The ABC, Australia’s taxpayer-funded leftist propaganda network, is supposed to be bound specifically by law: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983. Instead, the ABC apparently thinks that this entitles it to be a law unto itself.
For a supposedly public-owned operation, the ABC is notoriously secretive, whether it’s hiding what its staff are paid or the opaque Memory Hole that is its complaints procedure. ABC also feels entitled to blithely disregard its own rules, from impartiality to social media strictures.
So what to do about the ABC? Its current chair, Ita Buttrose, thinks it should be more like the BBC. If only.
The BBC is funded by a licence fee paid by all British households, companies and organisations that receive or record live television broadcasts, including iPlayer catch-up.
To make the ABC more like the BBC, the Morrison government should propose a voluntary licence fee for the ABC, providing a direct line of sight between money from our pockets to the coffers of the public broadcaster. That would test Aunty’s impartiality at the next federal election. It also might help relieve taxpayers from more ABC arrogance.
It would also expose just how much Australians really value the ABC. The ABC likes to claim that it is “Australia’s most trusted news source” – which is odd, because less than one in ten Australians watch it. In rural areas, of course, the ABC is most often the only news source.
The Beeb has also undertaken to release publicly, on a quarterly basis from April this year, details of all outside engagements and payments made to staff for corporate gigs and so on.
None of this happens at the ABC. Yet a listed company sets out in granular detail names, salaries, other benefits in its annual report. Some remuneration reports go for 30 pages. The ABC lists a few salary bands, no names. That’s not transparency from a publicly funded body. It’s a joke in very poor taste.
Then there’s social media. The BBC has laid out a strict social media policy and its new director-general has promised that breaches will be taken seriously. “All the way to termination.”
At the ABC, on the other hand, senior journalists and producers are apparently to treat Twitter as their personal office gossip space.
The ABC has a social media policy, last updated in March. But as with most of its codes and policies, it suffers from poor compliance and even poorer enforcement[…]
As an ABC director for five years, I saw first-hand that the place was rife with recidivists because action against them, if it happened, normally meant a bit of “counselling”. A decade later, copious “counselling” hasn’t stemmed the arrogance of ABC journalists. Arrogance has heightened.
The witch-hunts against Cardinal George Pell and Christian Porter have been spearheaded by senior ABC personnel using Twitter. Even after the ABC settled the defamation action brought by Porter, Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour tweeted that “no money was paid”. That was simply untrue. The action cost the ABC close to a million dollars.
Neighbour’s tweet breached the social media guidelines too. But there have been no consequences for Neighbour that we know about[…]Neither Neighbour nor her line manager, Gaven Morris, took action to correct her incorrect tweet. That happened only after Anderson told Morris to get it corrected.
BBC employees are forbidden from using social media to “express a personal opinion on matters of public policy, politics or controversial subjects”.
Australian taxpayers can only dream of such accountability from our public broadcaster. At the March Senate estimates hearings, Anderson said the ABC did not discourage staff from posting provocative personal opinions on social media. “We can’t supersede people’s civil liberties … people don’t park all their civil liberties at the door when they come through the door at the ABC,” Anderson said. If only Izzy Folau were an ABC journalist.
The Australian
So what to do about the ABC?
A truly brave conservative PM would privatise the Ultimo swamp. The ageing Boomer elite and inner-city activists at Friends of the ABC would squeal blue murder, of course. A more politically possible step might be a voluntary licence fee.
Australians who see over a billion dollars of their taxes disappear down the maw of a clique of Sydney Harbour-side green activists might vote with their wallets.
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