The BFD | ABC Determined to Out-woke NZ Media

Last week, the Australian taxpayer-funded broadcaster’s Four Corners program was described as “embarrassing the whole organisation”.

“Hold my beer,” says 7.30. Apparently taking lessons in wokeness from across the Tasman, the program will be peppering its reports with Newspeak that almost no one understands nor wants to hear.

ABC’s flagship current affairs program 7.30 will start using Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander names when it introduces places on its program in a move to improve representation of the Indigenous community in its programming.

Because, sure, a whopping 3% of the population isn’t already over-represented on the ABC. It’s also not as if this tiny portion of Australia doesn’t have an entire network dedicated solely to it.

The exercise also smells strongly of the enforced language creeping across the New Zealand public service.

ABC sources, who were briefed on the change but are not authorised to speak publicly, said they were told the names will be put on all location supers, which are the straps across the screen that appear in news packages or when a reporter talks about a particular area. They will sit alongside the official government name for cities and towns.

This “thought reform” is already being enforced in Tasmania, where tourism signs are being altered – and sometimes altered back, unofficially, by unimpressed locals. It also raises the question of how, say, Great Lake, could have an “indigenous” name when it didn’t exist until 1922. Indeed, much of what is passed off as “Tasmanian” language is a “reconstruction” (uncharitable souls might call it “made up”).

It might also beg the question of just how far do we go? James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land reminds us that there were a raft of convict-derived place names that were displaced in government gazettes by the current names. Barry Brimfield’s Long trek south argues that Tasmania was settled in waves, millennia apart, by different language groups.

How many of these groups are the ABC prepared to represent? Will they start trotting out four- or five-fold place names?

Meanwhile, the wokeness is pullulating right across the taxpayer-funded network.

The 7pm news bulletins on ABC News in the Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory, South Australia and Tasmania start with an Acknowledgement to Country[…]

Television programs such as Gardening Australia, radio stations such as ABC Melbourne and mobile phone applications like ABC Kids Listen currently commence with a Welcome or Acknowledgement of Country. There are 130 Indigenous language station idents on ABC Radio and several presenters on ABC Country, Triple J and Triple J Unearthed, which often use Indigenous place names in their conversations. Shows like Play School and Little J and Big Cuz use Indigenous words and languages, while Indigenous consultants often advise on the use of place names in particular factual and documentary content.

Sounds like a nice little earner for some.

Never mind, either, that “Welcome to Country” is a purely modern invention, coined in 1973.