You can always rely on the taxpayer-funded broadcaster to push a far-left agenda. Note how they attempt to poison the well in the first sentence of this supposedly objective news story.
A major regional council has allegedly succumbed to pressure from a climate change-denying councillor to strip an environmental group of a $285,000 grant.
Now, when I went to journalism school, we were taught that the first sentence of an article should tell the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. This first sentence not only lies or obfuscates on most of them, it explicitly ignores the Why.
More importantly, what does Councillor Ted Lapkin’s alleged ‘climate change-denying’ have to do with anything? The issue at hand is the conduct of the activists – which the ABC eventually gets around to reporting.
The ABC understands that Councillor Ted Lapkin – a former Israeli Defence Force soldier – lobbied the City of Ballarat executive team to give Ballarat Renewable Energy and Zero Emissions (BREAZE) an ultimatum: axe board member Mary Debrett over allegedly antisemitic social media content or lose council funding for net zero projects.
One week later, both Ms Debrett and the grant were gone.
Instead of getting to the point of the anti-Semitic social media content, the ABC embarks on another round of well-poisoning against the councillor.
Cr Lapkin grew up in Israel and did mandatory military service with the IDF as a “combat-intelligence officer”.
He was elected to the council last October, has past affiliations with the Australian Jewish Association and Zionist Federation of Australia, and has published numerous op-eds equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
The only reason the ABC goes to such great lengths to detail Lapkin’s background is because that gets it to use all the anti-Jewish buzzwords its audience will lap up. ‘Zionist’! Boo! Hiss! As for “equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism”, well: yes. Unlike most ABC journos and readers, who use ‘Zionist’ as a polite figleaf for ‘da Joos’, I know what Zionism is: simply the view that the Jewish people are entitled to a state in their ancient indigenous homelands.
If you oppose Jews having a state in the very land their ancestors sprang from millennia ago, how are you not an anti-Semite?
On February 12, BREAZE president Peta Guy met with [council’s director of infrastructure and environment, Bridget Wetherall] at a local cafe for a “business-as-usual” meeting.
Ms Guy said as the meeting drew to a close, she was presented with four A4 pieces of “barely legible” paper containing a series of retweets and thread comments made by Ms Debrett on X.
“The way that it was presented and formatted did not give me a high degree of confidence that things were entirely accurate,” she said.
That doesn’t mean they weren’t accurate, though. So, did she bother investigating any further?
Ms Debrett, whose X account has since been wiped, told the ABC she had been responding to posts about the “genocide committed by the Israeli government” in Gaza.
So, that sounds like an ‘it was totally accurate’.
Those thread comments from Ms Debrett included the line “Israel is a stain on the planet” and a statement tagging Foreign Minister Penny Wong that said the IDF continued to “dehumanise and torment people of Gaza in similar style to the way Nazis dehumanised Jews during the holocaust”.
In case you’re an ABC reader or reporter, comparing Israel to Nazis is very, very much anti-Semitism. So, best not to get on your high horse.
“How many Ballarat citizens have their year-old posts trolled through by council staff?” she said.
How many Ballarat citizens are posting anti-Semitic content and demanding money from the council?
What grounds, by the way, does the ABC have for smearing Lapkin as ‘climate change-denying’?
Cr Lapkin is also on record denying the existence of climate change, attacking Greens policy as “immoral and dangerous”, and calling BREAZE “radical activists” who tout “progressive climate orthodoxy”.
During a council meeting on December 11, 2024, Cr Lapkin accused the organisation of biting the hand that feeds it, and said BREAZE should “pay its own way”.
“Why don’t we stop funding such frivolous wokery?” Cr Lapkin said during the meeting.
None of that is ‘denying the existence of climate change’. The ABC is lying through its teeth.
All in the defence of lefty Israel-haters spouting anti-Semitic bile on social media. This is what billions of dollars of our taxes are paying for.
