the United States a few weeks back, with the Democrats retaining the Senate.

There’s a lesson here for traditional media such as the ABC and the sundry Nine voices across once-was print, talk radio and broadcast news: it’s way past time to stop letting the global campaigns of the US-based company set its local news agenda.

Instead of a referendum on COVID management, Australia saw what happens when a once-proud, mainstream political party like the Liberal Party is captured by a self-interested group — in this case, News Corp. 

The election was bad news for News Corp (and its soon-to-be-reunited partner Fox Corp). From an Australian (or even a Melbourne) perspective, it looks like just another squabble between the city’s fading masthead and a Labor government it didn’t like, but drawing back the lens reveals how the Herald Sun’s war on Premier Dan Andrews was just a proxy in a global fight.

Like the rest of the far right, News and Fox were quick to turn their guns on COVID regulation. Why? Who knows? Maybe it was the “public” part in “public health”. Maybe it was the horror of seeing governments achieve something the libertarian market couldn’t. Maybe it fitted too easily into the Trump-inspired hostility to China. 

Even now as we’re moving into a living-with-COVID world, the global right just can’t let it go. In Melbourne, with its record number of lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, the right figured it had found a battlefront too good to ignore. 

But who are they talking to?

A 2021 University of Sydney study gives us some idea. It found that across Australia, Canada, the UK and the United States, about 10% of the population were classed as “non-compliant” with COVID rules. Not enough to win an election, but more than enough to build a media company around. (For all its tabloid-style shouting about Andrews, the hard-paywalled Herald Sun is shown in its latest company report to have about 150,000 combined print and digital subscribers in a state of about 6.7 million people.)

That’s why News Corp relies on the rest of traditional media taking it seriously enough to extend its reach outside its own echo chamber, including by positioning its staff on ABC programming (like Insiders).

The Sydney study found that the non-compliant were “mostly male, less agreeable (cooperative, considerate), less intellectual as a personality trait (less willing to try new experiences), and more extroverted”. They skewed old, putting them smack-bang in the centre of the News/Fox “grumpy old men” demographic. 

News Corp funnels this audience to the right. In turn, it rewards political players who talk the talk appealing to its audience. The result? News Corp increasingly shapes the Liberal Party in its own minority image. Unfortunately for the Liberals, this repels more than it attracts.

The global round of elections since 2020 indicates that, in a COVID context at least, voters are inclined to trust their governments to do the right thing and will reward them for it. This is more than an Australian story, too; in the recent US midterm elections, only one sitting governor was turfed out — in tourism-dependent Nevada.

Leaders who lost elections — such as Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Scott Morrison here in Australia — all pandered to a certain COVID carelessness, and their defeat was pretty much baked into polling before the pandemic started. The pandemic gave them an opportunity to rebuild trust, which each squandered.

The only world leader to lose his job over COVID — poor old Boris Johnson, elected in a landslide the month before the coronavirus broke out — had to resign over his lockdown rule-breaking, rather than his handling of the crisis.

Despite it all, Australia’s traditional media are desperately trying to find some meaningful pandemic-related change in Victoria’s election results: anti-Labor swings in western Melbourne, a Green seat (but not vote) gain, an increased vote for independents. Maybe.

More likely, people have already moved on. We should have seen it coming. As Daniel Defoe wrote in his Journal of the Plague Year about the great plague of 1665, as risk declines, people became “impenetrable by any new terrors, and would not be persuaded but that the bitterness of death was pass’d”.

Same in the elections now. The parties — and media — that grasp that voters want to get back to business as usual are the ones coming out in front.

In pandemic panic a played-out strategy by the likes of News Corp? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.