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The ABC is irrelevant to the majority of Australia. Waste of our hard earned

Ita Buttrose needs to show us respect by changing ‘smug and boring’ ABC

Janet Albrechtsen The Australian December 16, 2020

Disrespected? Dry your eyes, Princess. You don’t need to be a former ABC board member to be disappointed by the ABC chair’s defensive, dismissive and dissembling response to criticism. First, let me share some sentiments from online readers of The Australian when they learned that Ita Buttrose “feels disrespected” because the Communications Minister posted his letter to her on Twitter.

One reader, Gail, put it simply: “Ita, I hoped you were better than this.” Another noted: “If Ita feels ‘disrespected’, at least we can agree that she is perceptive. She might also be just a little bit precious.”

Another reader, Jamie, posted this comment on Monday: “Ms Buttrose should understand that both respect and disrespect are earned.”

And this: “Ita seems to be experiencing a feeling those who don’t vote for Greens experience any time we watch the ABC. Disrespected, Disliked, Disregarded, take your pick — the ABC delivers them all in abundance.” Another elaborated: “If anything, the ABC has become more unruly … so please Ita do your job or resign and stop playing the victim. The victims are we the taxpayers, not you.”

There are hundreds more like this, from perceptive, frustrated Australians who want the ABC to be an informative, fair-minded, entertaining national broadcaster. The quid pro quo for taxpayers funding Buttrose’s salary and every other part of the ABC is the board’s legal responsibility to provide “broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community” while ensuring that news and information is “accurate and impartial”. These standards justify the ABC’s independence.

Yet under Buttrose, it seems like ABC staff continue to pervert the words “cultural diversity” to create a taxpayer-funded playground for identity politics.

In fact, the ABC was created by taxpayers to contribute to a robust democracy where cultural diversity means curious journalists with intellectually diverse views exploring all kinds of issues, from different perspectives, to reflect and resonate with a broad range of Australians.

This legislative charter doesn’t need changing; it needs following. Yet ABC staff, senior journalists such as Laura Tingle, will write off my concerns, and those of readers included here, as ravings from the Murdoch press. The Communications Minister may be clumsy and often ineffective in his role, but his job is to ensure the ABC meets its responsibilities under the charter. We, the public, are entitled to see how he does his job. Just as we are entitled to look closely at how Buttrose does hers.

It was a bit too cute strategically leaking bits of her response to David Speers on Insiders. Let taxpayers read your whole letter. And if you genuinely think Twitter is a tacky platform for serious discussions, then emulate the BBC and get your journalists off it. At the very least, ask ABC radio host Patricia Karvelas to stop tweeting in CAPITALS. She shares that unbecoming Twitter shouting tone with Donald Trump.

The ABC chair’s dismissive response suggests that Stockholm syndrome has set in again, just as it hit predecessors housed in the fancy corner office.

I witnessed, first-hand, how some board members and chairmen wanted to be embraced by staff. Not respected, mind you. They wanted to be loved. And some of the staff are very adept at the seduction process.

Soon after my appointment to the board, staff members approached me, touched me, and said, “Oh I didn’t realise you would look like this.” Did they expect an Australian version of the rednecks in Hillbilly Elegy? At another function, a staff member whispered in my ear that she was dating a member of the Liberal-National Party, as if her sex life might tilt the balance at the ABC.

The place was bonkers then, and it’s worse now because this staff seduction of the board stops proper governance of the ABC. In my experience it often meant the relationship between the chair and the CEO was far too close, to the point where they approved each other’s overseas trips.

Sure, many, perhaps most, board members, including chairs, arrive at the ABC with fine aspirations to ensure the national broadcaster caters to the people of Australia, not a select group of them. But then they meet the celebrity journalists and the influential producers who have worked there for so long they think they own the place.

When I asked for details of Kerry O’Brien’s salary at a board meeting, management told me that I was not entitled to that information. It was provided only when I reminded the CEO and the chairman that board members are entitled to that, and much more information.

I saw journalists who regularly breached editorial standards being “counselled”, never seriously sanctioned. It created a cohort of recidivists who snubbed their noses at their legislative responsibilities. My suggestions to the CEO and management that the ABC employ journalists from a wider array of places was met with studied obstruction. Instead, every year Aunty recruited from the same pool of woolly-minded idealists with journalism degrees from the same universities. They were cultural clones when it came to climate change, asylum seekers, gay marriage, dislike of religion and preaching their own set of rigid commandments about identity politics.

Ita, you could have been different. Smart, with media experience, no shrinking violet, you could have started to turn the ABC into a truly diverse, entertaining and valued broadcaster. And please don’t trot out those silly self-serving surveys about audiences loving the ABC. I saw these tricks staff use to snow the chair and the board into silence.

The now infamous Four Corners program that you watched before it aired is a symbol of the worsening bias and declining standards of ABC journalism. Aunty’s open invitation to Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd to diss on the Morrison government and the Murdoch press whenever they want has turned the ABC into a joke.

I want to believe that ABC veteran Barrie Cassidy was smoking weed when he said it would be “dangerous” for the ABC to recruit more conservatives to panel shows to satisfy cultural diversity. But the man was stone cold serious. Conservatives’ voices are not just ignored, they are treated as morally repugnant. Just as many sections of the left have hardened their views against intellectual diversity, so has the ABC. This public and flagrant wrecking of democratic traditions should not be funded by taxpayers.

Take some holidays away from the ABC, Ita, and quietly reflect on this: feeling “disrespected” by a minister posting a letter to you on Twitter doesn’t come within cooee of the disrespect dished up daily to taxpayers by your smug and boring ABC.

Janet Albrechtsen served on the ABC board from 2004 to 2008.

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Ita Buttrose’s dismissive response to criticism suggests that Stockholm syndrome has set in again at the ABC. Picture: Matrix Media Group