Yeah, not literal shares. It’s more that a lot of the staffers working for the conservative party (confusingly called the Liberal Party) come from the News Ltd

Yeah, not literal shares. It’s more that a lot of the staffers working for the conservative party (confusingly called the Liberal Party) come from the News Ltd media and mining companies, and a lot of executives of mining/resource companies and journalists and executives at the Nine/Fairfax and News Ltd. duopoly are ex-politicians, political staffers, etc. - lots of revolving doors between them. For example, the current PM’s chief of staff came straight from Rio Tinto, previous PM Tony Abbot’s chief of staff (Peta Credlin) now has a show on Sky News, as does ex-PM Turnbull’s (Chris Kenny, from when Turnbull was opposition leader), who also writes for The Australian newspaper. On the other side of the duopoly, the chairman of Nine/Fairfax is an ex-Liberal Party treasurer (basically the most powerful cabinet minister apart from the PM), and they held fundraising events for the party at their studios during the last election. So the media run positive stories about the Government, and downplay or fail to run stories about, for example, serious allegations of corruption against multiple cabinet ministers of the Government, while policy proposals from the opposition are scrutinised far more closely and savagely than actual policy from the actual Government, and often rubbished. The media runs character assassinations against opposition party leaders and MPs and puff pieces about the Government ministers, the PM’s wife and her fashion choices, etc. - it’s pretty shameless. Then there are links between Government, the media and big business (again, mostly mining here) through a bunch of think tanks like the IPA (extreme far-right), the Sydney Institute, etc. As long as environmental protections are kept weak enough for the miners, and tax cuts keep being promised for the wealthy, none of them rock the boat.