Piers Akerman: ‘Their’ ABC does not show independent thought

The loudest and most intrusive political voice in the country is the ABC, writes Piers Akerman.

Like lambs gambolling after the spring rains, a new crop of wannabe independent MPs has come forth espousing the green-left jargon the nation has come to expect from ABC commentators.

Hang on.

One of them, Zoe Daniel, is a former ABC correspondent and as anyone who subjected themselves to “their” ABC’s interpretation of the news in recent years knows, Ms Daniel won’t need to find a scriptwriter to help her deliver word-perfect anti-conservative speeches.

Zoe Daniel

Her coverage of the US during the Trump presidency was as predictable as the totally discredited attempt by the ABC’s current Washington bureau chief, Sarah Ferguson, to claim Donald Trump colluded with Russian intelligence operatives to corrupt the 2016 election.

Even The New York Times, which along with The Washington Post, won a Pulitzer Prize for the now totally debunked story, has conceded it got it wrong.

As New York Times editor Dean Baquet admitted in September, “we’re a little, tiny bit flat-footed”.

Not the ABC, however; even though former US federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has written: “The Trump-Russia collusion narrative was essentially a fabrication of the Clinton campaign that was peddled to the FBI (among other government agencies) and to the media by agents of the Clinton campaign – particularly, its lawyers at Perkins Coie – who concealed the fact that they were quite intentionally working on the campaign’s behalf.”

That didn’t deter Daniel (and later) Ferguson from breathlessly reporting the left-media line on the Democrats’ bogus Russia collusion charges and even now failing to adequately address its gross misreporting, though the case against Trump collapsed when special counsel Robert Mueller released his report in April, 2019, and his congressional testimony that July.

The ABC Ultimo Centre in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Swift

Daniel even wrote a book, Greetings From Trumpland, about her experience. Not on my Christmas list.

She intends to stand against moderate Liberal Tim Wilson in the Victorian seat of Goldstein, choosing to fight a candidate who is on the green side of the Liberal ranks just like another early nominee for next year’s federal election, Carla Zampatti’s daughter, Allegra Spender, who has announced she will run against Liberal MP Dave Sharma in the Sydney seat of Wentworth.

The interesting thing about these so-called independent women who are all reading from the same green-left song sheet is that they can very easily be grouped into a bloc – how independent is that?

Zoe Daniel’s book will not be Piers Akerman’s Christmas list.

The green-left lobby, supported by the ABC, is hoping to attract the votes of disillusioned women from wealthy electorates well removed from the seats where workers wear high-vis and get their hands dirty.

Last Wednesday I saw some representatives of this grouping in full voice at a meeting at the State Library of NSW initiated by former NSW Liberal minister and federal and state Liberal Party treasurer Michael Yabsley to discuss political funding.

Members of the panel were former Labor senator Stephen Loosley, former NSW Appeals Court judge Anthony Whealy QC, Transfield boss Luca Belgiorno-Nettis AM and one-time independent candidate Licia Heath (who polled 2.6 per cent in the 2018 Wentworth by-election).

Loosley was the most restrained.

The reality that the loudest and most intrusive political voice in the country is the ABC was ignored but the panel was happy to discuss 10 suggestions put forward by Yabsley, a true poacher-turned-gamekeeper.

One of his somewhat naïve proposals was that all donations be limited to $200.

Given that the largest individual donation ever given was for many years the $1.6m from Wotif founder Graeme Wood to the Greens in 2010, followed by Malcolm Turnbull’s $1.75m to the Liberals in 2016, there is little evidence that campaign funding buys either influence or swings votes.

Clive Palmer’s company, Mineralogy, spent a massive $83m during the 2019 election and his United Australia Party didn’t win a single seat in either house.

Amusingly, the general panel view was that independent candidates were good – if they were from the green-left – but bad if they represented constituents concerned about the lunacy of global warming cultists.

Be as independent as you wish, so long as you think as we do.