This week’s QandA was everything wrong with the ABC
IF you want a snapshot of why conservatives regard the ABC as a swamp of irredeemable cultural leftism, you had only to spend some time watching it on Monday night, writes Miranda Devine.
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IF you wonder why most conservatives regard the ABC as a ghetto of irredeemable cultural leftism, unworthy of its $1 billion annual gift from the taxpayer, you just had to watch Monday night’s offerings.
From Q&A to the new in-house promos, the ABC presented a middle finger to the values of Middle Australia.
The promo, aka “brand position”, titled “ABC, Yours”, was developed by the “in-house creative team” and “tested with Australian audiences [who] overwhelmingly accepted [it] as reinforcing inclusiveness …” Yada yada yada.
But in Freudian projection typical of the ABC, the result is the opposite of the virtue it claims for itself; the promo reinforces anything but inclusiveness.
In fact, two of Australia’s nastiest haters are among the usual suspects chosen to front the promo: abusive anti-Catholic crooner Tim Minchin and Benjamin Law, the Safe Schools activist who declared he wanted to “hate-f*ck” Andrew Hastie and other MPs against same-sex marriage.
That’s the ABC, “yours” only if you agree with the foul-mouthed collective.
Moving on to Q&A, Monday’s program was a showcase of every left-wing preoccupation, from climate alarm and the rainbow agenda to the joys of welfare and the evils of Donald Trump.
Host Tony Jones and his Melbourne studio audience fawned over visiting US leftist Jeffrey Sachs with such extravagant sycophancy he could have been Moses handing down holy writ rather than a Manhattan economist who considers himself a “citizen of the world”.
Sachs is a Harvard-educated former neoliberal advocate of “shock therapy” economics who had a Fraserian conversion to woke climate alarmist and poverty expert. Now he’s a strident Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter, George Soros collaborator, Occupy Wall Street fan, pal of Bono and Angelina Jolie, UN Special Advisor and abortion enthusiast, who somehow has become a “science” adviser to Pope Francis.
So, he fit right in on the Q&A panel.
Jones, at one point, reverently asked Sachs’ opinion of the UN’s IPCC climate report: “terrifying … a disaster … We’re in the midst of horrendous danger …. And the reason we’re not acting is big money and big companies … and I would add your Mr Rupert Murdoch.” Cue rapt applause.
Sachs was anti-American in that way that Upper West Side globalists often are but, for Trump, he went all out: “He’s bizarre, let’s face it … he’s absolutely the weirdest president we’ve ever had. [But] we’re doing our best to bring this man under control... That’s really important that he be constrained, because he is unstable and he’s dangerous.”
Sachs also declared that Trump is “completely neurotic” about China and any threat from the assertive authoritarian regime is in “Donald Trump’s imagination”.
Delirious applause greeted Sachs’ every utterance.
The one sour note was provided by the unimpressed Millennial sitting next to him, Liberal Senator James Paterson. Even with the room stacked against him, Paterson bested them all with logic and a cool impertinence which made Sachs lose his temper.
Sachs accused Paterson of “sloganeering” when he pointed out that “entrepreneurial capitalism has reduced poverty far more than foreign aid ever will”.
“With Respect,” said Paterson silkily, “lots of things you have recommended haven’t worked either.”
“With respect!” thundered Sachs. “What I have helped to lead has been a massive decline of poverty … And if you do any professional work on actual budgeting, then I would tell you what you’re saying is a glib slogan.”
But he had made the fatal mistake of patronising the younger man, who went in for the kill.
“Jeffrey, you should know from your own experience about what some of the limitations of foreign aid are. In fact, a UK government review of your recent Millennial Villages Project in Ghana showed that after five years and the expenditure of £11 million of UK taxpayers’ money, that virtually no progress was made on poverty and hunger.”
Boom.
But the most telling moment of the whole godawful program came when an audience member, who identified himself as vice-principal of a Christian school, asked a question relating to the Ruddock report on religious freedom.
Spotting a prime opportunity to virtue signal, Jones tried to humiliate the poor man, throwing six questions at him, which has to be a record, effectively doxxing him by demanding he name his school, allowing the partisan audience to laugh at him and panellists to ridicule him. “I mean, a gay teacher doesn’t teach gay maths” sneered Labor’s Terri Butler. “They just teach maths.”
The man tentatively asked if faith-based schools should be allowed to choose staff who align with their values and beliefs
Paterson replied that they should, “Just as it’s important, for example, that an LGBTI organisation should have the right to hire staff who align with its values, and I don’t believe we should force them to hire, for example, a conservative Christian who opposes same-sex marriage …. Happily, we’ve got a pluralistic education system, where there are public schools and there are other non-denominational private schools, where there are options available to you.”
Jones interrupted: “They’re taking money from secular taxpayers so that’s going into religious schools. Should they not therefore abide by secular rules?”
What dumb logic. Do only “secular” people pay taxes? (Secular, by Jones’ standards, meaning an ideology that wants to drive religion out of the public square, rather than a healthy distinction between church and state.)
Perhaps this is a new rule of taxation. Let’s call it the Jones Rule — where your taxes are hypothecated only to the causes you favour. If you like private schools, make sure your taxes don’t go to public schools. Coal lovers could ban their taxes paying for renewable subsidies.
But I don’t really think that’s what Jones wants because there wouldn’t be enough taxpayers willing to pay his salary or fund the rest of the ABC’s bloated bureaucracy.
ABC Yours? You can keep it.