Category: Media

In August 2013 I wrote about Rupert Murdoch’s abuse of power and his intense fascination with party politics. That blog is reproduced below.

Rupert Murdoch is a frustrated politician. He loves the political game. Usually he works indirectly through ultra-loyal and uncritical editors and journalists. But new technology, particularly twitter, allows him to indulge his love of political intrigue more personally. The family must hope that sometime soon he will call it a day, but I think Murdoch will persevere to the end.

I can’t recall such a blatant abuse of power as Murdoch’s call on Tony Abbott to sack Peta Credlin. ‘If [Abbott] won’t replace Peta Credlin she must do her patriotic duty and resign’. Murdoch should admit that his unprofessional and biased support of Tony Abbott at the last election was misplaced. But rather than directly state the view he clearly holds about Tony Abbott, he blames a staffer and a woman. What a gallant performance by Murdoch.

This personal attack on Tony Abbott via his chief of staff is even more bizarre than the appointment of Prince Phillip as an Australian knight. Tony Abbott described the social media reaction to Sir Phillip’s appointment as ‘electronic graffiti’. He may think the same now about Murdoch’s social media effort.

Murdoch wants to micro manage Tony Abbott’s office but failed in managing scores of telephone hackers in the London Sun and News of the World!

Every politician that Murdoch supports pays a price in the end. Tony Abbott is now paying that price and his attempts to oblige Murdoch particularly with his attacks on the ABC, count for very little once Murdoch has determined that a political change is necessary.

Perhaps Julie Bishop gave Murdoch an insightful briefing when she called on him when she called on him a few days ago in New York.

Hopefully this latest bizarre twitter effort by Murodch will bring home to him and his family how much he has overplayed his hand. How much more will his loyalist staffers be prepared to accept?

I have no doubt that Murdoch’s intervention will produce a quite contrary effect to what he intends. If Tony Abbott gave way to Murdoch’s demands and sacked Peta Credlin, he would make himself look quite absurd.

Rupert Murdoch’s abuse of power (First published 7 August 2013)

Controlling 70% of Australia’s metropolitan newspapers, one would hope that Murdoch would exercise some responsibility in the use of that power. But none of that responsibility for Rupert Murdoch!

The Australian is the ‘intellectual’ leader of the mad-hatter’s tea party in Murdoch’s Australian media. No matter how badly the government is performing, The Australian can always make it worse. Then the Murdoch tabloids follow.

I worked for Rupert Murdoch for seven years 1967-74 as the General Manager of his Sydney newspaper operations. Looking back on those years, what strikes me most is his convenient memory about important events. The Murdoch media played an important role in backing Whitlam in 1972. Murdoch wanted a favour in return. He raised with me his possible appointment as the Australian High Commissioner to London. He said he would put his newspapers and television interests in a trust so that there would not be a conflict of interest. He also told me that he believed that he could influence other Australian media proprietors in order to avoid flak for the new government. I put Murdoch’s request to Gough Whitlam. In  rather colourful language he said ‘no way!’.  Rupert Murdoch denies that he sought the London job. I stand by my account. (For more background see ‘Things you learn along the way’ on my website at page 113.)

I had lunch with Rupert Murdoch in Canberra four days before the Whitlam dismissal on November 11, 1975.  He told me that he was quite certain that there would be an election before Christmas and an election specifically for the House of Representatives. I pointed out that the half-Senate election was the only possibility. He rejected my view and said that he would be staying in Australia for the election. To reassure me, as I was then the Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, he said that I had no need to worry as I would be appointed in the event of a Liberal victory as the Ambassador to Japan. Malcolm Fraser had obviously told him. About 18 months later I was in Japan as Rupert had predicted. Once again, Rupert denies my account but I stand by it. (See page 157)

What drives Murdoch is that he is really a frustrated politician. He wants to play the political game. He can’t help himself. He is a political addict. He loves the exercise of power.  He once discussed with me that he might seek to become a member of the Australian parliament. He was close to Jack McEwen who was the leader of the Country Party. I assumed he would seek Country Party pre-selection for the seat of Hume within which his country residence of Cavan near Yass was situated.

What impertinence it is for the Murdoch media which abuses its power everywhere and hacked telephone conversations up and down the UK to tell the Australian voters in such an aggressive way how they should vote. He leads an organisation without a moral compass.

Rupert Murdoch is not even an Australian citizen. For business advantage in the US, he gave up his Australian citizenship long ago. What role should a grumpy 80 year old American Republican billionaire play in Australian politics today?

In the 1975 election, journalists on the Australian went on strike  over Murdoch’s election bias. I wonder if any of his courtiers now, whether executives or journalists, will make a stand for editorial independence and integrity.

S U B M I S S I O N 

Senate Select Committee into the Abbott Government’s Budget Cuts on Friday 12 December 2014

Quentin Dempster – appearing as a private individual

                 VANDALISING THE ABC

1. Following is a list of impacts which I have assembled from available sources.    I can add to it as more information comes to hand. The committee already has the benefit of formal statements of impacts from the ABC (and SBS) and their claimed justifications.  This list is to help the committee understand and put into perspective the audience impact through the reduction of production resources, journalists and program makers not always frankly stated by ABC management.   The ABC has said that 300 staff are to be terminated immediately with a further 100 through restructuring operations over 2015.

2. Radio Australia – GONE ARE:-

• Phil Kafcaloudes and Mornings (2 hours of live programming to the Pacific weekdays)
• Asia Pacific weekdays
• Asia Review weekends
• Reduced daily news bulletins
• Loss of network entirely in western Pacific island nations including the Marshall Islands, Pauru, Marianas, Kiribas and the Cook Islands
• RA’s shortwave service to Myanmar (via Singapore) to be shut down end of December
• Language services cut to one person per service resulting in no continuous news service
• Loss of dedicated language programs to Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Myanmar, Vietnam and PNG

3. Australia Network/Australia Plus television – GONE ARE:-

• No longer a 24 hour channel. Built around a six hour block of programming repeated across the day.
• One hour nightly news program ‘The World’ reduced to 30 minutes
• Business Today weekdays with Whitney Fitzsimmons
• Pacific Sports 360 – dedicated sports review program for the Pacific
• Fashion Asia
• Around 650 rebroadcasters for the Australia Network service reduced to about 50 rebroadcasters in India, Asia and the Pacific, mostly delivered through a limited and encrypted satellite service
• Loss of untold Direct-to-home viewers across Asia, particularly in Thailand, who can no longer access our signal straight off the satellite due to encryption.

4. Asia Pacific News Centre (check updated information from ABC management) – GONE ARE:-

• Loss of APNC correspondents in Delhi, Jakarta, Beijing, the Pacific and parliament House Canberra. Total journalist and production staff made redundant as a direct result of the termination of the ABC/DFAT contract: 73.

5. Foreign Correspondent reduced to 22 x 30 minute episodes starting in mid-April. Catalyst the ABC’s television science show will be severely cut. Catalyst will fill the 8 pm Tuesday slot for 10 weeks from February, March and early April, and then, when Foreign Correspondent finishes its Catalyst will come back for 11 more shots. Result: Destroyed production momentum for both programs, audience confusion. After Catalyst’s first 10 week run the program staff will go into a producers’ pool for several months for so far unannounced production. We are expecting that if by 2016 Catalyst exists at all it will have been outsourced.

