By Situation Theatre 29/05/2020. Updated 24/06/2020.
The Coalition’s corruption has never been more flagrant, yet the ABC’s ability to hold it to account has never been less potent.Today’s announcement of the axing of another 250 jobs due to budget cuts is but the latest tragic, upsetting, and disturbing assault of an abusive government.
If news about the latest attack on Aunty has fanned the flames of your fury about ongoing abuse of the beloved broadcaster, you’re not alone.
It’s a kind of abuse which is undermining one of the greatest pillars of our democracy and for many of us, it is heartbreaking.
There are some who still cling to the anachronistic idea of the ABC as a left institution, but living in denial is no way to fight back our ideological enemies.
For that, the starting point must be to properly understand the nature of the abuse.
We know the main perpetrator of this three-decade campaign of institutional violence is one John Winston Howard. Crikey’s Bernard Keane sums it up with “the Howard Government slashed ABC funding, appointed a friend of the Prime Minister to the Chairmanship, launched a stream of vexatious complaints about its journalism, imposed reviews and stacked the board with Liberals and right-wingers”.
In 1987, then managing director David Hill said the public broadcaster cost each Australian 8 cents a day. Twelve years of Howard and seven years of Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison later, and this figure has been reduced to half that.
For the sake of brevity however, the focus here is on the more recent period of conservative rule as the continuation of a toxic relationship.
The right’s Aunty abuse has many hallmarks: budget cuts, board stacking, intimidation, policy and policing, to name a few.
Budget Cuts
On the eve of the 2013 election, Tony Abbott famously said there would be “no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, and no cuts to the ABC or SBS”.
In 2014, the Abbott Government slashed $254m from the ABC budget, killing off Lateline, local editions of 730, and much Radio National specialist programming.
This wasn’t even the half of it, with a recent Per Capita report finding conservative cuts since 2013 will amount to $783 million by 2022 – a 29.5% cut in funding since 1985-1986.
These cuts have cost nearly 1000 jobs including many senior journalists and producers. Radio current affairs programming of The World Today and PM has been halved, likewise the hours of original, scripted Australian television.
Recording and broadcast of live concerts on Classic FM is much reduced, over 100 ABC websites have shut down, local sport is no longer covered, and local production units in Adelaide and Perth have been closed, as have five regional local radio newsrooms.
Non-news TV production is now concentrated entirely in Sydney and Melbourne as broadcast facilities in smaller states have disappeared. Short-wave radio in the NT is gone, locally produced regional stories made through ABC Open are no more, and the Australia Network has been cancelled, devastating Radio Australia and bureaus in Tokyo, Bangkok, New Delhi, and New Zealand.
The ABC has never received additional funding for its digital services including iView, ABC online, and podcasting.
Partly as a result of the service provided during the bushfire and coronavirus crises, the ABC is now far and away the most trusted news source as well as the most popular.
Despite this, as recently as February, Managing Director David Anderson and Chair Ita Buttrose were rebuffed in their attempts to seek financial relief, and in March, Anderson admitted “the ABC will have to absorb cumulative budget cuts that amount to $105.9 million per annum by the time we reach the 2022 financial year … At this point, it is not possible to absorb further cuts without an impact on jobs and services.”
Board Stacking
It didn’t take long for Abbott to take up Howard’s mantle. In July 2014, conservative columnist for The Australian Janet Albrechtsen and former Liberal Minister and Deputy Leader Neil Brown were hired to oversee appointments to the broadcaster’s board, described by ABC Friends as a “declaration of war on the ABC’s Independence”.
And so it went.
Peter Lewis, a former financial executive for Seven West Media and Channel 10 was appointed for a five-year term in October 2014, a decision described as “a reward for him having devised a blueprint for how the ABC should be cut” and “an attempt by the Government to impose an agenda of commercialisation on the ABC”.
Donny Walford, a Liberal Party donor who neither applied nor expressed interest in the role, became a board member in November 2015.
Michelle Guthrie, a lawyer for News Corp for thirteen years, former Director of legal and business development for Foxtel, and replacement for James Murdoch as CEO of Star TV, became Managing Director in May 2016.
Vanessa Guthrie, former mining executive, Chair of the Minerals Council of Australia, and Santos board member was rejected by the nominations panel for lack of media experience but appointed in February 2017 nonetheless.
Justin Milne, former Director of MSN, OzEmail, and Telstra and board member of Tabcorp, was made ABC Chairman by the Turnbull Government. The fact Milne is a close friend and ex-business partner of the Mr Turnbull is probably a coincidence.
Joseph Gersh, a merchant banker and longtime friend of Peter Costello, also rejected by the nominations panel, got his spot in May 2018.
Ita Buttrose, who spent most of her career working for either Kerry Packer or Rupert Murdoch, was handpicked for the role of ABC Chair by Scott Morrison in February 2019, bypassing the recommendations of the independent process.
The ABC Board then made the bizarre decision to appoint David Anderson as Managing Director, who as an ABC careerist of 30 years seemed to lack the requisite experience in mining and Murdoch propaganda.
Intimidation: Attacks, Complaints and Reviews
In a piece analysing some aspects of the “broader war on the ABC” at the time of Justin Milne’s resignation in September 2018, Bernard Keane described the “mostly successful attempts to intimidate ABC management” through “attacks on journalists in parliament”, “vexatious complaints about journalism that the Liberals find inconvenient”, and “a constant stream of “reviews” by commercial media executives”.
