ABC sacked the wrong person

JUSTIN Milne should have gone before Michelle Guthrie, writes Miranda Devine. And today’s revelations of his gauche email only serve to drive home the point.

IT’S ironic that the ABC, which has been hyperventilating about the plight of Liberal women, and demanding to know why Malcolm Turnbull was ousted, has just shafted its most senior woman, without explaining why, and given her a good kicking on the way out.

If anyone should have been shafted it was ABC Chairman, Justin Milne, Turnbull pal and smug cultural leftie, who suddenly finds himself philosophically out of step with the new management in Canberra.

Former ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie and ABC Chairman Justin Milne last year. Picture: Joel Carrett/AAP

Perhaps he thought he needed to get in first.

If his extraordinarily gauche email reportedly ordering Guthrie to “get rid of” ABC presenter Emma Alberici because the Turnbull government “hate her” is any indication of his governance style, then it’s clear the wrong person was sacked.

“Get rid of her. We need to save the ABC — not Emma,” Milne wrote to Guthrie in the leaked email. “There is no guarantee they [the Coalition] will lose the next election.”

Now, because of the clumsy brutality with which he handled the sacking of managing director Michelle Guthrie, taxpayers face the cost of legal action.

And who can blame her. What did she do so wrong that it justified such a drastic and unprecedented act, not even halfway through her term?

Other than treat with appropriate cynicism the chairman’s obsession with a digital pipe dream costing upwards of half a billion dollars?

Project Jetstream, described as iView on steroids, would be another ABC incursion into the territory of its cash-strapped commercial competitors, and what sane government would pay for that?