British politicians didn't dare take Rupert Murdoch on until he was wounded. Now that he is, they can't say enough about how concerned they've been all these years by his newspapers' practices and excessive influence.

From a distance, the whole thing resembles post-Saddam Baghdad, with the newly liberated running around firing AK-47s into the air from sheer joy. Tomorrow's appearance before the British parliamentary committee inquiry promises to be a new exercise in retribution. Who knows? Perhaps Murdoch pere et fils will be required to appear in cuffs, and Rebekah Brooks in a Lecter-style mask.

And the mood of joyous insurrection spreads internationally. The Americans are investigating whether News journos hacked the phones of American 9/11 victims, based on a single unsourced piece of speculation in the Daily Mirror. People are huffing and puffing about investigating parallel criminal behaviour inside Australia's News Limited.

This is kind of daft; it's perfectly clear, just from reading Australian newspapers, that the kind of privacy invasion that was widespread in Britain is not practised here. How do you know? To put it bluntly – the yarns just aren't that sensational. Picking up the News of The World in Britain used to be like putting your eye to the peephole in a well-trafficked den of vice. "How on Earth did they find THAT out?" you'd think, leafing gingerly through the pages of Britain's biggest-selling tabloid as it documented every sordid detail of Shane Warne's latest coupling with a team of cocktail waitresses, or the grim domestic topography of some EastEnders star's divorce.

It was as plain as the nose on your face that the News of the Screws was either buying this information, or nicking it. And it turns out that they were doing both. On the other hand, I can't say I ever pick up The Australian and think "Well, bugger me. I wonder how they got hold of that press release from the Coal Association?" Or marvel at how The Age managed to get ACOSS to say all that stuff.

It's not spying or phone-hacking that is getting the Greens and the Government's undies in a bunch about News Limited - nothing like it. It's bias. And that's a different matter.

Government ministers at present have an almost superstitious fear and loathing of the News Limited stable. They believe News, through its aggressive reporting of the BER scheme and the National Broadband Network (in The Australian) and the tabloids' campaign for a fresh election, is trying to destroy the Gillard Government.

There is an ancillary thread of paranoia about Kevin Rudd, who has - it is understood - mended relations with The Australian's influential editor in chief Chris Mitchell. Could this have anything to do with the recent decision to strip Mr Rudd of the authority to award the Australia Network tender, contested between the ABC and the News-backed Sky?

Hostility between governments - especially struggling ones - and media organisations is nothing new. Mr Rudd's deteriorating relationship with the News stable preoccupied him extensively in the latter part of his term, and one of the precipitating events that preceded his ousting as Labor leader was an ugly confrontation with Murdoch editors at a Melbourne dinner in May last year at which the then prime minister delivered an obscenity-laced tirade.

The editors did not report the incident, but word spread quickly among Mr Rudd's colleagues.

These hostilities become more serious when they influence government behaviour. For instance, when Julia Gillard ruled out a carbon tax during last year's election campaign, her principal motivation for doing so was to cauterise a possible line of attack from what she saw as a "feral" News Limited scare campaign against carbon pricing. Hindsight tells us that whatever this decision achieved by way of short-term protection, it's opened up a splitting long-term headache for the PM, who now is unable satisfactorily to explain why she has broken that undertaking.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer.