The Guardian Australia is failing to uphold the values of the Scott Trust.
The Trust says:
The Scott Trust was originally created in 1936 to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference.
The Guardian Australia refuses to discuss the issue of immigration in reference to “journalistic freedom and liberal values”.
Instead, it has adopted the bigotry of its commentator Greg Jericho:
“Immigration – because there are many desperate to hate – must be treated with extreme care by politicians and journalists… The inherently racist parties will seek to use any discussion and any seeming evidence of the negative impact of migrants as fuel to burn their fires of hate”.
Australia has no right-wing populist political force. It has an embedded culture of mature multiculturalism and a civil society capable of debating the distributional impacts of economic inputs.
What Australia does have is a politically motivated mass immigration program that acts FACTUALLY as a class war within its borders: suppressing wages, lifting rents, spreading homelessness, and intergenerational inequity that panders to an uber-elite of corporate interests.
Yet The Guardian Australia systematically censors the mention of immigration as a factor in these issues, cheerleading the class war in its silence.
It is immaterial that The Guardian Australia does not take money from immigration-benefiting robber barons.
Its censorship intrinsically supports a feudal order of corporate profiteering from the falling living standards of low-income and economically vulnerable Australians.
Indeed, The Guardian Australia has become an Australian corporate ‘useful idiot’.
In so doing, it contributes to rising anger in the polity about being muzzled, ripening the environment for a future right-wing populist.
The Scott Trust must investigate and prosecute The Guardian Australia’s editorial culture for this breach of its liberal values.
Otherwise, the Trust becomes an accessory to a feudal immigration class war in direct contradiction to its constitution.