6. ABC’s international bureaux. Staff ‘consultation’ is still underway.  But going west to east around the world this is what we currently know:-

• London – a rare bright spot. The third reporter there (currently on local hire) will be upgraded to a full A-based position. And there should be more camera capacity.  Currently the long time editor there also shoots PTC’s (pieces to camera) and overlay. But management wants to transform that into a full camera/editor position. That may mean the current editor will be terminated and a new locally hired person brought in.
• Moscow – Bureau officially closed more than a year ago. Long time fixer/translator should have been kept on.  Awaiting confirmation of this.
• Middle East – ABC has realised belatedly that having all reporting resources in Jerusalem is not wise. New Arab world office will be established in Beirut – reporter, camera and locally hired fixer/Arabic translator. The second Middle East report will stay in Jerusalem and become a VJ (video journalist) with one local producer to help. Expecting office administrator and driver to be sacked.
• Nairobi – Has been VJ correspondent and will remain so. Hopefully the reporter has an officer, a fixer and some admin support.
• New Delhi – To become a home based VJ with local fixer/translator. The ABC has had a functioning office in Delhi for decades but now apparently the lucky correspondent is expected to cover the entirety of South Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal etc (1.2billion people) from a back bedroom.
• Bangkok – similar to Delhi. Good functioning office will be scrapped. Home based VJ plus local.  Excellent camera man will be offered fewer days per year.
• Jakarta – Meant to be a bigger ‘hub’ with second correspondent and second camera but with regional ‘fire reporter’ – immediate despatch to breaking stories thought by staff to be better coordinated from Bangkok than Jakarta.
• Beijing – also slated as bigger ‘hub’ two correspondents and two cameras but to cover Japan and Korea and region as required. This is not really an enhancement but more a replacement of the resources which existed when Australia Network was operating.
• Tokyo – A big loser. Close down the office in the main government broadcaster NHK – where ABC currently gets access to news bulletins and feeds, although rent is ‘cheap’.  BBC apparently has spent 15 years trying to get back into the building.  New arrangements: home based VJ plus local fixer/translator.  Under Japanese law it will be very expensive to have locals including excellent local hire camera operator made redundant.   The process of closing down is expected to take most of 2015.  Tokyo decision is viewed by ABC staff and international correspondents as short sighted.
• Port Moresby – Already VJ. Has separate office from home in one compound, plus local fixer. Correspondent often has to waste several days a week doing admin because ABC News will not hire someone to help.
• Auckland – Closed and with it a lot of good South Pacific coverage as well as NZ material. ABC has had a visible TVNZ office for many years of great value to Australia’s engagement with the Kiwis: a single correspondent with VJ capacity but access to professional TV NZ crews. Highly productive and comparatively inexpensive:
• Washington – Staff do not believe claim by News managers that they are creating ‘major multi-platform hubs’ in London and Washington by July 2015. The truth is Washington DC is being down sized with one fewer reporter and likely to lose its long time editor (who occasionally shoots footage and interviews). One of two camera operators (an Australian on local hire conditions) has reportedly been told that his current contract is too generous and to stay he will have to take a pay cut.

7. Radio National  

RN is cutting deeper than the cut the network was asked to deliver ($350K) as part of the Government’s budget cuts in order to invest in a digital future.

• Five specialist feature programs to go (Hindsight, Encounter, Poetica, Into The Music, 360documentaries) to be replaced by a generalist 4x28min feature slot. 9 out of 18 producers to lose their jobs.
• Increase in the freelance budget of the Features area – a clear casualisation of the workforce.
• Bush Telegraph cut – loss of 6 jobs
• By Design and RN First Bite to go and replaced by less resourced program covering similar content areas – dumbing down the network.
• The Religion Unit to lose 4 producers as part of the restructure of RN Features, these 4 producers are in the pool of 18 producers mentioned above.
• A new program to be presented by Tom Switzer
• Background Briefing to lose half a position in Canberra but to gain a FT position in Melbourne – no consultation about this decision.
• A new junior reporter position established in Perth to work across the network.
• Four new digital producer positions created – this is where the investment in the digital future comes in.
• One position to go in the RN Admin team – 2 people in a pool to be reduced to one.

Overall 22 potential redundancies at the network and the creation of 8 new jobs.

Religion 

The impact on religion and its format coverage on the ABC is of particularly distressing concern.   Please see an open letter to ABC chairman James Spigelman AC QC from 30 of Australia’s religious leaders covering the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu communities. Signatories include Melbourne’s Anglican Archbishop Dr Philip Freier, the Grand Mufti of Australia, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, the Uniting Church’s President of the National Assembly, Professor Andrew Dutney, plus leaders of multiple Christian denominations, Jewish and Hindu organisations.  The open letter said:

“We write to you because we believe that the ABC has a particularly important role in presenting religion both in its own right and as an integral part of modern Australia, thanks to the high-quality specialist religion programming provided by both television and radio.  We believe the faith and values we hold will always occupy a central part in the formation of our Australian national identity.  Further, an understanding of religion plays a crucial part in grasping today’s ever more complex social and political developments both in Australi9a and internationally.  It has never been more important for Australians to have access to content that builds a deeper understanding of the role of faith in the lives of individuals or society, as demonstrated in last month’s G20 interfaith summit”. 

• In reality, the proposed changes mean a reduction in Religion Unit staff from 10.5 full and permanent positions to 6. This is a loss of 43%.  The media has quoted a loss of 70% of below the line production budget i.e. the amount of budget available after salaries.  This is correct.  The majority of this budget has been spent on artist fees (i.e. freelance producers).
• The removal of the religion feature producers from the Unit with its attendant support and extended networks and specialist knowledge base across different religious, faith and multi-cultural minority communities was not at any point prior to the announcement on Monday Nov 24 discussed with those responsible for managing Religion. On the contrary when further consultation was requested Religion was told that there would be opportunity for further discussion about the future of religion on RN once the scale of government cuts was known.  Clearly there was no intent to have any discussion since the ‘proposed’ changes and cuts were all handed down (as if at the flick of a switch) less than two working days after the government announced its cuts.
• Significantly the religion unit’s remit stems from the job description of the EP Religion, ABC Radio. It has a remit to serve the ABC Radio division and more widely across the ABC.  The Executive Producer’s leadership of programming is to be in consultation with Network Managers.  It was with immense surprise and shock that the proposed changes were presented effectively fait accompli and an hour later to 4four of the Unit (those primarily deployed at present on the production of the existing RN feature, Encounter).
• The rationale given by Michael mason, the new Director of Radio behind the proposed formation of a features unit (to encompass existing RN Arts features and Encounter, the religion feature) is to pool staff and resource for “greater program efficiency and program cohesion” – this is an existing modus operandi for the Religion Unit to the benefit of six programmes, nine hours across four Radio networks; in the devising of several cross-network and cross-divisional projects which have been applauded by RN, by the Radio Division and by Television:  it having even been noted that Religion have been seen to be providing the model for the way the ABC should work in the future.
• The religion Unit contends that its staff are not attached to individual programs (work records support this). Religion also contends that RN management and indeed Radio Division management should not be nominating these producers as features producers.
• It is further contended that if the line management of people and editorial is removed from the Religion Unit, the producers selected from the pool based on their specialisation as well as feature making skills will soon lose that specialisation without the support, cross-fertilisation and development of ideas that comes from the way the Unit works together.
• Religion is also concerned about the inability it will have to move staff around between programs, to give other producers opportunities to produce in the feature and documentary form and to use the skills of the staff to be removed from the Unit to the benefit of the other five programs in the Unit, to ‘renew and refresh’ in the parlance of RN, to give things a good shake up. This goes to the heart of Religion’s ability to manage people and their careers to motivate, inspire and challenge them and to use all the skills available to the widest possible benefit of the ABC.
• The job of the EP for ABC TV’s Compass has been axed. This means there is no editorial head of religion in TV. Compass will now be supervised by a general commissioning editor.
• Songs of Praise is to be discontinued. Leaving Compass as television’s only commitment to religion.
• Christmas Carols and Readings which was previously part of ABC TV’s Christmas offering was dropped last year and reportedly Head of Programming ABC1 and ABC 2 has said that he would not schedule it into the future ‘unless he was told to do so’.  In short:  ABC axes Christmas Carols. This has left ABC TV with no reflection of Christmas as a religious festival anywhere in the schedule. 

9. At the Movies

Although Margaret Pomerantz and David Stratten have voluntarily now left the ABC it is significant to note that the ABC will not be developing replacement talent or continuing a program which has successfully engaged audiences for decades.  Again the qualitative difference in this format was the intellectual depth and honesty used to engage viewers in this most powerful art form.  Its added value was its critical exposure of Australian feature length movies and their comparison with those produced elsewhere in the world.   The loss of this format is a tragedy for Australian audiences and the local film industry.

• Classic FM

The loss to the ABC and Australia seems to concentrate within Classic FM and new music genres: the loss of NMUL and Jazz outlets from the free to air Classic FM network being examples, along with the prospect of losing “to the God who sings” as a result of cuts to the Religion unit.  The cuts to Classic FM will result in a significant loss of a specialist craft and skill base – a loss of more than 300 years of massed experience.   The cuts have been concentrated in two branches with 50% of existing staff going from both Perth and Adelaide.  In spite of a proclaimed new ‘model’ of parity in numbers between engineers and producers in each branch (i.e. two engineers equals two producers) the sole producer position in Perth has been abolished.  Perth is the hardest branch in the ABC to support by relief staff (potentially from either Melbourne or Sydney) because of travel times.  Classic FM staff have identified inaccuracies and errors in the Lewis review which to date have not been corrected by ABC management.  As a consequence the credibility of the current changes has been undermined with only the barest of new ‘structure’ plan provided for discussion.

