Fresh from his triumphant diplomatic demarche in, um, Canadia – where it was agreed that climate change should be ignored as much as possible – Tony Abbott hot-footed it to New York this week for the customary prime ministerial audience with Rupert Murdoch.

They all do it when they visit the Big Apple. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were just as keen to grovel in the light of the mogul's countenance on their trips there, blathering the usual sycophantic but erroneous guff about "a great Australian". Welcomed more warmly than the Labor socialists, Abbott was favoured with an invitation to dinner at the grand apartment on Central Park West; his date for the evening was the inevitable Peta Credlin.

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre.

We can guess that climate change got a workout over the table; the subject apparently being much on Rupert's mind at the moment. ''Wild winter in US, UK, etc. no respectable evidence any of this man-made climate change in spite of blindly ignorant politicians,'' he tweeted the other day. Listen carefully and you will hear the low hum of editors gliding into line from London to Hobart. How they must hang on each new ukase at The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the Canterbury-Bankstown Express ...

I enjoy thinking of Murdoch in New York as King Kong, the 1933 version: an enormous primate swaying atop the Empire State Building, one paw clutching not a terrified Fay Wray, but the struggling body of journalism itself. The little biplanes buzz about, their machine-gun bullets pinging harmlessly off the beast.