Sunday, 30 November 2014

Co-operative, consultative and collegial? - The AIM Network

Co-operative, consultative and collegial?

December 1, 2014
Written by:
Kaye Lee
13 Replies

“I certainly think it’s important that we try to ensure that over
time all levels of government are sovereign in their own sphere,” Mr
Abbott told Sky News. “And we shouldn’t be bound by commitments that
the former government made that were never affordable.”

Of course, when Tony Abbott made these comments, he was referring to
the slashing of government funding for health and education.

But it’s a different story when it comes to the East-West link in Victoria.

After declaring that the weekend’s election would be a referendum on
the East West Link, Abbott maintains he is determined to see the East
West Link finished – no matter what – and is threatening to withdraw $3
billion of federal funding unless he gets his way.

To satisfy Tony’s wish to be remembered as the Infrastructure Prime
Minister (though I suspect there are a few other things that will stick
in our minds), he is bribing the states to sell off publicly-owned
assets in order to be given billions in co-funding to build his “roads
of the 21^st century” (finger number 4).

Similarly, Christopher Pyne said the coalition will seek to amend
school funding legislation to remove parts that allow the Commonwealth
to dictate to the states.

“We’re not for taking over anyone or anything and we don’t subscribe to a command and control philosophy,” he said.

Unless we are talking about school chaplains of course, in which case
you won’t get the funding unless you employ religious counsellors as
opposed to people trained in welfare and youth counselling.

While Abbott can’t tell the states he is going to raise GST, ripping
$80 billion out of agreed future funding and then saying “we don’t run
schools or hospitals, it is up to the states to fund them” is a crass
attempt at starving them into submission.

Abbott swept to power assuming everyone would just go along with his
plans unquestioningly with Coalition governments across the country and a
compliant media.

What he didn’t reckon on was people power as a growing number of the
electorate are shaking off the political apathy that our easy life has
lulled us into.

Abbott’s promise to lead a “co-operative, consultative and collegial” government is proving more ludicrous every day.

Moon Landing A Fake Reveals Government

In "Rossleigh"

Tell me what I want to hear

In "Environment"

Murdering the Political Discourse Or the Language of Fools

In "Politics"

Friday, 28 November 2014

ABC sacks Quentin Dempster

Date: November 28, 2014 - 8:17PM

Anna Patty

Workplace Editor

View more articles from Anna Patty

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Dismayed: The host of 7.30 NSW, Quentin Dempster, an ABC employee of more than 30 years, was sad about the loss of his program. Photo: Wolter Peeters

When veteran ABC broadcaster, Quentin Dempster, says
"bye-bye" in his Queensland, boy-from-the-bush way next Friday night, it
will be for the last time.

After more than 30 years with the national public
broadcaster, Dempster told viewers on Friday night that he plans to go
out with a "bang".

"Next Friday will be the final edition of 7.30 NSW," he said.

"I will be leaving the ABC after 30 years to return to the private sector. It has been an honour to work with Australia's great and unique public broadcaster."

Advertisement

The ABC is abolishing local TV current affairs programs including 7.30 NSW.

"I think the ABC is making a big mistake in axing these shows
and will have to revisit the deficiency in future years," Dempster
said.

Within two hours of ABC managing director Mark Scott's
announcement to staff on Monday that 400 jobs would be lost around the
country, director of news, Kate Torney, called Dempster into her office
to tell him he had no future role at the ABC.

"I will be among 300 staff retrenched in the first round of the ABC's cuts," he said.

"This is a very emotional time for me.

"I have worked extremely hard for the ABC to faithfully use the opportunity it has given me."

On why he was being "sacked", Dempster says he "only ever
sought to uphold the integrity of Her Majesty's institutions, the
Parliament and the police, in Queensland and NSW."

"That's not left-wing," he said. "There could be nothing more conservative.

"Why isn't Rupert Murdoch being sacked for phone hacking,
invasion of privacy, intimidating the politicians, his tax havens and
all those tits on page three? Just asking."

In what has been described as a "Hunger Games" approach to
staff culling, colleagues with similar skill sets have been grouped into
small pools and told that some within that group will be among 300 to
lose their jobs by Christmas Eve.

"This has been a brutal and bruising process for all affected people," Dempster said.

"During this week I have been assisting and comforting staff
as they go through what's called a 'pooling' process and made to
scramble among each other for available jobs in skills categories."

