For over a year the ABC chairman, board and senior management have misunderstood Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his government.
There was a view within the ABC that former prime minister Tony Abbott was hostile to the taxpayer funded public broadcaster and that the Coalition’s position on the ABC would change if Mr Turnbull replaced Mr Abbott. This was a serious misjudgement.
It is true that Tony Abbott, like Mr Howard before him, was critical of the lack of political balance within the ABC. When prime minister, for example, Mr Howard called for the ABC to appoint a “right-wing Phillip Adams”. By this the former prime minister meant that there should be at least one prominent ABC right-of-centre presenter of a prominent program. Two decades after this call, the ABC remains a Conservative Free Zone, without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its prominent television, radio or online outlets.
Both John Howard and Tony Abbott were publicly and privately critical of the ABC’s lack of political balance. Other than this, both supported the role of the public broadcaster and neither focused too much on the ABC’s efficiency.
Malcolm Turnbull has a different approach. He believes that most journalists are left-of-centre and that, consequently, the ABC is bound to be a left-wing broadcaster. The Prime Minister maintains that this fact about the ABC cannot be changed and there is no point pursuing lost causes.
However, Malcolm Turnbull believes that the ABC is a bloated organisation and that much can be done to rein in costs. The Prime Minister compares the ABC to such institutions as SBS, Sky News, Channel 10 and Channel 7 (with which he had some past involvement), which operate with significantly fewer staff for similar programs. Most politicians who do the rounds of TV and radio interviews know that the Turnbull position is correct.
That’s why it was naïve for The Guardian’s media editor Amanda Meade to express surprise recently that the Turnbull government had continued the cuts to the ABC, put in place in the first Abbott budget in 2014. Ms Meade seemed to forget that Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister Abbott’s communications minister at the time.
The current dispute between the Turnbull government and the ABC over the public broadcaster’s generous pay settlement with its staff should be viewed in this light. Communications Minister Mitch Fifield and Employment Minister Michaelia Cash are critical of the fact that the ABC has breached government guidelines by providing the ABC staff a monetary payment along with back pay and domestic violence leave in addition to annual wage increases.
Addressing The Sydney Institute on 13 October, Minister Fifield said that ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie had promised the government that the public broadcaster would not be asking for any more taxpayers’ money during the current funding agreement. This understanding appears to have been breached. Moreover, ABC chairman James Spigelman has defiantly told the Turnbull government that in negotiating pay deals, the ABC does not have to abide by government guidelines. This is not a smart way for a tax payer funded public broadcaster to handle the Prime Minister.
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