Piers Akerman: Sack ABC board and end the warped bias

THE government should sack the ABC board and end the long-running claim it is responsible for ensuring the gathering and presentation of news is “accurate and impartial”.

Piers Akerman.

NOTE: The Press Council has partly upheld a complaint about this article. Read the full adjudication here.

 

 

Australian Press Council Adjudication

THE Turnbull government should sack the ABC board and end the long-running claim that it is “responsible for ensuring that the gathering and presentation of news and information is accurate and impartial, according to recognised standards of journalism”.

Last Monday evening I was a member of the broadcaster’s Q&A panel along with Attorney-General George Brandis, federal Labor MP Tanya Plibersek, activist human rights lawyer Julian Burnside and pollster Michelle Levine.

Before the show, ABC chief Michelle Guthrie, who it ­appears has maintained the editor-in-chief role, appeared with board member Simon Mordant in the Green Room. They later sat in the audience.

It’s a pity they didn’t hang around later to hear a critique of the ABC’s flagship program.

ABC chief Michelle Guthrie greeted Q&A panellists, including Piers Akerman, in the Green Room last week. Picture: Hollie Adams

Impartiality has never been on Q&A’s loaded agenda, just as its self-identifying audience is always overwhelmingly ­partisan.

The first question was from a woman who identified herself as Fred Thorpe, a former teacher of 28 years, who said she supports herself and three children on a $22,000-a-year disability pension for an unspecified health problem.

No mention of her superannuation, which, if she were a member of the uber-generous defined benefit scheme under the old teachers plan, almost bankrupted NSW.

Ms Thorpe was aggrieved at being selected for review by Centrelink’s current automated data-matching program.

According to her Twitter feed, which surely someone employed within the bloated ABC might have checked, Ms Thorpe is a Labor-Greens supporter who despite her disability found the stamina to aggressively campaign for former Australian Idol host James Mathison, who ran against Tony Abbott in Warringah in last year’s election.

According to the Backyard Blitz television program, Ms Thorpe was also the beneficiary of one of their home makeovers and had a rooftop garden constructed atop the family’s Manly beachside apartment while they were away in Canberra “to enjoy the new Nat-ional Museum of Australia and visit the Australian National Gallery”.

Q&A host Tony Jones.

Ms Thorpe was permitted to make gratuitous remarks about Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull hosting Rupert Murdoch at a lunch (I suggest he is a major world figure) and said she had spent most of her weekend “throwing up from absolute fear” that her pension may be removed.

She might have chilled a little if she had sat by her ­designer “glazed water bowl and fountain” which “provide the calming sounds of trickling water”. Impossible not to feel sympathetic for anyone finding it difficult to cope, but surely Ms Thorpe has nothing to worry about?

Q&A moderator Tony Jones and Labor’s Tanya Plibersek evaded or ignored the fact that the automated data-matching program was set up by Labor.

In fact, Ms Plibersek and Bill Shorten, then the ­assistant treasurer, put out a press release on June 29, 2011, to boast that the “new data- matching initiative between Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office is expected to claw back millions of dollars from welfare recipients who have debts with the Australian government”.

They bragged that the debt recovery program was expected to recover more than $71 million over four years.

Neither the ABC nor Ms Thorpe were conspicuously protesting at the time.

The Turnbull government is now picking up debts that Labor missed.

That certainly didn’t fit the ABC’s worldview or Q&A’s narrative that everything ­conservative governments do is evil.

There was also industrial-level eye-rolling and sardonic mirth when it was suggested that concerned recipients of a Centrelink inquiry contact the agency. Again, the fact are at odds with the ABC-supported perception.

Those who are asked to provide information are advised to call a dedicated 1800 debt line and the waiting time on this number is between one and five seconds. All others are asked to call the general social security lines — average waiting time is 13 minutes 31 seconds, below the department’s KPI of 16 minutes.

Another example of the bias which moderator Jones and editor-in-chief Guthrie failed to block or even remark upon was Ms Plibersek’s statement that the government was cutting the Clean Energy Supplement.

This was put in place by the Gillard Labor government to compensate for its hated carbon tax.

That tax was abolished by the Abbott Coalition government — so there was no longer the need for the supplement.

Under Labor’s six years in office, electricity prices for households increased by 101 per cent. When the Coalition repealed the carbon tax, it led to the largest fall on record in electricity prices, according to the Australian Bureau of ­Statistics.

Similarly, her claim that the Warburton Review said that more renewables put downward pressure on energy prices should have been challenged.

The Warburton Review said the RET would lead to higher prices — “if incumbent generators shut down permanently … the additional renewable generation capacity deployed as a result of the RET would lead to increased retail electricity prices”.

Further the Australian Energy Market Commission said of a bigger RET in its Integration of Climate & Energy Policy report just last December “as existing generators exit the market, wholesale prices can be ­expected to rise and consumers will face the full cost of the increased subsidy”.

Ms Plibersek accurately claimed that the cost of solar power has come down by about 80 per cent in the past seven years and wind power has come down by about 50 per cent, but she and the ABC ignored the fact that solar ­remains the most expensive form of generation.