Ms Torney confirmed she had met with Dempster on Monday to inform him he would have no future position with the ABC.

"It is with deep regret that we lose someone with the
experience, integrity and reputation of Quentin and viewers and
colleagues alike will greatly miss the enormous contribution he has made
over such a long period," she said.

Dempster, 63, hosted 7.30 Report before it was turned into a national program hosted by Kerry O'Brien in 1997.

He later became a part-time presenter of a program called Stateline at 6pm on Fridays.

"With executive producer Murray Travis [the late Paul
Lyneham's producer] we worked hard to make the program relevant even
with a timeslot which put us up against Brian Henderson's 6pm news on Nine and the Channel 7 news with Ross Symonds," Dempster said.

Stateline moved to a 7.30pm Friday slot in 2001 and was renamed as 7.30 NSW in 2009.

"Since then the show was seen to make a very valuable
contribution to localism, even though I have been agitating since 1997
to have local current affairs returned to a nightly schedule, preferably
at 6.30pm weeknights [with 10 minutes] of local news," Dempster said.
"While the ABC acknowledged there was a deficiency the reinvestment
could not be approved because of cost."

In 1992, Dempster was awarded the Order of Australia for
services to the media, "particularly in the fields of journalism and
current affairs". Ten years later, he was honoured with a Walkley Award
for the "most outstanding contribution to journalism".

Dempster started his journalism career in newspapers and was chief political reporter at The Telegraph in Brisbane before joining the ABC in 1984. Within three years he was fronting 7.30 Report in Queensland.

While covering the Fitzgerald inquiry into police and
political corruption, he wrote daily re-enactments and analysis to break
down its complex evidence in a way that was easy for viewers to
understand.

In 1990, after moving to Sydney to host 7.30 Report in NSW, he turned his attention to police corruption in NSW while covering the Wood royal commission.

He is the author of several books including Honest Cops, Whistleblowers and Death Struggle.

An active member of MEAA, the journalists' union, he was also a staff-elected director of the board of the ABC.

Monday, 24 November 2014

He is Such a Lying Bastard. - The AIM Network

He is Such a Lying Bastard.

November 25, 2014
Written by:
John Lord
10 Replies

The subject of political lying, since the election of Tony Abbott,
has almost become a permanent point of discussion on main stream media,
social media and the blogosphere.

Why is this so? It’s because the Prime Minister has set a record of
lying both past and present that is unprecedented in Australian
political history. If you think I am exaggerating read “Remembering Abbott’s past”.

Lying is so engrained in his political persona that he knows not the difference between fact and fabrication.

More recently his lie about funding the ABC (and all the others) has
drawn immense criticism. On Monday 24 November he denied in Parliament
that he had broken a pledge not to cut funding to the ABC and SBS,
telling Parliament his government had “fundamentally kept faith with the
Australian people”.

In saying this he used another lie to justify telling the original
one. This is not just wrong but appallingly immoral. To suggest the
first lie was not one is to suggest we are no longer communicating in
English.

And Malcolm Turnbull’s attempt to do the same thing only served to devalue his own integrity.

More recent examples are the PMs Letter of advice on changes to the
pension. What a deceitful document it was. Really his lying knows no
bounds. He fails to mention the way the pension is calculated is to be
changed (If he can get it passed) resulting in a substantial loss of
income. Does he really think we are fools?

Another deceitful lie is the cuts to power bills with the elimination
of the Carbon tax. The resulting drops in charges varied across the
country and nowhere near the $550 he indicated everyone would receive.

Yet another example was when asked about the Green Fund at a joint
press conference with President Hollande the PM said that we already had
a Direct Action fund of 2.5 Billion and a Clean Energy Finance Corp 10
Billion fund. The only thing wrong with the answer was that the first
won’t work and it is a tax not a fund. And its Government policy to
abolish the second.

Unfortunately less informed voters outnumber the more politically
aware. Therefore, conservatives feed them all the bullshit they need.
And the menu generally contains a fair portion of untruths.

People like Bolt and Jones write and comment outrageously on the
basis of payment for lying controversy. Freedom of the press may entitle
them to do so but it is unjustifiable for the Prime Minister to follow
suit on the grounds of a collective desire for honesty in government. It
is however, highly unlikely that this Prime Minister has the decency to
do so.

“Political Lies and Who Tells Them Revisited”.

