Piers Akerman: ABC’s obsession with seeking apologies should turn inward
Despite their demand of the Prime Minister, it’s the national broadcaster who seem to find ‘sorry’ the hardest word to say, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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Sorry is not the hardest word – Elton John got it wrong. Sorry springs easily to the lips of politicians but its over-use has made it vacuous, empty of meaning, except to the look-at-me journalists from the ABC and Nine Media who demand apologies and the “sorry” word to make themselves appear virtuous.
It was London to a brick that the ABC’s Laura Tingle would use her position as president of the National Press Club to try to embarrass Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday by asking him whether “you want to take this opportunity to actually say sorry for the mistakes you’ve made as prime minister?”
Not just about Covid, Tingle was quick to explain but everything … from taking a break with his family in Hawaii when bushfires were starting to break out in December, 2019, not anticipating early enough the development of rapid antigen tests and ordering the unapproved RATs in advance, to not writing a blank cheque for Labor’s grossly rorted NDIS scheme and even the whole global pandemic.
Not blessed with the ABC’s crystal ball, which enables Tingle and all other ABC commentators to constantly mislead the national broadcaster’s dwindling audience with incorrect forecasts of election results both domestically and abroad – think the US elections, think Morrison’s own election – Morrison looked a little stunned by the audacity if not stupidity of his interrogator.
He shouldn’t have been.
Before entering the NPC through a collective of rabid generic protesters for all causes, Morrison should have war gamed the likelihood of attack but it seems his advisers let him down or perhaps he wrongly, arrogantly, assumed he’d be quizzed on the content of the speech he delivered.
After all, he had been preceded by Opposition leader Anthony Albanese on the same platform a week earlier and Albo had been handled with kid gloves and Dorothy Dixer questions by the adoring and partisan crowd.
But that was never going to be the case for Morrison.
Sorry was the word it wanted to hear and what’s more, the ABC’s AM presenter Sabra Lane didn’t let up with her first question on Wednesday which ended “you appear unwilling to say that you’re sorry. Why is sorry the hardest word for you to say?”
The ABC’s obsession with the sorry word is puzzling.
The taxpayer-funded monolith never says sorry.
It just pays the legal bills for its ideologically-driven, error-prone staff from the billion dollar bounty bestowed upon it by you and me and blithely moves on.
Sorry is not a word used by the ABC though it had no hesitation in permitting its reporter Louise Milligan to lead its pack of hate-filled commentators to malign Cardinal George Pell when he was wrongfully accused by the Victorian police of the most appalling crimes which, by any reading of the evidence, he could never have committed.
Coincidentally, Sabra Lane also hosted a now notorious episode of the 7.30 Report with Milligan as the star reporter in which claims were made that Cardinal Pell assaulted boys in the Ballarat swimming pool.
The claims were so flimsy that they were thrown out of court but nonetheless, good enough for Lane and Milligan. No apologies, no sorry.
Let Frank Sinatra sing “regrets, I’ve had a few” but not the ABC.
Australia has had a national sorry day since 1998 to commemorate the claim that hundreds if not thousands (the numbers swell with every retelling) of Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children were wrongfully removed from their homes under State and federal child protection laws in the last century.
Of the less than a handful of cases from alleged stolen generation members that have made it to court, only one has been successful though the person who was found to have taken the child was not acting under any government instruction.
The national apology, the big sorry, offered in 2008 by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of all Australians, most of whom were not born or not in the country when at risk children were being placed in homes, hasn’t had any effect on child abuse in Indigenous communities but it has led to a greater wariness on the part of the authorities to act when intervention is needed.
Saying sorry hasn’t just been an empty gesture, it has given us more reasons for sorrow.
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