The revolving door between politics and media

Helen Coonan served as Australia’s Minister for Communications from 2004 to 2007 under the Howard government. In that role, she was personally responsible for the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2006, the legislation that fundamentally restructured Australia’s media ownership landscape.

The law she introduced replaced the previous ownership restrictions with a ‘two out of three’ rule, allowing companies to own two of the three regulated media types in any single market. It also scrapped foreign ownership limits entirely. This was the architecture that enabled the current concentration of Australian media ownership. It was lobbied for extensively by Rupert Murdoch.

After leaving the Senate in 2011, Coonan became a regular presenter on Sky News Australia, the channel owned by News Corp, the company whose founder had lobbied directly for the law changes she implemented. She also became Chair of GRACosway (a lobbying company), Executive Chair of Crown Resorts, and Chair of the Minerals Council of Australia.

Helen Coonan implemented the media ownership law changes that benefited Rupert Murdoch. Afterwards, she became a regular presenter on Murdoch’s Sky News Australia and took multiple corporate roles that depended on her political connections and regulatory knowledge.

Stephen Conroy served as Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy from 2007 to 2013, responsible for the NBN rollout, the digital television switchover, and media reform legislation.

In February 2010, he was reported to have spent time on holiday with Kerry Stokes, owner of Seven West Media, in the weeks before announcing a A$250 million licence fee rebate for free-to-air television stations.

After resigning from the Senate in 2016, Conroy became Executive Director of Responsible Wagering Australia (the bookmakers’ lobby), Chair of TG Public Affairs (a lobbying firm), a regular Sky News Australia commentator, and a Foxtel board director from 2025.

Conroy’s appointment to the Foxtel board is particularly notable given that as minister he had direct responsibility for the anti-siphoning regime. He has agreed to recuse himself from A-League broadcast negotiations involving Foxtel due to his role as chair of the Australian Professional Leagues.

Peta Credlin served as Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Tony Abbott from 2013 to 2015, arguably the most powerful unelected position in the country during that period. Abbott was removed by Malcolm Turnbull in September 2015. By May 2016, within months, Credlin had become a Sky News Australia contributor. She now hosts a nightly primetime opinion program.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wrote that News Corp’s decision to employ Credlin at Sky News was ‘consciously giving a powerful platform to a vindictive, vengeful enemy of my government’.

Consciously giving a powerful platform to a vindictive, vengeful enemy of my government.Malcolm Turnbull, on News Corp hiring his former chief of staff [4]

During the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum, Credlin used her Sky News platform to promote a claim that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was not one page but actually twenty-six pages. This claim was fact-checked and debunked by RMIT FactLab. Peer-reviewed research found that Sky News Australia’s Voice coverage constituted political advocacy rather than journalism.

Credlin is also married to Brian Loughnane, the former Federal Director of the Liberal Party of Australia. She is, in the most literal sense, a political operative embedded in a media platform.

Peter Tonagh served as CEO of News Corp Australia, CEO of Foxtel, and CEO of REA Group, all major entities in the News Corp stable.

In 2021, he was appointed to the ABC Board, the body responsible for overseeing Australia’s public broadcaster, whose independence from commercial media interests is central to its statutory purpose.

He left the ABC Board in late 2024, approximately 18 months before the end of his scheduled term. A week after his departure was reported, his appointment to the Nine Entertainment board was announced. Nine’s chair described his qualifications in terms of his ‘stints as CEO at News Corp, Foxtel and REA Group’.

The sequence is: News Corp, Foxtel, REA Group (News Corp), ABC Board, Nine Entertainment board. The commercial media ecosystem’s senior executives are circulating through the public broadcaster’s governance.

Hugh Marks was Chief Executive Officer of Nine Entertainment from 2015 to 2020. During that period he oversaw the Nine/Fairfax merger, the largest media transaction in Australia in thirty years.

In 2018, while serving as CEO of Nine, Marks hosted a A$10,000-a-head fundraising dinner for the Liberal Party. The guests of honour were then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher. Journalists at the SMH, The Age, and the AFR were, according to The Conversation, shocked by the dinner. Marks subsequently admitted it was a mistake.

In December 2024, he was appointed Managing Director of the ABC, effective from March 2025, for a five-year term. As Managing Director, he is also ex officio editor-in-chief of the ABC. The ABC chair who appointed him is Kim Williams, himself a former CEO of News Limited (later renamed News Corp Australia).

The CEO of Nine who hosted a $10,000-a-head Liberal Party fundraiser while running Australia’s largest commercial media company now serves as the editor-in-chief of the public broadcaster his company competed against. He was appointed by a chair who is a former News Corp CEO.

Under current Australian law, former Commonwealth ministers must not engage in lobbying activities related to matters they had ‘official dealings’ with for 18 months after leaving office. This period is reduced to 12 months for former ministerial advisers. Members of Parliament who are not ministers are not covered by the restriction at all.

The Centre for Public Integrity found: Around 40 per cent of registered third-party lobbyists previously held political roles. The 18-month restriction applies only to matters with which the former minister had ‘official dealings’, a narrow definition. Australia lacks enforceable lobbying legislation. The Lobbying Code of Conduct is not law; it is a voluntary code with minimal sanctions.

Unlike Canada, the United Kingdom, and most comparable democracies, Australia does not require detailed disclosure of lobbying meetings or ministerial diary publications.

The post-employment restriction applies to lobbying activity, but not to media appearances, board appointments, or commentary roles. Former ministers can appear on the channels of companies they regulated within days of leaving office, legally. The Centre recommends extending the cooling-off period to five years.

The structural problem is not that individuals are corrupt. It is that the system creates incentives, relationships, and dependencies that systematically align the interests of regulators with the interests of the regulated, both prospectively and retrospectively.

The minister who changed Australia’s media ownership laws in ways that benefited News Corp became a regular presenter on News Corp’s television channel. The minister who oversaw the regulatory framework governing Foxtel for six years is now a Foxtel board director. The prime minister’s chief political operative became a nightly primetime opinion host on News Corp’s broadcast platform within months of leaving office. A former CEO of News Corp and Foxtel served on the ABC Board before moving to the Nine board. A commercial media CEO who hosted a political fundraiser now runs the ABC.

None of this required a conspiracy. It required a system in which political power and media power routinely exchange people, and in which the laws governing that exchange are deliberately insufficient to prevent it.

The mainstream media rarely covers this system in depth. This is not surprising. The mainstream media is the system.