Mike O’Connor: It’s your ABC - as long as you are not a white male

If there’s an ABC job vacancy and two applicants, the culturally diverse candidate gets the nod while the one born into an Anglo-Saxon way of life gets shown the door, writes Mike O’Connor.

It must be but a matter of time before the Victorian Racing Club is hauled before the Human Rights Commission and told that it can no longer run the Melbourne Cup in its present form.

It’s amazing that it’s been able to get away with it for as long as it has, lacking as it is in that precious quality most prized by any organisation worth its welcome to country ceremony and that is diversity.

If the race is to be run next year, 50 per cent of all jockeys will have to be female with a yet-to-be-determined percentage to be Indigenous or otherwise culturally and linguistically diverse persons.

Getting a 50-50 gender split when it comes it the horses may be a challenge, but this is modern, diverse Australia, so giddy up!

ABC chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor.

If the VRC needs a hand in sorting this then it has only to contact the ABC, where management has discovered that – horror of unspeakable horrors – it is lacking in sufficient quantities of the D word.

In an email to all staff last week, backed up by a streamed debate from its Ultimo headquarters in Sydney titled “Change takes action – how do we drive change?”, chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor sounded the alarm, warning of the need to ensure that diversity and inclusion were made a priority.

Targets for 2024 include having 50 per cent of executive roles filled by women, 30 per cent of content makers being culturally and linguistically diverse with eight per cent of staff having a disability.

Whether genetic males identifying as women count towards this target has not been made clear.

Oliver-Taylor said “the reality is, we don’t have enough colleagues that come from a diverse background joining the ABC, and we need to deliberately make that happen”.

ABC managing director David Anderson. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Put another way, the ABC doesn’t hire the best person for the job.

If there’s one position vacant and two applicants, the culturally and linguistically diverse candidate gets the nod and the one who has the misfortune to be born into an Anglo-Saxon culture and who professes English to be his first language gets shown the door.

Almost two-thirds of the adult population of the nation has been accused of racism in recent months, but surely any policy that discriminates on cultural and linguistic grounds is racist even if it is labelled as diversity.

If the best candidate for the job doesn’t get it then it follows that you are hiring the second or third or fourth best and the result is a second-rate workforce producing a second-rate product.

If you want to talk about diversity, how about starting with a diversity of views, for when it comes to presenters and commentators, the ABC is a conservative-free zone and nor do you have to venture too far to find comment posing as news.

Incredibly, in the lead-up to the Voice referendum, staff were told that they had to be objective in their reporting.

The ABC’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras glitter logo from 2022. Picture: Supplied

Apparently without this admonition, it would not have occurred to them that this was the most basic of all tenets for a professional journalist.

If you were wondering why, in spite of consuming $1bn annually in taxpayer funds, the ABC continues its seemingly inexorable slide into irrelevance, then look no further than the focus of its highly remunerated executives.

Managing director David Anderson has said that over the next three years, the public broadcaster would focus on inclusion in practice, a diverse workforce, inclusive content, products and services, connection with Indigenous and diverse communities and accountability and transparency.

Let’s take transparency.

The ABC is notoriously averse to questioning and has a history of investigating itself when a complaint is made and finding to no one’s surprise that there is no case to answer and only recently succumbed to pressure and moved to establish an ombudsman to look into complaints made against it.

Then ABC host Stan Grant on the public broadcaster's coverage of the King’s coronation on May 6 that led to more than 1000 complaints. Picture: ABC TV

The disaster that was its coverage of the King’s coronation, which triggered more than 1000 complaints, showed just how far from mainstream Australia our national broadcaster has drifted.

Anderson says “our teams help drive the national conversation on inclusion, for example through innovative content for International Day of People with Disability, Harmony Week, and Mardi Gras”.

No, they don’t, because nobody watches them.

In listing its recent achievements, it pointed to its decision to feature acknowledgements of country and Indigenous location names across ABC screens.

I rest my case.