November 2013

The issue of truth featured largely in the last election. We the
voters were often left to decide who was and who wasn’t telling the
truth. Or who was telling more or less of it. So what is a lie? This
election was different in so much as we saw the emergence of various
“Truth Finder” sites and both sides of the political spectrum were found
out telling full-on porkies, or at least using different shades of hue.

This week lying has again been highlighted with the Government’s
decision to axe the Gonski Education reforms. The troubling aspect of
this decision is that during the campaign Tony Abbot gave a number of
commitments. For example:

“This will be a no surprises, no excuses government,
because you are sick of nasty surprises and lame excuses from people
that you have trusted with your future”.

He also promised a ”unity ticket” with Labor on Gonski funding:

“You can vote Liberal or Labor and you’ll get exactly the same amount of funding for your school”.

“There will be no change to school funding under the government I lead”.

These commitments were totally unambiguous. Unequivocally
intentional. So much so that the average voter on hearing them could
logically assume that they were being told the absolute truth.

We now know that the Prime Minister and his Education Minister
Christopher Pyne were telling blatant lies about this and many other
policies. Policy decisions since the election (as listed in other posts
on this blog) demonstrably attest to this. Their actions have been
universally condemned by all media outlets except those of Murdoch who
has a vested interest in protecting Abbott from criticism.

This all gives rise to the question of the value of the words
politicians use. I for one wouldn’t believe a word Abbott says. There is
ample evidence that he is a liar and he has declared so himself.

But let’s take a look at the broader picture and ask ourselves what is a lie in general and what constitutes political lying.

We know that a lie has three essential ingredients; it communicates
some information, the liar intends to deceive or mislead and the liar
believes that what they are ‘saying’ is not true. And we call people who
use these three principles blatant liars.

When the leader of the then opposition said in July 2012: “The
tragedy of this toxic tax is that it will not actually reduce emissions”
and six months later they fall by 8.6%. Did he actually tell a lie? One
could well argue that he had no facts on which to base his assumptive
statement, so it could not be construed as a lie. It might be just an
opinion. The same could be said about his statements about towns being
wiped of the map and many others. However, if in politics we believe
that lies or statements are made either to deceive or manipulate (and
has the three principles mentioned previously), then you would conclude
that he was telling porkies.

“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no
better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs.
And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the
only thing that counts”.

– Michael Ende, The Never-ending Story

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed”.

– Adolf Hitler.

Conversely, when the former Prime Minister said “I don’t rule out the
possibility of legislating a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a
market-based mechanism”, “I rule out a carbon tax”, did she actually
tell a lie? Clearly she showed an intent to keep her options open. As it
turns out we have a market based scheme. She was not trying to deceive.
She was being honest within the uncertainty of the circumstances. And
the MSM never gave her the benefit of the doubt.

I have always felt that when politicians have in their possession
certain knowledge and facts and fail to disclose it then they are guilty
of lying by omission. When you withhold information you are denying the
other person’s right to the truth. An example of this was when John
Howard found out that the children overboard incident was false and
withheld the information for two days prior to the 2001 election. It was
in fact lying by omission. And of course there is the weapons of mass
destruction lie. Did John Howard ever check the facts? If not he
perpetuated one of the greatest lies in history.

“When you tell a lie you deny the other person’s right to the truth”.

– John Lord.

On a more personal level there are what we call white lies where we
deliberately colour what we say in shades of hue to protect the feelings
of others or ourselves, or to avoid argument.

“Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is”.

– Barbara Bush.

Consider the case where telling a lie would mean that 10 other lies
would not be told. If 10 lies are worse than one lie then it would seem
to be a good thing to tell the first lie, but if lying is always wrong
then it’s wrong to tell the first lie.

When politicians lie over a long period of time, it only serves to
denigrate the liar and show contempt for the voter’s intelligence.
Especially if the lies are chronic and systemic. The current use of the
term “no direct knowledge” is a lie within a lie pretending to absolve a
person who is fully conversant with the facts.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . . when first we practice to deceive”.

– Walter Scott, Marmion.

Lying is probably one of the most common wrong acts that we carry out
(one researcher has said ‘lying is an unavoidable part of human
nature’), so it’s worth spending time thinking about it.

Why is lying wrong?

There are many reasons why people think lying is wrong; which ones
resonate best with you will depend on the way you think about ethics.

