These are our two parties. We will protect them.

Murdoch’s media empire really does not want a third party to win:

Last week, the Lib-Dem candidate Nick Clegg—the third party candidate in the race—did so well in a television debate that he began to emerge as the logical alternative to Labor. This has caused the Murdoch papers to unleash a full-scale attack on Clegg—with hardly any pretense other than to help Cameron—now known as the “Kill Klegg” campaign.

In turn, the Independent newspaper ran a front pager yesterday with the headline “Rupert Murdoch will not decide the outcome of the election. You will,” challenging the Murdoch coverage of the race.

Question: is it just that the parties that are rising are progressive parties, parties that aren’t tied to the old media and whose economic policies might actually be less favourable to billionnaire media moguls? Or is it that once new parties get in a position to demand it, they’ll seek electoral reform (like multi-member electorates) such that the undemocratic two-party duopoly is dead forever? Is it that a two-party winner/loser contest is easier to sensationalise to sell papers/whatever comes next?

Australians by now are used to News Ltd’s anti-Greens smear campaign every election, the one that essentially claims that Bob Brown wants to forcibly inject your son with gay heroin and make him marry a queue-jumping muslim tree in order to bankrupt the country. The Greens’ vote rising in spite of everything they can throw at them just inspires ever dirtier and more dishonest attacks – the worst, and most outrageously misleading or untrue, being reserved for the last week when it’s too late to adequately respond to them.

And the Greens are still fighting to get to twenty percent. Imagine what would happen if, like the Liberal Democrats in Britain, there was a hope of them actually winning an election outright in the near future. I can’t imagine what Murdoch’s lackeys would come out with then.