Too Costly: The Right-wing Attack on Australia’s ABC

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the country’s major public broadcaster, was on Wednesday accused by Prime Minister Tony Abbott of taking ‘everyone’s side but Australia’s’ due to left wing bias. The following day, the federal government announced an efficiency review of both the ABC and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which is also government-funded and Australia’s major multi-language and multicultural broadcasting service. The Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who is, in his own words, a ‘passionate defender’ of the ABC, maintains that the proximity of the announcement of this review to Prime Minister Abbott’s comments is ‘completely coincidental’.  Whether we believe Mr Turnbull or not – and I am inclined to think this had little to do with him – it can hardly be coincidental that this much pressure is being placed on the ABC all at once. In any case, we ought to examine the nature of that pressure: what does it mean for a national broadcaster to supposedly not be on the side of its nation?

Prime Minister Abbott made his comments on radio station 2GB, in conversation with conservative host Ray Hadley. He stated that the ABC ought to demonstrate ‘some basic affection for the home team’ and that ‘you can’t leap to be critical, you shouldn’t leap to be critical of your own country, and you certainly ought to be prepared to give the Australian navy and its hard-working personnel the benefit of the doubt’. The context for this last statement is that there are two issues in particular that the ABC should supposedly not have been reported on.

Firstly, the ABC and Guardian Australia combined forces to expose Australian intelligence as having tried to monitor the telephone calls of the Indonesian leader, his wife, and several people close to him and high up in the Indonesian government. I rather think that reporting on this issue is an outcome of how investigative journalism functions and, as ABC head Mark Scott put it in November, in the public interest, not an outcome of a lack of affection for Australia.

Secondly, the ABC reported on allegations by asylum seekers that they had sustained burns due to abuse by members of the Australian navy. I am not accustomed to ignoring allegations of abuse or torture because those accused are hard-working or for any other reason; I am accustomed to expecting that there will be no benefit of the doubt, but a full and thorough investigation.

This kind of dissonance is why I do not trust when Mr Turnbull says that the study will not look at editorial or programming policies: how can it not? There seems so much scope for an efficiency investigation to be skewed when Mr Abbott is making comments that the ABC’s fact checking unit is too costly and ‘surely that should just come naturally to any media organisation’. It all seems geared at limiting the ABC’s journalistic effectiveness, especially if the review coincides with a funding cut, which seems likely.

The crucial matter I want you to take away from this piece is this: what is it about reporting about matters of concern to Australia that makes the ABC unAustralian? Australians pride ourselves on fairness and transparency, and that means asking the hard questions that make Australia a more reflective, informed and engaged society – not an unreflectively cheerleading one. We really need to maintain an independent national broadcaster to maintain such a society. That’s what Australia stands to lose if the ABC loses out.