 

• ABC domestic news and current affairs. GONE are:- 

• 30 Friday night state shows which have existed in this timeslot since 2001. Loss of local TV current affairs in NSW, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia, Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory.  This is a major blow to the ABC’s engagement with audiences at a local level around Australia.  There is a qualitative difference in the ABC’s coverage of politics, issues, and state services in this format (studio interviews with premiers and ministers plus investigative pieces) – education, health, law and order, environment, planning, social equity and multi-party corruption.  The removal of these programs in New South Wales and Queensland at this time when state elections are due in early 2015 is passing strange editorially.  

• The Business – Ticky Fullerton’s late night business and market review program is gone. Staff dispute management claims about audience figures for this program and are highly sceptical about the influence and effective business journalism to be delivered by 2 x 15 minute slots placed elsewhere in the News 24 schedule. Again the concern is one about the loss of a qualitative difference in format.

• Lateline – See ABC management explanation. Field reporting capacity for original investigative reports is being stripped out.  Lateline has been a major force in ABC journalism, exposing major bungles in Commonwealth Government administration, failures in indigenous affairs and exposure of systemic cover-up in child sexual abuse – a precipitant to judicial inquiries at state and national levels.  Staff see the loss of Lateline’s original reporting capacity particularly its role in government accountability to be a major blow to public broadcasting in Australia.

• Current affairs – will lose about 31 full time positions (26 editorial, 5 news operations).

• State news rooms – will lose around 30 full time positions (29 editorial, 1 news operations). Reduction in duration of radio news bulletins.

• Overall 100 editorial and support staff to be stripped from news and current affairs programming on radio and television.

• TV production South Australia and Western Australia

• The ending of TV production in SA and WA is expected to result in the reduction of a further 9 full time positions in SA and 10 in WA. The committee has been furnished with production impacts by others.   The loss of the ABC’s remaining regional television production capacity outside Sydney and Melbourne confirms the strategic centralisation of ABC creative content production to Sydney and Melbourne.   It is this issue which needs to be addressed by government in future consideration of the role and functions of the ABC and its taxpayer investment in the regions of Australia.

In summary

• It is apparent from an analysis of these impacts on the content produced by the ABC that those programs which require specialist skills, investigative journalism, studio based interviewing to add greater value to state and territory government accountability, distinctive international broadcasting from logistically supported in situ foreign correspondents,   that the current cuts are vandalising the ABC and its role in our national life.  The ABC has been judged by the public to be one of the most trusted institutions in Australia.  It is trusted mainly because it is perceived by the public as independent of the government of the day.   It is trusted because on occasions it is perceived by the public as having the capacity to call government to account.   The impacts raise a distressing concern that ABC journalism through the digital revolution will be turned into ‘churnalism’ servicing the relentless demands of the 24 hour news cycle.  ‘Churnalism’ is reactive coverage to drive traffic to ABC news online, tablet and mobile sites through rolling coverage to exploit immediate public interest.   But journalism is more than ‘ambulance chasing’.

• The same quality concerns apply to all programming offered by the ABC. Since its foundation in 1932 the ABC has evolved uniquely without paid advertising. Public broadcasting has followed the ethos of Lord Reith (director general of the BBC 1927-38) to ‘educate, inform and entertain’. This ethos transcends delivery platforms. Reith fought United Kingdom executive government to establish the BBC’s independence but famously said of the broadcaster’s reason  for being:

                        “He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for lower standards which he himself will then satisfy.”

The political context

• The Abbott Government has no mandate from the electorate to cut the budgets of either the ABC or SBS. The emerging deficit was well known to the political parties well before the September 2013 federal election. While the shadow communications minister Malcolm Turnbull noted the cost efficiency of the broadcasters could or would be reviewed in the context of likely deficit reduction policy, cuts of the magnitude now confronting the ABC and SBS were not forewarned.   In a now famous statement on the eve of the 2013 election Tony Abbott said unequivocally and unconditionally that there would be no cuts to the ABC or SBS.

• Two months after the change of government Mr John Menadue, former CEO of News Corp. Australia and a former Secretary Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, noted in a prescient article Murdoch and Abbott vs ABC (19^th December 2013):

Tony Abbott has a debt to repay to Rupert Murdoch for the extremely biased support he received in the last election.   With the help of Senator Cory Bernadi, Tony Abbott is now following the Murdoch Media line in attacking the ABC.  He is also following in the steps of the Howard Government that attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the ABC to heel.   During the Howard Government, Minister Richard Alston and Senator Santo Santoro led a concerted campaign against the ABC to force political compliance. 

7. While both Prime Minister Abbott and Communications Minister Turnbull now acknowledge that Mr Abbott’s pre-election commitment should not have been uttered and that the reduction to the broadcasters’ funding envelope from 2015 must proceed in the interests of deficit reduction, John Menadue’s observations help to establish the realpolitik here (politics based on realities and material needs rather than on morals or ideals). This is self evident in the government’s decision, announced by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, to terminate the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade contract with the ABC to provide international broadcasting services to the Asia Pacific region. While Minister Bishop can be expected to reject any suggestion that she has exercised her discretion to terminate the Australia Network contract at the insistence and persistence of a lobbying campaign by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, she has exposed the shallowness of her thinking through her stated reasons for such termination.  In a speech to Chatham House in London (12^th March 2014) said: 

               It’s not about the ABC promoting its news programmes or whatever else into the region.  It’s actually meant to be fulfilling the Australian Government’s foreign policy objectives.  My question is whether or not there is an inherent conflict in having the ABC contracted to deliver Australian government messages into the region.  We’ve had the conflict writ large when it comes to the issue of asylum seekers and the issue of the Snowden allegations.  The ABC is a news organisation and perfectly entitled to report how it wishes intro the region on those two contentious issues.  But under a soft-power diplomacy contract, it’s meant to be delivering a positive image of Australia into the region.

• The Minister wanted Australia Network to be a propaganda arm of government in spite of the long standing protocol that the ABC would adhere to its editorial Code of Practice in its international reporting. DFAT had contractually agreed that it would not have veto or censorship control of material to be broadcast. Of course the ABC would expose contentious issues concerning domestic Australian politics and foreign policy and the politics and human rights abuses occurring anywhere in the region.   The ABC would be bound by its editorial practices, constrained by defamation, contempt and discrimination laws domestically and by protocols covering cultural and ethnic sensitivities.   The two contentious issues the Foreign Minister seemed to be referring to at Chatham House were the ‘burnt hands’ claims of asylum seekers under Australian Navy operations and the ABC’s joint reporting with Guardian Australia of the Edward Snowden drop of ‘five eyes’ intelligence surveillance showing that the Australian Signals Directorate had tapped the mobile phones of the Indonesian president and his wife and senior Indonesian ministers and officials.    For sure both were embarrassing, but journalism’s role is to inform the public.  In spite of Minister Bishop’s claims in a recent Insiders interview with Barrie Cassidy that the Australia Network service was contractually under-performing, DFAT at no time raised any concerns that the ABC’s operation of Australia Network was not meeting its contracted performance standards.   On this factual basis this committee would be entitled to ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade to table or release DFAT’s advice to her on which she based her decision to terminate the Australia Network   On the evidence to date it appears the Minister’s discretion was unilaterally applied.   Given the vandalism to the national interest described above the committee would be entitled to ask with justified consternation: Why?  

Management Speak

• In addition to the ABC’s response to the Lewis ‘efficiency’ review and the Cabinet Expenditure Review Committee’s setting of the funding envelope for ABC funding to apply from July 2015, ABC managing director Mark Scott has provided staff with an explanation of additional cuts to produce $20million of internal savings for ‘reinvestment’ in the technological upgrade of iView and for other purposes. The ABC Board, the managing director and his communications staff have failed to protect or to effectively defend the ABC from the aggressive political attacks upon the broadcaster from News Corporation which has consistently demonstrated its political hold over the current government. The Board and its chairman, James Spigelman AC QC, were missing in action in the months leading up to the May 2013 federal budget with its 1% ‘down payment’ budget reduction.  The Board, its chairman and managing director, failed to persuade the government of the value to Australia of the ABC’s international broadcasting capacity, particularly with the 2013 ABC annual report stating that with 3.3billion mobile phones in the Asia Pacific region the ABC was wiring Australia into the region as never before with quality, ethical programming, finance news, sport and entertainment.  It is because of this failure of the current ABC Board and management that the Federal Parliament should now consider new methods of securing certain and adequate funding outside the political and discretionary power of executive government for the public broadcasters – the ABC and SBS. 

