In 1964, Rupert Murdoch's establishment of the Australian signalled a daring gamble by him and the end of the old order for Australia's other newspaper proprietors. Originally published from Canberra, its importance was not just that it was the first general national daily in the country, but that it was the first Australian newspaper to seek an appropriate function in a world that used television as its primary source of news. It was also the first daily to address directly the new class of the tertiary educated.

The members of this new class were at odds with the old establishment that continued to see the world in terms of the Cold War and our dependency on great powers. They were interested in events in the world beyond Australia, and in establishing our own relationships with the newly independent countries to our north. The first issue of the new paper met these interests by including three pages of world news, and it continued to report extensively on American politics, on defence, and on Australia's policies towards Asia.

The view of the establishment was enunciated in the fourth issue in a statement from Paul Hasluck, Minister for External Affairs, who was reported as claiming that ‘A shadow of fear hangs over all South-East Asia’. The shadow was that of communism, which was seen as the force dominating activity in Sukarno's Indonesia, in Malaysia, and in Indochina, where both American and Australian military forces were already engaged.