Why #TheirABC needs reform

Janet Daley, from The Telegraph in the UK, recently wrote a piece titled ‘How modern democracy has given rise to lockdown totalitarianism — The expectations that an omniscient state can prevent every death has led us down a dark path’. Janet’s argument was that the political culture of Western democracies has changed in recent decades so that there is “the belief that the state is now morally responsible for all outcomes…the state must promise not just the best healthcare it can provide, but a kind of immortality.” And here in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is enforcing this culture.

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis many of the most enthusiastic barrackers for lockdowns have been current and former ABC employees. They’re separate from the productive economy and have little knowledge of it. Their livelihoods are guaranteed by the government.

Back in September, Jon Faine, a former host of ABC radio in Melbourne, wrote in The Age something that betrayed not just a lack of understanding of private enterprise but also a complete lack of empathy for anyone not in the public sector. In an article which was a long defence of the Victorian Labor Premier, Faine said this about job losses and businesses shutting down because of what Daniel Andrews was doing.

“Undoubtedly there are many small and even large businesses that are struggling and some will go under. That happened last year too, and every other year.”

Such an attitude is frankly breathtaking. To begin with, the businesses that have gone broke in previous years have not done so because of the utter incompetence of the state government that allowed COVID-19 to escape from hotel quarantine. But more fundamentally, by talking about ‘businesses’ instead of ‘people’, or ‘employees’, or ‘staff’ or ‘team members’, Faine, either deliberately or not, avoids talking about the human cost of the lockdowns. Faine is basically saying ‘last year too, and every other year people lost their jobs so what’s the problem?’ Unfortunately, that is how many people at the ABC think — they just simply wouldn’t connect a business ‘going under’ with the consequences for the staff of the business and the family of that staff. The worldview of the typical ABC employee is that of a permanent public servant. It is not the worldview of mainstream Australians. Indeed, the worldview of most Australians is very seldom represented on the ABC.

That’s just one of the reasons why the ABC empire in Ultimo, Sydney should be decentralised to rural and regional Australia. Joe Gersh, a board member of the ABC, recently wrote in The Australian:

Chris Kenny has been a vigorous critic of the ABC while previously “resisting calls for its privatisation or abolition”, but after last week’s Four Corners, Media Watch and Q&A he has asserted that it now “is beyond redemption”.

This follows similar calls from the Institute of Public Affairs and other respected organisations.

I cannot agree. I declare my centre-right bias; a long-time reader of The Australian, I was appointed to the ABC board by Turnbull government communications minister Mitch Fifield.

The ABC is frequently criticised and sometimes for good reason. Even the most passionate friend of the ABC could not argue that Aunty is beyond criticism.

Calls for the abolition or privatisation of the ABC (essentially the same thing) are a thought bubble for which there is no constituency on either side of politics. Each time it is repeated, it damages the ABC’s quest for the long-term, stable funding it needs and that underpins its independence…

Unsurprisingly, the ABC’s political coverage attracts the most controversy. But how can it be consistent with liberal values to call for the ABC to be defunded every time a controversial story is aired? Cancel culture, which conservative columnists abhor, is just as absurd when applied to the ABC…

Critics often portray the ABC as a “conservative-free zone”. Yet Kenny’s greatest criticism of Q&A was the heated exchange between Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Kelly, two leading, respected men I would describe as conservatives. Agree with either, or neither, but what sin has the ABC committed in putting these important issues — climate change and media diversity — to air?..

The ABC does not require redemption; it accepts constructive criticism but needs support and stable funding. Believers in a robust media would benefit from dial¬ling down threats to its funding and continuity.

Evan Mulholland, the IPA’s Director of Communications, published the following response in The Australian and The Spectator Australia:

It is revealing that in attempting to demonstrate that the ABC is not biased against the views of mainstream Australians, ABC board member Joseph Gersh, writing in The Australian on Tuesday, used as proof the composition of the panel on the ABC’s premiere discussion and current affairs program, Q&A.

He described Paul Kelly and Malcolm Turnbull as conservative, which is false. They would not describe themselves as such. They would be more accurately termed small-l liberal.

What Gersh did not mention was that the other three panel members were former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr, left-wing activist Jan Fran and left-wing academic Jenny Hocking, not to mention left-wing host Hamish Macdonald. Not a single conservative among them. (At most maybe one of those six might be an occasional Coalition voter.) The point of mentioning this is that last week’s display is representative of the bias the ABC presents daily.

This, after seven years of Coalition government, reveals the truth of Gersh’s comment that many on the right side of politics are realising the ABC cannot be reformed.

Throughout its history the Institute of Public Affairs has always supported more freedom of speech and more diversity in the media. A media organisation owned and operated by the government that every taxpayer is forced to fund is incompatible with a free society. The IPA supports the continued existence of the ABC, but not one that is controlled by government and funded by taxpayers…

The ABC says it wants diversity, but the most important diversity is diversity of opinion. This is the diversity chairwoman Ita Buttrose refuses to accept. She told the ABC last year, “I certainly hadn’t thought that Andrew Bolt would be a great fit for the ABC.” That is a strange admission given Bolt is Australia’s most read journalist.

The debate on ABC reform and privatisation is one worth having. Except Australia’s elite has lost the ability to debate, seeking only to censor and control viewpoints such as those you’ll find in this newspaper.

“The ABC will be giving money to Google with your tax dollars, only to receive it in return. The relationship between big tech and big public broadcaster will inch that bit closer in a cosy deal that puts mainstream Australians last…

The ABC wants the perception of being independent from commercial interests while cashing in on revenue from commercial organisations like a seagull to a chip.”

The government’s proposed laws that will force Google and Facebook to pay Australian publishers for their content means the ABC will be getting even more money. Even though the ABC already use taxpayer money to advertise…on Google.

‘Misinformation’ now isn’t something that can be taken to be objectively wrong or incorrect — it’s used as a slur to describe opinions people disagree with. ‘Misinformation’, when it comes to news for example, is as much about what is not reported as much as what is reported. Try typing in ‘Clinesmith’ into the search function on the ABC News website and see what you find. Yes — you guessed it. Nothing. Clinesmith was a lawyer working for the FBI who forged evidence relied upon by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify government surveillance of Donald Trump’s election campaign. Clinesmith had previously spoken to colleagues about how passionately opposed he was to Trump. Last week Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months’ probation. Given the intense interest the ABC takes in all things American politics, it is revealing that (as far as the search button on the ABC website can reveal) the ABC has made no mention of Clinesmith either when he was charged, or now sentenced, for his crime. The ABC is delighted to report on shamans wearing horns invading the Capitol — but is not so interested in covering the conviction of a US federal government employee who forged documents to attack Donald Trump. In this case the ABC isn’t so much engaged in peddling ‘misinformation’ as perpetuating a policy of ‘no information’.