Lying is bad because a generally truthful world is a good thing:
lying diminishes trust between human beings; if people generally didn’t
tell the truth, life would become very difficult, as nobody could be
trusted and nothing you heard or read could be trusted – you would have
to find everything out for yourself and an untrusting world is also bad
for liars – lying isn’t much use if everyone is doing it.

Who are the biggest liars? The left or the Right of Politics.

Last year on Facebook I shared a post of an interview with Laurie
Oakes and Tony Abbott (you can see it on YouTube). It is from 2005 and
Tony Abbott is obviously telling lies about the Medicare safety net. At
the time I made the following comment to accompany it:

“People who constantly portray the prime minister as someone who constantly tells lies should take the time to read this”.

It was then picked up by former National Times journalist Alan Austin
and we had a chat about broken promises, telling lies and the current
standard of journalism. He had this to say:

Remember, it was a Senator from his own side who called John Howard ‘the lying rodent’.

And have we forgotten the articles about Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Top 40 broken promises’?

Lies, about-faces and broken promises are as follows:

Gough Whitlam: 7

Malcolm Fraser: 52

Bob Hawke: 4

Paul Keating: 3

John Howard: 41

Tony Abbott (as minister): 17

Kevin Rudd: 4

Julia Gillard: 6

Tony Abbott (as Opposition Leader): 15 and counting. As PM ?

I found this to be particularly revealing so I inquired as to the authenticity of the figures and he replied with the following:

Before your time, John, I wrote a piece for The National
Times in 1977 about what were then Malcolm Fraser’s top 25 blatant lies
and broken promises. The then editor Trevor Kennedy – later to become
one of Rupert’s henchmen – headed it “Malcolm’s battle with the time
machine” which I thought at the time was unduly generous towards Mr
Fraser.

Later, in 1980, I wrote a piece for Nation Review on Fraser’s top 40
lies and broken promises which then editor, Geoffrey Gold, headed
‘Promises, promises.’ Neither are online, unfortunately, but I have them
in my clip file. Since then, I have kept tabs on all Prime Ministers
and would love to write about it.

If I get a publisher, I will let you know. (I am tentatively titling
the piece ‘Lies, damned lies and I support the elected leader of the
party’). Point being that there is simply no comparison whatsoever
between the falsehoods and about-faces of the Conservatives and
Progressives. The ratio is about 8 to 1. Which is why the current
perception that Ms Gillard is ‘Juliar’ is so bizarre from this vantage
point. (I am in France. Which means I read other media than just Rupert
Murdoch’s).

I replied:

Well I do hope you get to do it, Alan. I have been
following politics for around 50 years and it is time we had more
honesty and the standard of reporting is deplorable. However, do you
think there is at times a fine line between a broken promise and a
change of mind? And of course changed circumstances can necessitate a
change of mind. I would also be interested in what you think of the
standard of political journalism in Australia today.

Again, quoting Alan Austin:

Excellent questions, John.

Re standard of journalism in Australia:

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=27274

Regarding categories of deception, there are at least seven.

Staring down the camera bare-faced lies are Class A falsehoods, like this one satirised here:

This is Tony Abbott lying about a meeting with George Pell.

Promises broken for political expediency with no external factors
forcing their abandonment are Class B Examples are Ms Gillard duding Mr
Wilkie recently. And Mr Howard’s no-GST-never-ever which he abandoned
before the 1998 election.

A Class B broken promise may, of course, be ratified by an election.
If this succeeds, as indeed happened with Mr Howard’s GST, then it
becomes less offensive. Say Class C.

Commitments made in good faith but prevented from being implemented
despite the government’s genuine best efforts – by a hostile Senate or
the High Court or a hung Parliament – are Class D.

Promises prevented from being implemented by changed economic
conditions – such as Paul Keating’s L-A-W-law tax cuts – are Class E.

Promises deferred by changed economic or political conditions – such
as Labor’s no carbon tax – are Class F. (Keating’s L-A-W tax cuts also
turned out to be F eventually.)

Assurances of loyalty to the leader by putative challengers deserve a
special category. Say Class I. (I for inevitable? Unavoidable?)

‘Telling the truth should not be delayed simply because we are not sure how people might react to it’.