It’s not hard to find examples of each.
In January 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the ABC “takes everyone’s side but Australia’s” and Coalition Senator Ian McDonald said the ABC had a “clear left-Green agenda”.
In 2015, Mr Abbott ordered an “urgent” government inquiry into the ABC over a Q&A episode in which former terrorism suspect Zaky Mallah confronted junior minister Steve Ciobo about changes to citizenship laws and said “heads should roll over this”. Cabinet Minister Kevin Andrews said he would boycott the show in what must surely be seen as the world’s most popular protest.
In October 2017, Queensland Liberal Nationals MP George Christensen used taxpayer money to take out an ad in the local newspaper attacking the ABC for its coverage of the state’s new Adani coal mine, claiming Four Corners’ coverage was “overly influenced by the extreme green movement”.
In a period of five months to June 2018, Communications Minister Mitch Fifield made six official complaints about the ABC.
Perhaps the most egregious example in recent years of conservative interference in the broadcaster’s ability to do its job is the role of Turnbull’s enemy within, Justin Milne. The former ABC Chairman told Michelle Guthrie of political reporter Andrew Probyn “you’ll just have to shoot him”, due to the PMs dislike of the journalist.
Milne also told Guthrie to fire chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici following complaints from Mr Turnbull about her analysis: “We are tarred with her brush. I think it’s simple. Get rid of her. We need to save the ABC - not Emma. There is no guarantee they [the Coalition] will lose the next election.”
Most recently, the office of Prime Minister Scott Morrison complained to the ABC over reporting by investigative journalist Dylan Welch about the COVIDsafe app, describing his coverage as “unnecessarily alarmist”.
These attacks and complaints are just a tiny sample and soften the ground for official reviews.
Only a matter of months into the Abbott Government, aforementioned commercial broadcast industry executive Peter Lewis was hired to conduct an ABC/SBS “efficiency review”. As such, he was given access to confidential information about the internal operations of these broadcasters. Well may you think it seems a little sus given he was also about to commence his role as Chief Financial Officer of a major commercial competitor, Southern Cross Austereo.
In September 2017, Pauline Hanson made a deal with Malcolm Turnbull to support his media concentration laws in exchange for another inquiry into the national broadcaster. This was Hanson’s revenge for the ABC’s pursuit of her over the way her 2016 re-election campaign was funded. When this “competitive neutrality” inquiry found the ABC and SBS “do not distort the media market”, the Coalition Government launched yet another inquiry, this time to be headed by ex-Foxtel boss Peter Tonagh.
The Government website announcing the review recognises “although the Lewis Review was completed relatively recently, a fresh review is warranted given the rapid pace at which the media sector is evolving”, which is a funny old way of describing the dangerous and disturbing right-wing fetish for Aunty abuse.
Policy and Policing
In June 2018, the Liberal Party’s annual Federal Council voted overwhelmingly in favour of a Young Liberal bid for the “full privatisation of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, except for services into regional areas”.
In June 2019, Queensland Liberal James McGrath called on the ABC to sell a number of its Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane properties to pay down the national debt.
The depressing reality is, thanks to budget cuts, board stacking, intimidation, policy and policing, the ABC is now so compliant with Government interests, much of their perceived benefit from privatisation (neutering journalism which poses a threat), has already been achieved.
That won’t stop them trying to go further of course.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Legislation Amendment (Fair and Balanced) Bill is on the list of legislation proposed for introduction in 2020, which is not only there at the request of Pauline Hanson, but also a win for fans of the Fox News rallying cry.
And all this without even getting to the AFP raids on the ABC and the sinking of Australia in the Press Freedom Index.
Data published by Reporters Without Borders this year sees Australia drop five spots since the previous report, identifying “a lack of constitutional protections for press freedom, Federal Police raids on the national broadcaster and a News Corp journalists’ private residence, a defamation law that “is one of the harshest of its kind,” and having among the highest levels of media ownership concentration in the world as the biggest risks”. They concluded that in 2019, “Australian journalists became more aware than ever of the fragility of press freedom in their country”.
Attacks on the ABC are embedded within a broader policy context in which more than 75 national security laws have passed since 9/11, most of which either block access to information, criminalise publishing certain information, or enable authorities to track and monitor journalists. “Australia’s most secretive court case”, in which an Australian secret intelligence officer known as Witness K, who exposed the bugging of Timor-Leste’s cabinet room, and his lawyer Bernard Collaery, face jail time, is just one notable consequence of the new laws. That the ABC has gone silent on “the biggest national security story in a generation” can be seen as yet another nefarious result of conservative abuse.
Last year’s AFP raids on the ABC’s Sydney headquarters for its Afghan files investigation is yet one more rather shocking example of the Government’s standover tactics.
The May 2019 election showed what happens not just when fossil fuel and media billionaires join forces to buy democracy, but also how this task is made so much easier without the national broadcaster serving as a truly fierce, effective, and independent counterweight.
Saving Aunty from her right-wing captors will be an enormous challenge even if we all fully understand what we’re up against. But without naming the abuse nor understanding its methods and pretending she’s okay, protecting our ABC from further degradation will be impossible.
Sign the GetUp! petition to Save our ABC
If you’d like to read more such analysis, support Situation Theatre on Patreon.