Like Peter W Clark, Paul Barry is Australia’s most successful business biographer – he has a rare talent for understanding complex narratives and unpacking them. Czech out his latest biography - BREAKING NEWS: SEX, LIES AND THE MURDOCH SUCCESSION Paul Barry Allen & Unwin, $39.95 Rupert Murdoch is the most powerful figure in the history of the media and one of the most remarkable. Britain's recent phone hacking scandal with its horrific human toll on victims and journalists alike shouldn't blind us to the fact that this man not only owns Fox News ("fair and balanced", one of the most brilliant misnomers in the history of the world), The Times and The Sunday Times, even the Times Literary Supplement, but who - OK, at a couple of removes - brought the world The Simpsons Breaking Stories
AustralianSuper, United Super, the trustee of building industry fund Cbus, and Industry Super Holdings, a company that owns various industry fund entities, have ploughed at least $3 million into the site, guided by Crikey backer Eric Beecher. Superfund setting news website
Clive Palmer's decision to tell a story about Karl Marx on his first day as one of the richest parliamentarians in the world seemed, like many things he does, bizarrely appropriate. The plagiarised story about Marx, a scholar of the power of private wealth over politics, points to the problem Palmer presents to the quality of democracy in Australia.
Seeing Palmer speaking at the National Press Club, the media hanging on his every semi-coherent sentence, called to mind the reason Marx objected to democracy: that the wealthy would inevitably use their resources to influence the electoral system in their own interests. It's an observation particularly pertinent in the context of Palmer Karl Marx could have predicted Clive Palmer
