Rupert Murdoch founded The Australian in 1964 as a bold statement or his belief that this country needed a quality national daily newspaper. His action was based on a nation-building vision that he shared with the leader or the Country Party, John McEwen, who deeply influenced him at that time.

For twenty years, The Australian lost money, a strange anomaly in the life of its ruthlessly commercial owner. In a 1994 address to the free-market thinktank, the Centre for Independent Studies, Murdoch mentioned these losses but argued that some things were more important than short-term profits – ideas in society. He went on to quote John Maynard Keynes’s famous lines about the significance of political and philosophical ideas to men who regarded themselves as supremely practical. In the media business, ‘we are all ruled by ideas’, Murdoch added.

Most Murdoch critics see him as a man of crude power interested largely in profits. This significantly underestimates him. He is a man of ideas, and his tenacity with The Australian meant that throughout the 1970s and 1980s it had a major ideological impact on the national agenda. It became the most consistent populariser of hardline free-market economics. Today it is the most important outlet for the culture war being waged by the intellectual right.