1. Mark Scott summed up the ABC’s survival challenge in current political and funding context as specifically to ‘reinvest’ in ABC content for mobiles and tablets.

 “If we continue to drift, if we continue to do what we’re doing now, then inevitably our audiences will get older and the percentage of Australians watching, listening and logging on each week will fall, our approval rating will fall and our ability to hold on to the funding base we’ve got will be more of a challenge.   “So what I’ve said to our teams is we want to increase from 25 percent (our current digital audience) to 40 percent in coming years … and in order to do that we need to invest more money in online and mobile services. Why is it only 25 percent?  We have underinvested in it compared to others.  We see four key areas that will need investment for us to be able to grow this mobile and online audience.  One is iView, one is Triple J, one is our ABC children’s services and the final one is ABC News.  And the one with the greatest potential to lift our engagement is ABC News.  News is already a massive driver of online and mobile traffic everywhere.  One of the reasons people keep picking up their phones is to get the news, to get the latest information and we need to invest more in order to really be able to do that.” 

• Online and mobile is said to be the key to securing the ABC’s future. Mark Scott gives just one line on what actual content would be covered, listing ‘great Australian drama, news, regional content, arts, narrative comedy, religion and science’. He offered the new ‘HBO-style’ Australian thriller Code (based on Canberra political intrigue which premieres later this month on ABC TV) and the narrative comedies Utopia and Please Like Me (currently screening) as examples of content designed to attract younger audiences.

• Exactly what, how and by whom future content which ‘skews young’ on mobiles and tablets is to be created and under what editorial criteria, is not mentioned. He is considering outsourcing all ABC content creation with the possible exception of news, leading to the destruction of what is left of the ABC’s creative independence.

• Mark Scott needs to explain exactly what content he will be asking taxpayers to reinvest in and how it fits with the legislated Charter of the ABC to enhance a sense of national identity, cultural diversity, to inform and, of course, to entertain.   How will this content draw from the talents and ideas of creators around Australia and not just from Sydney?  How will it build a viable video schedule currently dependant on largely British programming (Dr Who, QI, BBC murder mysteries etc) and now playing second fiddle to Foxtel after its recent exclusive first release  contract with the BBC?

• At a time of the disaggregation of free-to-air television audiences and the decline of print journalism there seems to be a greater need than ever before for a public broadcaster/cybercaster which is not driven by the prejudices and preferences of narrowing demographic segments but more concerned with ‘broadcasting’ – ensuring that young, old, geographically and culturally diverse Australians know what each other is thinking. The role of the ABC is to expand the experience of the people of the nation: call it nation building, cohesion or inclusion. The programming ideas which evolve from this ethos should not be driven by ratings or by ‘skewing’ demographically.

• Mark Scott is putting the means of delivery and its uptake by targeted audiences ahead of what is to be delivered. Wrong way round. The flaws with this approach were once described at an ABC broadcasters’ conference as “driving into the future with your eyes fixed on the rear view mirror”. That is, making decisions about what content the audience should be offered based purely on what they have already experienced. The strategy omits specialisation and innovation across the genres as drivers of original content creation.

• Today, Friday 12^th December 2014, the ABC is in a dark place. It faces a hostile national government out to do it very real damage at the insistence of Rupert Murdoch. It has a Board which appears mute or devoid of defensive advocacy.  It has a staff in agony at an unfair redundancy process based on what is known as ‘hunger games’ elimination on an inscrutable management selection methodology.  But it has a public which wants it to survive and prosper.   The ABC is a creature of an Act of the Federal Parliament of Australia.  Its survival as a quality producer of Australian content across the genres and regions will depend on those forces within the Parliament and the public rallying to its defence.

 

 

 

LAUNCH OF JAMES CARLETON’S ‘THE WIT OF WHITLAM’,BELLEVUE HOTEL, PADDINGTON, NSW, 8 DECEMBER 2014

As Henry Kissinger discovered to his chagrin in Beijing in 1971, Gough made a habit of getting there first.  The Bellevue is no exception.  Most of us here probably associate the Bellevue with its glory days when Suzie Carleton was, as Gough always described her, its chatelaine.  And Gough and Margaret were very much part of that scene.

But Gough and the Bellevue go back to 1951, before he even entered the Parliament.  That’s when, as junior to Bill Dovey, Margaret’s father, counsel assisting the Liquor Royal Commission, he exposed the Bellevue, along with the Captain Cook and the Edinburgh Castle, as one of the notorious sly-grog pubs of Sydney.

You can’t get more ‘0ld Sydney’ than that – and Gough and the Bellevue were in the thick of it.

It’s a reminder, too, that there was an Eastern Suburbs Whitlam before there was a Western Suburbs Whitlam, well before Werriwa.  And long after.

He was appointed Minute Secretary of the Darlinghurst Branch of the ALP the very night he walked in to join the Party in 1945 – two days after he was demobbed from the Air Force.

He was pre-selected for the Fitzroy ward in the Sydney City Council in 1947, but the Council was sacked before the election.  Later as you know, when he moved south and west, he failed in bids for the State seat of Cronulla and for the Sutherland Shire Council.  As he used to say:

I might have been Lord Mayor of Sydney, Premier of NSW or even President of the Sutherland Shire.  But, alas, the fates were against me.

The Fates brought him back to the Eastern Suburbs with a bang in 1975.  It was more or less a fluke that Gough and Margaret had bought their unit at Darling Point just before the Dismissal.  And Margaret immediately moved out of Kirribilli and into the flat the very next day.  They had never envisaged it as their home address for the next four decades.  But it became his Sydney headquarters for the campaign.

It’s in Marathon Avenue.  So as not to alarm the bourgeoisie among the new neighbours, he didn’t put ‘E G Whitlam’ on the residents’ board in the lobby.  He identified the new tenants as ‘Miltiades’ – the victorious Greek general over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.    So began Gough’s second incarnation as Eastern Suburbs Man.

This, of course, is the Gough that a bright-eyed curly-headed kid named James Carleton came to know – eyes wide open, ears wide open, taking it all in.

But the special thing about young James is not only what he witnessed at first hand.  He was soaking up all the stories from some of the master story-tellers of the times – Mick and Eric and Ed and Brian, just to begin with.  It’s not adequate to say that they are keepers of the flame.  They lit it.  And indeed, they are part of the flame.

So, as Gough might have said, James was destined to write this book whenever it was published.

As shown by his ability to meet Louise’s deadlines.  A remarkable feat.  His big problem was that the stories just kept on coming.  From 21 October, right up to the Town Hall Memorial, and after.  In fact, it was the only wake I’ve ever been to where the only subject of conversation actually was the deceased.

The reason is that everybody who ever met him has a Gough story.  They remember them and want to tell them. So the stream is endless.

One reason why they remember them is that Gough had the great comedic gift of the totally unexpected.  Tony Burke, on telling Gough his new daughter was named Helena, couldn’t possibly have expected a monologue on the history of the name, from Helen of Troy to Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, who discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem

–              Gough, I didn’t know that

–              Tony, if you talk to me for even a short time, you’ll always learn                                           something.

The Labor candidate at Alice Springs could hardly have expected to be introduced to the Renaissance School …

–              Comrade, I am to poster-sticking what Giotto was to the circle.

Another characteristic that comes through all the stories is his disdain for platitudes and clichés – something of a handicap for a politician.  So his standing instruction in the drafting of speeches was, as Queen Gertrude said to Polonius, ‘More matter with less art”.  Or, as I would put it, ‘more facts, less bullshit’.

Gough himself put it in another way.  About 1974, we were discussing our respective writing styles.

–              ‘Your trouble, comrade, is that you are too dithyrambic.  Mine is that I’m                          too inspissated .’

Well, who can argue with that?

[Dithyrambic – a passionate choral hymn, in honour of Dionysus, wild, bacchanalian;]

[Inspissated – dry, densely detailed.]

He did have the grace to say that we complemented each other.

There were other occasions we discussed speech-writing – at the opening of the Sydney Entertainment Centre on 1 May 1983, not long after the return of the Hawke Government.  At this stage, I was working with both Bob Hawke and Neville Wran.

–              How are you coping, comrade, doing what Our Lord says is impossible?                           (Man cannot serve two masters).

[Reading from Canberra Times 25 March 1990] –

“There was one VIP whose absence from the official opening at the Australian National Gallery on Friday night of ‘Civilisation: Ancient Treasures from the British Museum’, created a minor sensation.  The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, was otherwise committed, so in his place stood the chairman of the ANG Council, Gough Whitlam, who read the following note from Mr Hawke:

‘My present preoccupation with the preservation of Australian civilisation prevents my joining you tonight…. Well, then, in the circumstances we’ve had to draw on an ancient treasure from the Australian National Gallery!”

