News Corporation’s Tight Grip and Outsize Influence in Australia

Since then, the chief executive of News Corporation Australia has resigned, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was shown on the cover of Sydney’s leading tabloid in a Nazi uniform and the ruling Labor Party earned bipartisan jeers for accusing Mr. Murdoch of plotting to subvert the election.

It has been a busy three weeks.

News Corporation is the largest newspaper publisher in Australia, with a total audited circulation of 17.3 million newspapers, according to company figures — a 59 percent market share. (Its next closest competitor, Fairfax Media, had total audited distribution of 6.3 million papers for 22 percent of the market.) Given the reach of News Corporation papers — particularly The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the flagship paper, The Australian — they are often credited with having an outsize role in the country’s politics.

They have been front-and-center in the current national election pitting Mr. Rudd and the Labor Party against the Liberal Party led by Tony Abbott. The papers have run a string of scathing front-page editorials since Mr. Rudd called for elections last month. The decision to portray Mr. Rudd on the front page of The Daily Telegraph as Colonel Klink from the 1965-71 television comedy “Hogan’s Heroes,” sporting a Nazi uniform and a monocle, raised eyebrows and led Mr. Rudd to publicly call out Mr. Murdoch over the coverage.

Mr. Murdoch has made it clear, Mr. Rudd told reporters last month, “that he doesn’t really like us, and would like to give us the old heave-ho,” adding that “I’m sure he sees it with crystal-clear clarity all the way from the United States.”

Although several Murdoch papers endorsed Mr. Rudd during his first successful run for the leadership in 2007, they quickly soured on his positions toward big business like a proposed tax on mining profits and an emissions trading scheme. The company was seen as instrumental in the media campaign that saw him ousted in a 2010 party coup amid record low approval ratings. Mr. Rudd returned to government in June after upheaval in the Labor Party.

One of the Labor government’s plans calls for a National Broadband Network that would deliver high-speed Internet access to wide swathes of the country, a service that would broadly compete with News Corporation’s subscription TV service, Foxtel, which remains the company’s most profitable Australian venture.

Polling data from a number of leading firms suggests that Mr. Rudd is trailing Mr. Abbott’s opposition Liberal-National coalition in the contest by a significant, but not overwhelming, margin.

Jonathan Holmes, a prominent media commentator on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, says that the kind of tabloid treatment given to Mr. Rudd and the election has a greater impact because a single company’s papers are so dominant. They can effectively become, he said, a “political battering ram.”

“Behavior that would be completely O.K. in a genuinely pluralistic media environment is very much less O.K. in a market where you have such a dominant position,” he said in an interview.

But the politics are not restricted to the front pages of News Corporation’s papers. Less than two weeks after Mr. Allan arrived, Kim Williams, who was a senior executive at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Australian Film Commission before joining News more than a decade ago, resigned from his position as the company’s Australia chief executive after just 18 months.

In a statement, Robert Thomson, the global chief executive, said that “Kim feels now is the right moment to leave the company, which he has served for two decades, following the successful implementation of the first stage of News Corp. Australia’s strategy to drive integration and improve efficiency, to invest in its editorial products and publishing system, and secure a path of growth in a multiplatform world.”

Mr. Williams was widely seen as a smart executive but one whose emphasis on data put him at odds with the brash, tabloid style of Australia’s papers. “They’re all running around saying ‘This is a fantastic victory, we’ve saved newspapers,’ ” said a onetime News Corporation employee speaking under the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing former bosses. (News Corporation is so dominant in Australia’s newspapers that even some media analysts decline to speak publicly about the company.)

Woodside Petroleum Cancels Onshore L.N.G. Project in Australia

Global energy companies have invested $140 billion in six L.N.G. plants in just two and one-half years as Australia has increased production on its way to becoming the largest exporter of the gas in the world.

But investors’ interest in the sector in Australia has cooled recently because of huge costs overruns and in the face of rising competition from North America, where huge new supplies of gas have been tapped from shale.

Woodside’s canceled onshore project, called Browse, had been expected to export enormous amounts of liquified gas to Asia. The shelving of Browse as an onshore plant could spell an end to new onshore gas projects in Australia in favor of offshore plants that can be built at a lower cost and face fewer environmental and landowner hurdles.

“This decision will surprise few, as the proposed onshore development always looked too economically, technically, environmentally and socially risky for too little reward,” analysts at the bank Macquarie said in a research note.

Woodside also appears to be pivoting its focus toward North America, confirming Friday that it had lodged an expression of interest in developing a Canadian L.N.G. project.

Browse was to be Woodside’s biggest such onshore L.N.G. development yet, but it had been plagued by controversy over its proposed location at James Price Point on Australia’s northwest coast, coming under fire from environmentalists and some indigenous landowners.

The site is home to the world’s largest dinosaur footprints and sacred Aboriginal sites.

Peter Coleman, the chief executive of Woodside, said any new development would have to provide significant cost savings, adding: “Our customers are saying to us very clearly, ‘No longer can we pay for your expensive projects.”’

Many in the industry consider a floating L.N.G. plant to be the most likely fallback plan.

Analysts at JP Morgan have estimated that a floating project would mean a 20 percent saving in costs, resulting in a capital expenditure of $35.5 billion, versus $44.6 billion for the onshore development option.

Estimates of the cost of the onshore plant vary, but some analysts had said it could be as much as $48 billion.

Of seven L.N.G. plants under construction in Australia, all of which are due to come online in 2014 or later, four have already announced budget blowouts ranging from 15 percent to 40 percent.

Woodside owns a 31 percent stake in Browse, which it is developing with Royal Dutch Shell, BP, PetroChina, Mitsui and Mitsubishi.

Shares in Woodside, which has a market value of about $30 billion, rose 3 percent on expectations it would develop a less expensive option, but Chiyoda of Japan, which has a contract for the Browse project, tumbled 11 percent.

Building a floating plant in Asia and towing it into place off the coast of Western Australia would be likely to save billions of dollars in construction costs.

Earlier this month, Exxon Mobil and BHP Billiton disclosed plans to build the world’s largest floating L.N.G. vessel off northwestern Australia, producing six million to seven million tons of liquified gas per year, starting in 2020 or 2021.

Browse had been aiming for 12 million tons per year.

Shell, which owns 24 percent of Woodside, has not publicly supported a floating L.N.G. plant for Browse, but Ann Pickard, chairwoman of Shell Australia, has backed floating L.N.G. plants as a good solution for the problems with high costs in Australia.

Ms. Pickard has also championed the plants as a way for Australia to make revenues faster, though unions and politicians in Australia are worried about job losses from going offshore.

Another joint venture partner, PetroChina, said Friday that it was still deciding whether it would invest in Browse and that it was studying the project’s feasibility.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the decision had been a commercial one and was not the end of the nearly decade-long boom in resources in the country.

“We haven’t seen the peak of the investment phase into resources yet. And we are yet to see the peak of the production phase,” Mr. Gillard said in Sydney. “So we will be seeing the resources boom at work in our economy for a long time to come.”