ALMOST 25 years ago, Rupert Murdoch strode into the Flinders Street offices of The Herald & Weekly Times and made its board an offer too good to refuse. Australian newspaper publishing and public debate have never been the same since.

It was December 3, 1986 - the landmark anniversary is just months away - and even though I was working overseas for the HWT at the time, I'll never forget it. That's because telephones rang at foreign bureaus around the world as Murdoch arrived at headquarters. By the close of business that day, he pretty much owned the company. The bid was audacious, perfectly timed and pitched - everything his failed BSkyB bid in Britain wasn't.

Illustration: Matt Davidson

Murdoch sorted out the details in a matter of weeks and, after doing so, added the HWT's stable of what were then first-class newspapers, including The Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald in Melbourne, The Courier-Mail in Brisbane and Adelaide Advertiser, to his own. It gave him control of almost 50 per cent of Australia's daily and Sunday newspapers; now it's closer to 70 per cent.

The success of the bid was a direct result of the Hawke government's changes to media ownership laws that allowed proprietors to become, as Paul Keating put it at the time, queens of the screen or princes of print, but not both. Ironically, Keating was on the ABC this week citing the policy switch as evidence of good governance. He'd forced Rupert Murdoch to sell the HWT's television interests because the new policy wouldn't allow him to own a TV licence and a major newspaper in the same market. The law still doesn't. Anyone who values plurality would have to agree that's a good thing, but there are many who believe to this day that Murdoch should never have been allowed to buy the HWT and get such a stranglehold on our print media.