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Despite Royal Commissions in Australia and police operations in Britain, it seems an awful lot of famous people have been allowed to keep an awful lot of their dark past from the public spotlight. Operation Yewtree might have nicked Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris, but the Bill seem awfully incurious about just who Jimmy Page was keeping locked away from 1973–75 or just what David Bowie was doing in an LA hotel room with a couple of 14-year-olds in ’73.
It seems the ‘cool’ factor buys a whole lotta police selective blindness.
Of course, there was no internet or social media in the ’70s and ’80s, so many indiscretions of the famous remained buried in old periodicals or radio interviews. Occasionally, though, some come to light. No matter how much those concerned try to bury them. Academic Gary Dowsett, part of the university Queer Theory thinktank that produced Victoria’s notorious “Safe Schools” groomer indoctrination program, probably hoped his 1982 article in the Gay Information quarterly would be quietly forgotten. And well he might: the article openly praises and defends paederasty.
He wasn’t the only darling of the left-establishment to do so. Now we can add the taxpayer-funded ABC to the list.
For 50 years, the national broadcaster has fought to bury a Lateline radio interview celebrating the sexual abuse of minors. Now the ABC’s secret pedophile tape is public, and the Daily Declaration has spoken with the whistleblower who exposed it.
In a stunning move this week, economist and former political advisor John Adams made public a 1975 ABC recording in which a group of adult men provided detailed descriptions of sexual relationships with boys, in a broadcast that has been suppressed for nearly half a century.
Originally aired on the now-defunct Lateline program and hosted by the late writer Richard Neville, the segment featured three men in their 30s and an underage boy who recounted and openly celebrated acts of pedophilia.
The show’s content is jaw-dropping. Besides openly celebrating sexual relationships with boys as young as 12 and 13, they described grooming tactics: gifts, camping trips and targeting vulnerable kids from broken homes. It was practically a how-to for paedos. Paedos who framed their predatory abusiveness as “delightful”, “ephemeral” and even liberating. One casually recounted abusing his own three-year-old nephew when he was 12. The panel laughed.
Throughout the program, ABC host Richard Neville offered minimal pushback, couching any objections as queries which enabled the guests to elaborate further and maintain control of the pro-pedophilia narrative.
The ABC’s guests dismissed outright any suggestion they were causing harm to their victims, claiming that young boys are naturally sexual, that acts of pedophilia liberate children from societal oppression, and that their victims would have been traumatised anyway by their family and the culture.
Neville, co-founder of the infamous Oz magazine and an ABC employee, offered only the gentlest of pushback. He carefully distinguished “paederasty” from “paedophilia” to sanitise the discussion, invoked ancient Greece for intellectual cover, and let his guests portray themselves as enlightened mentors rather than predators.
Different times? No, they bloody well were not. When the broadcast aired in July 1975, it caused immediate outrage. Christian leaders, politicians and the public demanded action. Yet no charges were laid. No ABC staff reported the admitted offenders to police.
Worse, then ABC chair Richard Downing defended the programme in the Sydney Morning Herald, declaring, “In general, men will sleep with young boys”, which says a lot about the sort of circles the ABC’s bosses apparently moved in. “That’s the sort of thing the community ought to know about,” Downing wittered. And the police, too.
But the ABC did their best to make sure the police weren’t notified about what its guests, hosts and bosses, were up to or endorsing. And they kept the Cone of Silence firmly in place for decades.
John Adams obtained the full 42-minute tape from the ABC in 2023 under strict private-use conditions. After exhausting every legal and political avenue, Adams released it publicly last week, defying legal threats and YouTube censorship (which the ABC itself requested). The broadcaster’s response? Stonewalling, denial and threats of legal action against the whistleblower.
This is the same ABC, remember, that spent years demanding apologies, inquiries and billion-dollar payouts from churches, schools and charities during the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. Yet when it comes to its own institutional response to child abuse – platforming open advocacy for the sexual exploitation of minors – the national broadcaster has never faced the same forensic scrutiny.
The hypocrisy is staggering. In his own memoirs, Neville openly boasted about a “hurricane fuck” with a 14-year-old girl in London. Writer Dorothy Hewett was later exposed for pimping out her own daughters to the 1970s’ Sydney glitterati. The left-establishment’s ‘sexual revolution’ always seemed to come with an asterisk: rules for thee, but not for the enlightened.
It’s the Australian equivalent of the BBC’s decades-long cover-up of Jimmy Savile. The state broadcaster knew about Savile’s predation on children and simply looked the other way. The ABC’s 1975 broadcast is our home-grown Savile moment, except, instead of one monster, it was the national broadcaster itself giving airtime to a group of them.
Some institutions are more equal than others. And the ABC, it seems, is the most equal of all.