John Lord

In the US election Republicans Romney and Ryan took lying to an
unprecedented level. Fact finders alerted the public to 2019 lies by
Romney alone. It is my contention that

President Obama lost the first debate not because he was off his
game, or that he was under prepared, but rather he was taken by surprise
by the willful lies that Romney was telling. The same fascination for
untruth by conservatives has been exported to Australia.

In my view Australians faced the most important election in living
memory. Liberalism no longer existed so what we were faced with was a
political decision between a very sharp turn to the scary right. Or a
party (in spite of its faults) that had the common good at the centre of
its ideology. In our ignorance, or perhaps our naivety we elected a
cohort – an all-male club who insisted they were adults but instead
turned out to be juvenile liars.

“Do you shape the truth for the sake of good impression?
On the other hand, do you tell the truth even if it may tear down the
view people may have of you? Alternatively, do you simply use the
contrivance of omission and create another lie. I can only conclude that
there might often be pain in truth but there is no harm in it”.

John Lord.

Further reading Abbott tells another one.

Like this:

Five Things The Government Could Cut Instead Of The ABC

By Jazz Twemlow 24/11/14

8

28901

This morning, Mark Scott made his much anticipated announcement to staff, detailing exactly how the ABC would make the $254 million worth of cuts
called for by the Abbott Government. Somewhat bizarrely, it wasn’t a
case of everyone collectively being $254 million more efficient: a
Malcolm Turnbull wet dream where ABC staff don’t take lunch breaks but
are instead fed liquified interns intravenously while suspended in a
fluid-filled pod that keeps them awake 24 hours a day.

Instead, 400 will lose their jobs, Stateline will be axed, and Lateline will
reformatted and shifted to ABC News 24. Radio suffered casualties as
well, with a number of stations being scaled back, while Radio
National’s Bush Telegraph will be axed completely.

The whole thing seems rather ludicrous: Mark Scott might as well have
been standing in front of a herd of obese cattle being forced to trim
the fat off a vole skeleton. Rather than firing nearly 10% of its
workforce, there must be some other governmental fat that can be cut
first, right?

For instance:

–

#1. Fighter Jets!

Remember those 58 fighter jets we bought for $12 billion? The ones that need a further $12 billion to keep them operational until 2024?

“Sorry, how much is that, Mr. Plane Salesman?”

“Half a deficit please.”

“Cool. Will you accept five ABC regional centres as payment?”

As fantastic as spending money on 58 identical ways for pilots to die might sound for a government claiming a desperate budget deficit, would Australia be any less macho-missile-Top-Gun awesome if it were, say, fifty-seven fighter jets?

That way we still get to bomb some exotic geography in the least successful flight sim ever, but we also get to have a network on TV that has the audacity to publish un-Australian facts.

–

#2. The News Corp Tax Rebate!

Ok, so you really love fighter jets. No problem, you can keep them.
Instead, why not plug the new hole in the ABC’s funding with a fraction
of News Corp’s tax rebate?

A sweet near-$900 million went back to News Corp this
year, meaning you could make up the ABC’s budget cuts TWICE over and
still leave Rupert Murdoch $400 million to bathe in — or whatever it is
he does with all that money (hire a flat-earther to colonically irrigate
his fusty innards with crude oil? Probably).

–

#3. Direct Action!

Fine fine: you love seeing $12 billion fly around in the sky for a bit before it crashes in a storm it can’t cope with;
you adore watching a wrinkled Palpatine stunt-double husk kicking your
money around like a kid in dry autumn leaves. But surely you wouldn’t
mind if we got rid of Direct Action, the policy fart in the elevator of
environmental politics?

Direct Action literally amounts to your money rewarding huge companies
that have figured out how to shit on the earth a fraction less than
they used to. “Who’s a good, absolutely massive corporation? That’s
right, you, you little shnooky wookums. Have tonnes of our cash for
doing what you should have been doing in the first fucking place.”

Why not give money to every world leader that didn’t commit a war crime yesterday as well?

–

#4. School Chaplaincy Program!

Right right. Broken planes, megalomaniacal walking scrotum with eyes, desolate earth. You love all of them. Got it.

But how about school chaplains? In Joe Hockey’s budget, school
chaplains were allocated $243 million — almost exactly as much as the
ABC’s cuts — yet they remain less appealing than being locked in the back of a meat truck with anyone from the Gamergate hashtag.

Seriously, take the Government’s school chaplaincy program out of
context, put it anywhere else, and ask if you’d still like to splash out
$243 million. What about a University Warlocks Program? Postgraduate
Palm-Readers, anyone?

