There’s an old joke: anti-semitism is when you hate the Jews more than they deserve. In the lead up to this election, I realised that it can be when you love us more than we deserve, too. This occurred to me after I saw a photograph of Rupert Murdoch standing inside the charred remains of the Adass Israel Synagogue. What was the world’s most powerful media man doing at a local synagogue of an ultra-Orthodox sect? The answer came a short time later, when Peter Dutton started spinning the local tragedy into an election issue: if voted in, he would give the Adass community $35 million to rebuild their shule as part of his commitment to rid the nation of “the vile scourge of antisemitism,” which had been allowed to “fester” by the obviously Jew-hating Labor government.

We can’t know for sure if Murdoch got on the phone and told Dutton to hone in on Adass, but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine. Historically, his evil genius has been in identifying ideological trigger points, amplifying them, and then feeding the messaging to his preferred political candidates as campaign fodder. (See: Keith Windschuttle; John Howard; the history wars.) Still, as I watched the Murdoch press and Dutton push a narrative that this was the “anti-Semitism election” I felt like I was losing my mind. There are only around 120,000 of us in this country, not even half a percent of the total population, concentrated mostly in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne. I wondered how I would I feel if I lived in Dutton’s Queensland electorate of Dickson, and I saw a news report about my elected member pledging millions to rebuild a synagogue in Ripponlea as I squeegeed sewagey cyclone water out of my living room. It’s hard to know exactly, but I think it would possibly make me hate the Jews even more than they deserve.

This has been Murdoch’s life’s work: wedging political opinion by manoeuvring it away from material reality and towards abstract culture war. In this country, one of his key tactics has been buying up regional newspapers and either closing them or and putting them behind News Corp paywalls. In 2020 alone, News Corp did this to over 100 regional papers, including the Atherton Tableander and the Fraser Coast Chronicle. These days, if you live in Atherton or Maryborough and want to know about some local scandal, you have to buy a News Corp subscription and subject yourself to the editorial worldview of a media company owned by a billionaire who lives in Manhattan.

But not if you live in the Byron Shire. In this far-eastern, flood-prone pocket of the country, residents still have a community-owned and fully independent tabloid delivered to their door for free every Wednesday. It’s called The Byron Shire Echo. The paper was founded in 1986 by locals after police raided properties in the hills behind Mullumbimby looking for weed crops. The hippies and weirdos who lived up there in secluded splendour were strip-searched, manhandled, and intimidated day after day. But none of the local papers—which then included The Northern Star and Byron Shire News (both eventually bought and gutted by Murdoch)—would report on it.

A freelance radio journalist, Nick Shand, had the idea to start his own paper to document what was happening. He gathered a bunch of like-minded renegades from the area and together they began printing the news as they saw it. The Echo immediately found an audience among the countercultural cosmopolitans who had been arriving since the 1970s. Soon, local businesses started to advertise in the paper, whether they agreed with its politics or not. The Echo was, from the beginning, pretty progressive without being scolding or self-serious. It was irreverent and funny, hyper-local without being parochial, intelligent without being pretentious. It earned a boost when one of Australia’s most prominent political analysts, Mungo MacCallum, enlisted as a regular columnist and crossword writer. Why would one of our leading political sages work for a tiny local paper? In his view, it was “the last holdout of the long Australian tradition of the independent, crusading regional newspaper.”

Today, The Echo is run and owned in part by the children of the founders and it is still delivered, in print, to every fishing shack, Geodesic dome, and new-build mansion in the Shire. To the AirBnBing outsider, it might come across as a charming anachronism, with its rainbow masthead and kinesiology ads. But for long-time locals, it is still very much part of the weekly rhythm. It is where you can read about council decisions and flood damage. It is where the region’s real estate agents, aspiring musicians, and energy workers all place their ads. It is where pro-housing interest groups and anti-development interest groups lobby for more or less housing, sometimes on the same page. And it is where politicians try to convince the community that they deserve their vote.

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I happened to be in the Shire in the weeks leading up to the federal election, and I was curious about how this local paper of record would cover it. The seat of Richmond, which spans from Ballina to Tweed Heads, was the site of a heated contest. The long-time incumbent, former Gold Coast cop and Labor party member Justine Elliot, had narrowly won against Greens candidate Mandy Nolan in the last election. This time around, Mandy, as the locals all call her, only needed a 1.8% swing. She was campaigning hard. Her posters were everywhere, exuding phys-ed teacher élan vital; her platinum blonde, smiling visage was at farmers markets, at Bluesfest, at the patchouli-scented health food stores, on my Instagram ads. She was also, I noticed, a constant presence in The Echo, where, despite running for office, she retained her weekly column—“Mandy’s Soapbox.”

On a Thursday morning, I paid a visit to The Echo newsroom in central Mullumbimby, where I was greeted by the current editor, Hans Lovejoy, who looked precisely like how I imagined the editor of a staunchly independent newspaper in Mullum might look: Hawaiian shirt open over a surf-brand t-shirt, Converse All-Stars, and bushy sideburns. Lovejoy’s father, David, was one of the paper’s co-founders, and Hans grew up around The Echo. After school, he left the Shire to pursue a music career, before returning in his 30s. He took a job at the paper, selling ads and doing graphic design. In 2010 he assumed editorship. It’s a position he takes very seriously. He sees himself as a journalist working in the tradition of Jon Stewart or Kerry O’Brien: liberal, hard-headed, and willing to speak truth to power—or at least truth to Negative Energy.