He acknowledged the brilliance of Mr Hawke’s message, and displayed his own considerable insight into the nature of political expediency by quipping: “Quite frankly, I couldn’t have done it better if I’d written it myself …. and I suspect it was written by the same person who would have written it for me!’ “

Conclusion

One of the pieces I wrote as valedictory I entitled “A Very Public Life’.  By this I meant, among other things, that there was a great unity – a one-ness – between the public and private Gough.  As he said of the Whitlam Government itself, ‘What you saw is what you got’ – and that really goes for the public figure and the private man.

It wasn’t quite as Queen Victoria said of Gladstone: ‘He addresses me as if I were a public meeting’.

But there was never much Gough said or did that was meant to be off-the–record.

Indeed, the only time he took me to task, in all the hundreds of thousands of words between us, was when I wrote the Arthur Calwell entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and said that Gough had made a ‘calculated indiscretion’ in 1965 in telling a New Zealand reporter that Arthur was too old for the leadership.

But indiscretions abounded, calculated or otherwise, and while those around him may have shuddered at the time, they are now all part of the legend.  And a great many of them are in this book.

As Gough said: ‘I may be a legend but I am not a myth’.

And I think that it is a mark of Gough’s true greatness that the legend grows, even as we recall things with love that in anybody else would be regarded as outrageous.

It goes without saying that Gough would have enjoyed this book.

It contains one of the keys to understanding Gough Whitlam.  And that is : he enjoyed being Gough immensely.

And you can see how much enjoyed being himself, not least being the best caricaturist of himself, in every page of this book.

In this book, we can enjoy Gough being Gough.

Mark Scott has expressed concern at the pain being felt by staff losing their jobs and careers. He announced that he and his senior team would take a pay freeze for a year.

When it was pointed out that there would not be sufficient staff left to fill the program schedule, some senior manager apparently announced that the money achieved through some of the budget savings would be used to commission some individual programs and short series from some of those very people who are about to be made redundant. So, the ABC management is proposing to sack long serving and loyal staff with proper jobs, and use their salaries to bring them back on short term contracts and commissions with no security of employment.

The cuts will fall most heavily in program making areas. Over the past several years the ABC has closed its television production centres in Perth, Hobart and now Adelaide which has so upset Christopher Pyne. At the same time it has radically cut internal production in Sydney, until virtually the only in-house TV programs left are Compass and Catalyst. Now they are moving the outsourcing philosophy into Radio. The cuts will fall most heavily on staff in programs requiring depth of production, research and analysis; in TV and Radio News and Current Affairs, and in radio documentaries and features.

Mark Scott says the ABC needs to target younger audiences. The ABC has been talking about that for decades. And the same commercial formula for doing so is being trotted out again: Make it shorter, make it lighter, make it cheaper, and if possible make it funny.  What was that about dumbing down?

The intent it seems is to transform the ABC from a production house, reflecting the geographic and cultural diversity of the nation, into a commissioning and transmission agency, serving a few big commercial co-production houses, such as Southern star and Endemol.

The difficulty with this model is that commercial co-production partners may cover their costs plus a few percent doing a deal with the ABC, but their real mark-up comes from selling the product on the global market. This means productions skewed to their commercial sales potential rather than editorial merit for Australia.

The second consequence of this model is that with journalists and producers on casual and short term contracts, staff are going to be very timid about offending the powerful. This form of short term, run of show, contract employment poses a significant threat to independent vigorous program making, and to a free media. It risks the public purpose of the ABC.

The major industrial problem facing staff is that the ABC has told them that all redundancies will be individually targeted. This breaks a long standing expectation of staff. As the cuts have come in waves every decade or so and staff numbers have shrunk from around five and half thousand to around three thousand, staff have been allowed to volunteer for redundancy, and where possible to arrange for staff who wish to go to substitute for staff who wish to stay, so long as the targeted savings can be met. This was generally done as a way of cushioning the pain and gaining maximum staff co-operation in a difficult situation. This time round management have pre-emptively declared No Voluntary redundancies, and No Substitutions. Faced with industrial laws that make striking illegal, except during a once in 3 year wage bargaining period, staff are faced with the prospect of risking punitive legal retribution if they protest.

 

 

Limelight, ABC Classic FM’s online magazine, reported on 24 November

‘The number of concerts recorded will be slashed by a massive 50%, with just 300 performances due to be recorded over the next two years verses the 600 concerts recorded during the previous two years. Broadcasts of live performances currently account for 17 hours of Classic FM’s weekly output.’

http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/major-cuts-abc-classic-fm%E2%80%99s-programming-confirmed

So listeners will lose around 50%, i.e., 8-9 hours of Australian-performed broadcast music each week.

What will we lose?

Events like the 30 November broadcast of the fine new Australian opera by Iain Grandage and Alison Croggan, The Riders (2014), inspired by Tim Winton’s great novel. Many thousands of people will have heard this ground-breaking new work on Classic FM radio (and it is still up on Listen Again).

Or Max Richter’s new composition Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Recomposed (2012), which he played with the 22-piece Wordless Music Orchestra, an outstanding New York electro-acoustic group, in Melbourne on 24 November. Parts of this brilliant reworking of a familiar classic are already being broadcast on Classic FM: last week I heard Summer, and loved it.

Or the brilliant Victorian Opera Wagner Ring Cycle performed late last year in Melbourne, all 17 hours of which was rebroadcast soon afterwards on ABC Classic FM. Or Pinchgut Opera Company productions in Sydney. Or the Sydney International Piano Competition.

The 17 hours per week until now of broadcast live musical performances on Classic FM presumably reflected professional artistic judgements of how much of such music being played live each week around Australia was worthy of national broadcast.

Arbitrarily to cut it in half is like telling the ABC it can only broadcast half the days of a cricket Test series, or half of a football season. It makes no artistic sense.

Cost accountants like these cuts, because programmes of pre-recorded music CDs from overseas are cheaper than Australian live broadcasts. There are savings on broadcasting rights fees paid to creators and performers, and from not putting recording crews and announcers in place, sometimes in not-so-accessible locations in regional Australia.

But at what artistic cost?  For example, if ABC FM has now to cease rebroadcasting the Huntington Music Festivals: there will be real losses in listener pleasure, and in the financial support around the nation that helps a unique festival like Huntington in remote Mudgee to attract sponsors and thus continue to thrive. Many such festivals depend on ABC broadcasting financial support to help keep them viable.

How will FM program planners allocate their halved domestic live broadcast time between the Sydney Symphony Orchestra? The Adelaide or West Australian Symphony Orchestra? Huntington? Victorian Opera’s Wagner Ring Cycle? The Riders? A Peter Sculthorpe memorial tribute concert? An international piano or vocal competition in Australia?

The national classical music live broadcaster should not be forced to make such egregious choices on any but artistic grounds. This is what ABC Classic FM was set up for, and extended across our vast land to reach 95% of Australian radio audiences; not mechanically and endlessly to play tapes from overseas. There must be a balance.

I’m not sure how one gets across to people who do not much like or understand classical music the huge cultural treasure and living musical archive that the national Classic FM network, as it has evolved over the last 40 odd years, now represents in Australia. There is nothing else quite like it in the world.

It allows listeners almost right across Australia to hear the best world music and Australian-created or performed music, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Some people might see this as catering to an elite minority ‘niche’ taste. Is listening on the radio to Test cricket or an AFL series a ‘niche’ taste? I don’t listen to these things, but I am happy for others to do so.

The love of classical music has deep and broad roots in Australia. We would never have had a Joan Sutherland without our rich Australian classical music public culture, back to our early European settlement – all those church choirs, brass bands, eisteddfods, music and dance schools. And in the dark days of WW2, when visionary ABC executives like Bernard Heinze and Charles Moses, who both had a strong sense of cultural mission to the whole country while we battled Nazi  barbarism, sent ABC orchestras touring around Australia and playing Beethoven’s nine symphonies to packed houses of emotional audiences. And in the rich golden years of Australian classical music from the 1940s on, inspired by the contributions of Jewish and other refugee musicians from Europe.

ABC Classic FM has inherited from ABC Radio National, and now has sole broadcasting responsibility, for nurturing this rich living musical heritage. Live concert-hall or opera house audiences are essential for music to thrive. But surely it is also a cultural good that retired people in Orange or Bendigo or Launceston or Bunbury can switch on their FM radios and hear the same wonderful music, played in our country.   Hearing a tape from Frankfurt or London is just not quite the same thrill.