–

#5: Offshore Processing!

No? Okay. That’s fine. Winged suicide caskets. Withered,
just-drank-the-wrong-grail media ballsack. Global burning. Stoneage
belief counsellors. Your money is very well spent on all of those above
things, and you still demand the ABC be cut. I understand.

How about asylum seekers, then? As much fun as it sounds to spend more than a billion dollars
imprisoning 2,200 asylum seekers in offshore nightmare facilities in
Papua New Guinea and Nauru — facilities that, in humanitarian terms, lie somewhere between Shutter Island and the Bates Motel — we could save a hefty chunk of that money
even if we went completely crazy and had all “boat people” on
Centrelink benefits for the entire time it took to decide their refugee
status–a move that would only cost $500 million, which would go directly
back into local economies.

–

You want to keep that as well? Really?

Well then, the next time you publicly tweet your
outrage that your money is going to the ABC, perhaps you should change
your profile picture to the new Coalition logo: a taxpayer-funded
homeopath flying a knackered stealth fighter into a solar panel held up
by a refugee.

Jazz is a stand-up comedian who has written for A Rational Fear (Radio National), The Roast (ABC2), and The Guardian Australia. Find him on Twitter at @jazztwemlow

Feature image via GetUp

Read
more at
http://junkee.com/five-ways-the-government-could-save-254-million-without-firing-400-people-from-the-abc/45879#xd33ZzRju0H40Ym6.99

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Thursday, 20 November 2014

The ABC Cuts Are Not A Budget Tidy Up, They're About Revenge | newmatilda.com

The ABC Cuts Are Not A Budget Tidy Up, They're About Revenge

By Ben Eltham

Keywords:

abc

media

andrew bolt

janet albrechtsen

tony abbott

malcolm turnbull

ben eltham

media policy

The
public broadcaster does an incredible job of holding the political
middle ground. That's exactly why the Bolts and Albrechtsens of the
world hate it so much, writes Ben Eltham.

The ABC and SBS are to have their funding slashed.

The decision is yet another broken promise for Prime Minister Tony Abbott. But it’s hardly surprising.

To those who’ve followed the Abbott government since its election
last September, this move was utterly predictable. Right from their
first month in office, when the conservative hate figure of Tim Flannery
was ceremoniously sacked, Abbott and his cabinet have made the punishment of perceived enemies the number one priority.

The ABC has always been one of the most hated enemies of the right.

Even if the decision is not surprising, the ham-fisted way in which
the government has announced it has been. Communications Minister
Malcolm Turnbull can’t exactly say he’s cutting the public broadcasters
because conservatives don’t like them. So he’s trying to claim that the
funding cuts are merely about reining in the federal government’s
deficit.

“In every portfolio, across every spending program, we've had to look closely at what we do and how we do it,” he said yesterday. “This is what productivity is all about—getting the same, or ideally, a bigger bang for a smaller buck.”

The productivity argument is threadbare. The ABC and SBS deliver a
suite of services far in excess of what their commercial rivals produce.
They do it on much lower wages and with much leaner production values.

Nor will the cuts do much for the budget. Taking a few hundred
million from the ABC and SBS will achieve little to repair the
ballooning Commonwealth deficit, expected to top $30 billion this
financial year. They will, however, lead to hundreds of redundancies and
significant cuts to programming across both networks.

Even more bizarre was Turnbull’s twisted syntax as he tried to explain why the cuts were not a broken promise.

In election week last year, Tony Abbott famously pledged “no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”

And yet yesterday, Turnbull was trying to argue that he didn’t really mean it.

Pointing out that both he and Joe Hockey had signalled that the
broadcasters “could not expect to be exempt” from cuts, he then said
that “unless you believe that Mr Abbott, was, in that one line,
intending to contradict and overrule the very careful statements of
intention made by Mr Hockey and myself, his remarks can only be
understood in the same context, which left open savings of a kind which
would not diminish the effective resources the ABC and SBS had available
to produce content.”

In other words: Tony Abbott was lying.

In fact, the cuts announced yesterday add up to nearly 8 per cent a
year, according to the ABC’s Mark Scott. That’s because the headline
figure of 5 per cent is in addition to budget cuts already announced
this year – the termination of the Australia Network worth around 2 per
cent and a 1 per cent efficiency dividend. No one thinks the ABC can
keep doing everything it does currently on 8 per cent less every year.

These cuts are not about saving money. They are about appeasing the
hardline right wingers in the conservative think tanks, and on the
Coalition back bench.

The ABC has become a bête noire for the opinonistas of the right,
not because it is particularly left wing, but precisely because it is so
centrist.

If your view of the world is based entirely on what you can see from
the troll caverns of the right wing shock jocks, it’s not surprising
you’ll be angry with a public broadcaster that engages with the 55 per
cent of Australians who vote for Labor and the Greens.

The ABC’s news coverage is scrupulously balanced, which means that
the views of the Labor opposition are given roughly equal treatment to
those of the Coalition government. Concepts of social justice and social
democracy do get a look in, as do free market economics and the
principles of smaller government. The ABC mostly covers climate change
as the mainstream science that it is. This enrages denialists on the
right, who would like the broadcaster to treat fringe conspiracies with
every bit as much deference as robust, peer-reviewed science.

Pictured: just some of the many leftists who have infiltrated the ABC.

In fact, the very reason the right is so keen to assault the ABC is
that it is so successful (we should spare a thought for SBS here, which
seems to be basically collateral damage in this latest skirmish of the
culture war).

Private media companies, where the majority of the ABC’s critics
work, are collectively struggling with the contemporary media market.
Their advertising base has collapsed, their circulations are plummeting
and their consumers are not as keen to pay as they used to be. This
makes the ABC, with its guaranteed revenue stream from the taxpayer, a
genuine threat.

Why do we have public media organisations in the first place? The
answers go back to the 1920s and 30s, when, in Britain and Australia,
national governments set up large, taxpayer-funded national broadcasters
for the first time.

In Britain, as in Australia, a vibrant commercial media already
existed, both in print and in the emerging technology of radio. But
radio waves were scarce property: broadcasters could scramble each
other, and some form of spectrum regulation was required.

More importantly, governments felt that the compelling immediacy of
radio made it too dangerous a force to be left entirely to the private
sector. As the famous German philosopher Jurgen Habermas observed,
public opinion plays a crucial role in democracy. And if opinion is
shaped by the media, who owns that media is a critical question.

What emerged in Britain and Australia was a mixed model of media
regulation in which a powerful public broadcaster existed alongside
commercial competitors. These public media companies would exist for
different reasons and serve different constituencies to the for-profit
enterprises of the free market.

So was born the model of “public service broadcasting:” arms-length
public media organisations, independent of the governments that funded
them, whose mission it was, in the immortal words of the BBC’s John Reith, “to inform, educate and entertain.”

Supporters of the free market have never accepted the legitimacy of
public sector broadcasting. Ever since the ABC was created, it has been
bitterly opposed by private interests. As the IPA’s John Roskam wrote last year, “a state-owned media company has no place in a free society.”

The problem for the right is that voters love public broadcasting.
The Reithian dream has proved wildly successful, well beyond the
imagination of the early pioneers.

Public broadcasters are among the most admired, popular and trusted
institutions of all – often far more respected than parliaments or even
the courts. The ABC is the most trusted news source in Australia by a wide margin. The BBC is the most trusted news source in the world.

Indeed, the publics’ trust of public service broadcasting seems to be
increasing in the contemporary media environment. Websites and online
news sources remain among the least trusted of news sources, but
newspapers and commercial broadcasters are losing ground too.

This deep reservoir of trust poses a real problem for those,
particularly on the right of politics, who dislike public service media.
Because the ABC is so popular, because it hews so closely to the centre
of the Australian political discussion, its critics have been forced to
develop new tactics in their quest for its destruction.

This is one reason why the Murdoch media and its fellow travellers in
the Coalition are so obsessed by the ABC’s perceived bias. Despite all
the evidence which shows that the ABC is remarkably unbiased, they persist with the criticism because they know it provides a pretext for attacking it as an institution.

It was no surprise to see a chorus of applause for the funding cuts on the front cover of today’s Australian.

But just because Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen hate the ABC
doesn’t mean ordinary voters do. In fact, almost the opposite is true.
As Education Minister Christopher Pyne seems to realise, attacking
public broadcasting is unpopular.

That’s why the funding cuts are so characteristic of this government.
Tony Abbott prefers to punish enemies than to appease voters. No wonder
the opinion polls are so dire.

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Monday, 17 November 2014

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