The national Classic FM network allows large numbers of listeners to share in hugely significant and inspiring live musical events in our country that many, because of where they live, or lack of money, or mobility issues, would never get to hear. It allows many Australians to feel a sense of belonging to a common music-loving national community, uniting young, middle-aged and older people.

A symbiotic relationship exists between a thriving classical music national radio network, which builds and enriches audiences, and the stimulation and professional development of young musical talent in our country. If one is harshly cut back, the other inevitably will suffer. A holistic approach is surely needed.

What will happen under halved live broadcasting hours to the broadcasting opportunities and performance fees of our smaller state symphony orchestras outside Sydney and Melbourne – in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Tasmania? How will they cope with loss of income and audience engagement in their states? Such national musical assets are hard to create, easy to destroy. Look at the USA now, a virtual classical music radio desert and with symphony orchestras in financial difficulties closing down around the country. Do we want this?

Somebody must speak out now for Classic FM. It is not for elites, not for silvertails. It is for the 750,000 Australians listening to their FM radios, whose parents and teachers taught them to cherish classical music, whatever their location, means, ages, or mobility. Don’t taxpayers and citizens have a right to demand that this precious intangible national cultural heritage, built up by the hard work of so many people over so many years, not be cut off at the knees now?

 

 

Nobody laughed – things must be different in the press gallery these days.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott in one of his longest press conferences was trying desperately to erase the hangover from the setbacks which have dogged him and his government since his dismal performance at the G20 meeting which he had hoped – forlornly as it proved – would rescue the image of a very disordered and unimpressive government. He was trying to end the year on what at least might seem to be a high note.

He had just told the assembled media that despite the ‘dire’ state of the economy which had been his theme for more than 12 months, he could not abandon his universally unpopular $5 million paid parental leave scheme which will benefit only very rich women. This would, he said, be seen as breaking a promise. This, while he was being peppered with questions on his Kristallnacht of promises on health, education, pensions, tax,  petrol pricing, the ABC and SBS and even on his water buy-back policy from the Murray Darling system.

Such a brazen failure to read the mood of the meeting might in other days of the press gallery cause at least some audible amused incredulity. Billy McMahon, exhibiting similar ill-based self-assurance, could certainly not have got away without a snigger.

This press conference was supposed to set the scene for a high-note ending to his government’s first full year in office. Like many of Tony’s recent endeavours, it failed. Tony has developed a new principle by which he evaluates his government’s performance. ‘Things aren’t what they are – they are what Tony says they are’. It’s catching on with some of his ministers – a very quick adaptee is Treasurer Joe Hockey.

In his last week of a pretty dismal year, guided by this principle, Tony tried to convince his questioners that the government had a single ‘ragged’ week – not a ‘ragged’ fifteen months as demonstrated by the authoritative Newspoll the next day. The government was still in a heavily losing position as it has been in Newspoll and every other poll since November last year, and worst, stuck at the new low it hit with the production of its first budget back in May.

The principle is holding good too in reviewing presentation of his government’s controversial policies. Crippling moves on education, health, pensions, etc., are not broken promises taken from Tony’s innovative viewpoint. Unsurprisingly others, like electors, might and currently seem to see them in a different light. Tony using his same self-created prism assures us the Barrier Reef is not endangered by climate change; consumers, not bankers, will benefit from the removal of safeguards involving financial advice; students will somehow be better off paying up to $100,000 to earn a degree and pensioners won’t be worse-off having their payments calculated in the new way this budget proposes. There are a host of other propositions on which the voter seems determined to see things as they are rather than what Tony says they are.  Look at the polls.

And there is another major promise on which Tony has not yet been called by either the Opposition or the media. Robustly confident of an election win Tony declared that in government he would not be dealing with minor parties or Independents to win passage for policies which at the time voters were assured were not happening. In recent weeks our major political coverage has involved the very negotiations – only occasionally successful – that Tony assured us would not happen. And he went further. He would, he promised, not hesitate to take parliament to a double dissolution in order to tame the Opposition and get his program implemented.

A mere glance at the opinion polls tells us why this remains another broken promise. But it does not explain why he has so far been unchallenged by either Opposition or press on the question. Highly unfavourable opinion polls are not the only deterrent for Abbott here. Have a look at the election manifesto for which Tony will be seeking national support.

Higher university fees, lower pensions, more costly healthcare, dearer petrol, total disregard for climate change and a total shutdown of any government bodies likely to advise him otherwise. And there are a host of other electoral nasties Tony has unveiled as he has stumbled through his first 15 months in office but which remained well hidden in the lead up to his election win.

After his promise-shattering budget this year, Tony would indeed prove himself a gambler if he thought he could retain electoral support by promising these things were no longer part of his program.

Once bitten …..

 

 

Freya Newman has been placed on a two year good behaviour bond  with no conviction recorded  for  accessing the computer system of the Whitehouse Institute of Design concerning a ‘scholarship’ awarded to Francis Abbott.

Overwhelmingly the media coverage has been about Freya Newman and very little about the substantial issue, the ‘scholarship’.

The substantial issues seem quite clear. They have not been publicly disputed.

• The Whitehouse Institute is a private tertiary body.
• It awarded Francis Abbott, the then Opposition Leader’s daughter, a scholarship which saved her family more than $60,000 in fees.
• The scholarship was not advertised.
• Its existence was never made public.
• The Institute insists it was offered on the basis of academic merit, but has offered nothing to substantiate this claim.
• The Institute’s chairman was a substantial donor to the Liberal Party and has confirmed that he ‘probably’ recommended Ms Abbott for the scholarship.
• Tony Abbott did not disclose this benefit as part of his parliamentary obligations.

Just imagine if the daughter of Kevin Rudd or Bill Shorten had been awarded a $60,000 scholarship in such circumstances. The English language would not have been adequate to describe the criticism they would have received from Tony Abbott and Julia Bishop. The Murdoch media would have gone almost into meltdown over such a scholarship. The Australian would have called for either a judicial enquiry or a royal commission. It would have been as relentless as it was on Julia Gillard’s union connections.

It is remarkable that a young woman, who chose at very considerable risk to be a whistle blower, has been the focus of public attention, including from Christopher Pyne, while the substantial issue, the ‘scholarship’ has been sidelined.

It should not have been left to a young whistle blower to bring this issue to public attention. If Tony Abbott had been a member of the Parliament of NSW, Freya Newman and other whistle blowers could bring their concerns to the attention of the NSW ICAC. But there is no national ICAC.

The real issue is not Freya Newman. It is the ‘scholarship’ and the circumstances under which it was granted. An injustice has been done to Freya Newman. At least Magistrate O’Sullivan got the point about how trivial the case was.  The magistrate said that Freya Newman was not motivated by personal gain or a sense of animosity to Francis Abbott. ‘I accept that Freya Newman was motivated by a sense of injustice rather than a desire for personal notoriety or any desire to embarrass the student (Francis Abbott)’.

An injustice has been done, but the central issue surrounding the ‘scholarship’ has not been properly examined.

The issue is certainly not Frances Abbott. There is no suggestion she has done anything wrong.

New Matilda deserves credit for pursuing this issue whilst almost all other media avoided it or focussed on the whistle blower rather than on the ‘scholarship’.

This is a repost of a blog which I initially posted on December 19 last year.

Tony Abbott has a debt to repay to Rupert Murdoch for the extremely biased support he received in the last election.

With the help of Senator Cory Bernadi, Tony Abbott is now following the Murdoch Media line in attacking the ABC. He is also following in the steps of the Howard Government that attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the ABC to heel. During the Howard Government, Minister Richard Alston and Senator Santo Santoro led a concerted campaign against the ABC to force political compliance.

Last week Tony Abbott joined in the attack on the ABC in the Coalition party room. He particularly took a swipe at the ABC for revealing government spying around the world that has been brought to attention by Edward Snowden. But the ABC was in good company in carrying these stories. The Snowden revelations were carried by The Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel. Even if the ABC had declined to participate in the Snowden revelations it could not have avoided subsequent coverage of one of the major news stories of the year and possibly the decade. The ABC would have been forced into catch-up for weeks.

The Chairman of the ABC has announced a ‘bias audit’ of the ABC to counter the campaign by the Coalition and the Murdoch media. I can understand this defensive reaction, but it is all so one-sided. Who is to audit the Murdoch media and the scurrilous campaign that it conducted during the last election? Murdoch even sent one of his New York heavies, Col Allan, to do a hatchet job on the Rudd Government. It was an appalling abuse of power.

The Murdoch media is critical of the performance of the ABC but is silent on the performance of the Lachlan Murdoch – James Packer performance at Channel 10, to say nothing of the free ride it has given to James Packer for Sydney’s second casino for high rollers.

The Murdoch media which consistently points the figure at others has been charged with phone hacking and bribery of police in the UK. Rupert Murdoch abandoned his Australian citizenship to take advantage of business opportunities in the US.

The Murdoch campaign against public broadcasting is not new. James Murdoch, who has been pushed aside because of the hacking scandal that occurred under his watch in the UK, took every possible opportunity to attack the BBC. He alleged that the taxpayer-funded BBC was providing unfair competition to the Murdoch media.

It is nonsense to suggest that it is only public broadcasters like the ABC that are publicly funded. Ian McAuley in New Matilda on 9 December this year put it this way

“Commercial media are funded by what is to all intents and purposes, a sales tax. For example, if you buy a new car, around $500 of what you outlay is for advertising. Last year, $13.1 billion was spent on advertising, of which $4.9 billion was for commercial TV and radio, and $2.6 billion was for newspapers. To put these figures into a digestible form, we are paying about $1,500 per year per household for advertising, of which $500 is for commercial TV and radio, and $300 is for newspapers (not including the cover price). By contrast we are paying about $120 a year for the ABC. It is as asymmetric deal: those who use only the ABC pay $500 a year for commercial TV and radio, while those who use only commercial media pay $120 for the ABC. … Perhaps it’s part of our civic contract that those who pay for the commercial media they never use don’t complain, but the commercial media, particularly the Murdoch media when they attack ABC funding, don’t seem bound by such rules of decency.’

But who does the public really trust in the media? The overwhelming evidence is that the ABC is the most trusted media in Australia and the Murdoch media is the least trusted.

A recent poll on ABC funding in the Fairfax media drew over 21,000 respondents. 77% agreed that the ABC was an excellent and essential service that deserved more money. Another 12% said that the ABC did good work but the funding was about right.

Essential Research has just reported about ‘trust in the media’. Once again, the ABC is at the top of the list. Rankings for “a “lot of, or some trust, in the media” were as follows:

ABC TV news and current affairs                                70%

ABC radio news and current affairs                           63%

ABC talk-back programs                                              46%

Commercial news and current affairs                       38%

News and opinion in daily newspapers                     48%

Commercial TV news and current affairs                 41%

Commercial radio talk-back                                        31%

 

For particular newspapers, respondents ranked the newspapers in which they had “a lot of or some trust”. The rankings were as follows:

 

Melbourne Age (Victoria only)                                    68%

The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW only)                   64%

The Australian                                                                64%

Courier Mail (Queensland only)                                  59%

Herald Sun (Victoria only)                                            48%

The Daily Telegraph (NSW only)                                 41%

Trust in the Daily Telegraph has fallen dramatically over the last 12 months with its particularly biased campaign during the last election.

The Australian Press Council has also noted the performance of some Murdoch publications. The APC publishes guidelines to aid journalists and editors an investigates complaints. One subject which I follow closely has been asylum seekers. The APC reported on a Daily Telegraph story of 26 November 2011 headed ‘Open the floodgates – exclusive: thousands of boat people to invade NSW’. The APC found that this story was ‘grossly inaccurate, unfair and offensive’. It upheld a complaint about a similar story in the Herald Sun on the same day. The APC also found against three articles by Greg Sheridan on ‘illegals’ that appeared in the Australian on 23 and 28 October 2010 and 5 March 2011.

The ABC does not always get it right. It has had a very ordinary coverage of news on both TV and radio from Canberra for many years. Its Canberra correspondents show little interest or knowledge of policy. I wonder if they can spell the word! I am also amazed that the ABC continues to use ‘experts’ from so-called independent think-tanks like IPA, that refuse to disclose their funding sources. I suspect that those “think thanks” are often fronts for special interests. Cash for comment takes many forms.Unfortunately the ABC also still sees itself as a branch office of the BBC and CNN rather than an independent and involved media organisation in our own region.

But for all of its shortcomings, what an awful and barren media landscape we would have without the ABC.

The last people who should be lecturing the ABC about performance and bias are Tony Abbott and the Murdoch media.

Australian media had never seen anything like it. Suddenly print, radio, television and social media were overwhelmed – blanket coverage of a single event.

Edward Gough Whitlam, Australia’s 21^st and greatest reforming Prime Minister, was dead.

Newspapers were turned over to almost complete coverage ,not only of the fact that the former PM had died, but with coverage of the extraordinary series of changes he made to life and living in Australia in a short three years in office more than 40 years ago.

Throughout Australia newspapers (including News Limited) carried full facial photographs and wrap- arounds of up to 8 pages, outlining the major events of the Whitlam Era. Radio talkback shows were flooded with Whitlam tributes, anecdotes and testimonies. Greek, Chinese and other ethnic newspapers         who might occasionally give front page treatment to a political event but rarely to a personality, featured the late reformer all across their covers.

Aboriginal leaders lauded Whitlam as “a brother” who had made great steps in advancing land rights and other interests of Australia’s native people. Within two days newspapers worldwide had made more than one and a quarter million references to Whitlam and what he had done for Australia.

Television stations began screening hours of features on the Whitlam era, listing the dozens of major changes initiated by Whitlam and which were still part of Australian life.  Social media were similarly overwhelmed.  At one stage one media site registered more than 410 accolades to Whitlam in just over an hour.

These came from professional people acknowledging the importance of Whitlam’s free universities in building their careers, from people who themselves or their families had come through health crises thanks to Medibank which was won against strong political opposition only after the holding of a Double Dissolution election. Others, from formerly unsewered sections of our major cities, expressed gratitude for the new comfort in which they now lived thanks to Whitlam’s initiatives. And there were dozens from men, now of mature years, who in their youth had been saved from possibly perilous tours in the Vietnam War by the Whitlam intervention. And there were many others.

Nowhere, it seemed, was there anyone who had not had some aspect of their lives affected by changes made by Gough Whitlam 40 years ago and which have been left untouched by succeeding Governments.

No other major event – the outbreak of World War II, the unexpected (in Australia) death of King George VI, the passing of Churchill or Menzies has generated nearly the outpourings that followed the death of Gough Whitlam.

But somehow this impressive cross section of the Australian community, including media masters, had somehow got it wrong. In one quarter we were told Gough was not great; the endless string of enduring changes for which he was responsible, it seems, had just routinely happened.

The political battles which Gough was forced to fight over recalcitrant political opponents to win these changes it seemed had never occurred.

For this unusual view we have three principal authorities – all unsurprisingly from the Murdoch Press. Miranda Devine who is considered to be a mere convenience in her predictable religio-political views by thinking conservatives but is actually taken seriously by some others;  Andrew Bolt, who having failed to distinguish himself in mainstream journalism, has won some notice with his nutty extremism; and Greg Sheridan who was immortalised in an online publication some years ago in a hilarious two page listing of his erroneous predictions and fatuous assessments and, more recently, reinforced this criticism removing any doubt about his worth as a commentator with the novel assertion that George W Bush would come to be seen as one of the great US Presidents.

For the millions who somehow “got it wrong” the list of Whitlam’s accomplishments is awesome – almost endless. It is as impressive as it is long.

Organisations like the Federal Court, the Foreign Investment Review Board, The Trade Practices Commission, The Administrative Appeals Tribunal, every day institutions in Australia today, came from Whitlam initiatives.

The Honours system, which is now exclusively Australian, came when Whitlam discarded the borrowed British system of Knights and Dames. He started the move to scrap “God Save The Queen” and adopt an Australian anthem of our own. He put “Australian” rather than “British” on our Passports for the first time.

Whitlam started the process of granting Independence to Papua New Guinea, finally abolished the White Australia Policy, he introduced legislation for equal pay for women and introduced benefits for single mothers and homeless people. He created the Australia Film Commission, introduced FM radio and colour television, removed the necessity for a paid licence to watch television and, in his first year, doubled the amount of Government money directed to the Arts in Australia.

He created the Australian Law Reform Commission, the Consumer Affairs Commission, established the National Film and Television School in Sydney and unveiled the plaque launching the construction of Australia’s National Gallery.

At the Government level he amalgamated five Defence oriented departments – Army, Navy, Air Force, Supply and Defence into a single Defence entity. He split Australia’s largest, but most cumbersome department, the Postmaster Generals, into two efficient and highly profitable sections, Telecom (now Telstra) and Australia Post. The list goes on.

For the first time he went  beyond the provision of Science blocks to Catholic and other Non-Government Schools providing, for the first time, assistance to all schools on a needs basis (something that may have appealed to Miranda Devine), he gave votes to 18 year olds whom the previous Government had unhesitatingly drafted for war in Vietnam while denying them any say in the governance of their country. He legislated for no fault divorce and for the first time introduced parental leave for Commonwealth employees.

The handful of detractors who would have us believe that these reforms had somehow “just happened” ignore the fact that almost, without exception, they were bitterly opposed in both Houses of Federal Parliament by the Liberal-Country Party Coalition of the day. From the recognition of China to the exit from Vietnam and the creation of our enduring health system, Medicare, opponents fought to frustrate the Whitlam Government. These critics also ignore the fact that there had been 23 years – a generation – of non Labor Government and four non Labor Prime Ministers leading up to 1972 where there had been no action on these fronts or, indeed, any evidence that they had even been contemplated.

And while these remain among the hallmarks of Whitlam’s accomplishments leaders like Howard who in 11½ years left us two unhappy wars and a GST, Turnbull and Abbot continue to assert that the Whitlam Government was somehow totally inadequate.

One reminds the reader that in more than 20 years and three non Labor Prime Ministers since, not a single major Whitlam reform has been reversed – surely a matter of some disappointment to those who assess the Whitlam reign as a failure.

Eric Walsh was a long-time member of the Canberra Press Gallery, and Press Secretary to Prime Minister Whitlam.

 

 

Conservatives who read and listen to News Corp media have a problem. They are encouraged to believe that the world is really like News Corp says it is. The inevitable result is a loss of reality.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times on September 23 wrote of the problems of right-wing Republicans who keep complaining about the lazy jobless. He said

‘In a nation where the Republican base gets what it thinks are facts from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, where the party’s elite gets what it imagines to be policy analysis from the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation, the Right lives in its own intellectual universe, aware neither the reality of unemployment nor what life is like for the jobless. You might think that personal experience – almost everyone has acquaintances or relatives who can’t find work – would still break through, but apparently not.’

That closed information loop also operates extensively in Australia through the same News Corp. Australian conservatives are encouraged to think that the unemployed are dole-bludgers, that Muslims are terror suspects and that poor people don’t need to drive cars.

News Corp says in its outlets that the war in Iraq was justified and that climate change is nonsense. They are probably the two most important issues of the last decade. On both News Corp has been on the wrong side of history.

In the short term conservatives get a ‘sugar hit’ out of reading The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail and The Adelaide Advertiser, but in the long term they become divorced from reality.

These publications are not as extreme as the old Pravda, but rusted-on party supporters feel affirmed in their ideological correctness. But gradually they come to the view that they are being told nonsense and that the world of political unreality does not match their own experience.

As Daniel Moynihan, the former US Senator said, ‘everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but no-one is entitled to their own facts’. And News Corp keeps pushing opinions of issues such as climate change denial and pretends that they are facts. Scientific advice is overwhelmingly telling us that climate change is occurring and that human activity is responsible for that change. But News Corp keeps telling its conservative readership that climate change is nonsense.

Think tanks, like the Institute of Public Affairs adds to this closed circuit information loop. The IPA is secretly funded, apparently by big Tobacco and the foreign miners, but pretends it is an independent and intellectually honest think-tank. Just like News Corp it is a propaganda vehicle which helps conservatives to affirm their view of the world.

In the long term, ideological institutions like News Corp who feed into and from their ideological base do a great disservice not only to serious conservatives but also to the long-term interests of a diverse and informed community.

You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue

 

If the staggering evidence before the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption has taught us anything, then it must surely be to end the charade that democracy can function properly when people are buying favours of politicians, directly or indirectly.

The standard argument that political fund-raising is conducted at arm’s length and that the politicians making decisions are not involved or even aware of who the donors are, no longer has an ounce of credibility. The Chinese wall is rice paper thin.

Geoffrey Watson, SC, a person who does have credibility, arrived at this position a few months ago. The counsel assisting in recent inquiries by ICAC brought up the idea of full public funding of political campaigns. That is, taxpayers would foot the bill and all private donations would be banned.

It seems a radical idea and it may be unattainable in pure form, given the constitutional hurdles. But it also is a logical extension of where the debate about corruption in politics is heading. If politicians so readily and willingly get around NSW laws that they themselves introduced for the purpose of cleaning up their act, or giving the appearance of doing so, and that on paper are the toughest in Australia, then drastic alternatives deserve consideration.

After prosecuting the case against Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald and sundry other malefactors with Labor connections, Watson turned his attention to the Liberals. In his opening address for Operation Spicer, he laid out another remarkable saga of politicians rorting the rules to their own advantage. As he put it, “this inquiry will expose the systematic subversion of the electoral funding laws of NSW”.  Watson detailed how the office of Chris Hartcher, who resigned as minister after ICAC launched the investigation, had used front organisations to accept some $165,000 from property developers, who were banned from making political donations and some of who had planning applications before the state government.

He argued that the systemic failure of the system of political funding encouraged and rewarded corruption. “Something must change,” he told the Commission hearing, adding that “the problems caused by election funding are not intractable.” One suggestion that had been floated, he said, was full public funding as a way “to free political decision makers from the insidious effect of improperly motivated donations”. While ICAC was not the place for the debate, he pointed out that the Commission had an arm devoted to corruption prevention, whose experts “would be more than pleased to assist”.

Tony Abbott didn’t think much of the proposal. “At a time when we’re talking about a very tough budget indeed, the idea that we should scrap private fundraising and fund political parties through the taxpayer, I think, would be very, very odd.”

Hello! We’re already doing that. Last year’s federal election cost taxpayers $58 million, calculated on the basis of $2.49 per vote received. Four of the six states also have public funding systems – NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia – as well as the ACT.

The implication in Abbott’s comment and the assumption of many others is that public funding would have to be increased to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of private donations. Politicians can make that argument if they like, though Abbott obviously doesn’t have the appetite for it. The major parties even could agree on a bipartisan approach and justify it on the need to end the corruption, which is the position that NSW political leaders have taken.

But there also is a clear alternative: restrict spending to the present amount of public funding. It is not as though the taxpayer contribution is parsimonious – given they have a vote for the House of Representatives as well as the Senate and that not all voters pay taxes, taxpayers are contributing well over $5 each to federal elections.

The major parties in particular might complain long and hard about such belt tightening. But what a relief it would be to be spared of much of the largely fact-free deluge of election advertising that soaks up most of the money donated to the major parties. This competition between the parties has turned into an obscene arms race, in which parties feel compelled to spend more and more on advertising just because the other side is doing so, all the while admitting that they may not be getting much return on their investment.

The campaign managers are coming up with ever more far-fetched schemes for raising money, like conducting auctions at fundraisers for private meetings with prime ministers, premiers and ministers, all the while arguing that no favoured treatment ever flows from this. And they wonder why public trust in them keeps falling.

NSW Premier Mike Baird thought Watson’s idea had enough merit to send it off for review. Or perhaps more correctly, he didn’t feel he could dismiss the idea out of hand. He may have been relieved when the head of the panel he appointed – former senior public servant Kerry Schott – said she thought full public funding would fall foul of the High Court. Last year, the court declared invalid the law by the O’Farrell government banning all corporate and union donations on the grounds that it breached the freedom of political communication implied in the Constitution.

Graeme Orr, a law professor at Queensland University and an expert on electoral funding, does not see the High Court as an insuperable barrier. Rather, he says, the court said in last year’s case that the NSW government had not given a proper rationale for the legislation. “The court is really saying we require you to have an evidence-based explanation for these laws that restrict the implied freedom of political communication.”

He believes a system can be designed that could withstand challenge. It would need to allow for some private funding but a low limit could be applied – perhaps $1000 a year – that could not be considered potentially corrupting.

What about fabulously wealthy individuals like Clive Palmer funding their own parties? Caps can be set on campaign expenditure as well as on donations. They already exist in NSW and Queensland, although the Newman government has announced it will abolish them, together with the cap on donations.

There would be complications in implementing a system relying predominantly on public funding. While it may be possible to stop third parties, like trade unions or business lobbies, from donating directly to parties, they could still run their own partisan campaigns. But if the argument against radical reform is that loopholes will emerge, we may as well throw up our hands and give up. As Watson says, “something has to change”.

Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist.