Andrew Rule: Aunty has changed and I don’t like what I’m seeing

THE old ABC was a pillar of Australian society but too much has gone wrong with Aunty since those days, writes Andrew Rule.

DEAR Aunty, When I was a kid in the backblocks you were our lifeline to the world. I can still see the modern portable radio we called “the wireless”, about the size of a paving stone, so “lightweight” that if it fell from its spot on top of the hot water service it would break your toes or dent your skull but probably not kill you.

But it’s what came out of the wireless that mattered. We didn’t have electricity, much less television. Even the telephone party line relied on a dodgy wire Dad had strung on trees through the bush.

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The ABC meant news: that stirring but now quaintly “retro” news theme is probably the first music I ever heard. The ABC meant serials like Blue Hills and it meant The Argonauts, part of the children’s hour that entranced tens of thousands of kids all over the nation. The ABC was the market reports. The livestock and produce prices were nearly as important as The Weather, which was a very big deal. ABC local radio was all we had until power lines eventually linked us to the grid and television and the wider world. But the ABC was still the gatekeeper of news and information, as reliable as sunrise.

A lot has gone wrong since then, Aunty. In so many little ways the always adequate and often excellent service of the past century has drifted in the present one. Especially the past decade, most noticeably this year.

The old ABC was a pillar of Australian society but too much has gone wrong with Aunty since those days. Generic picture: IStock

It’s true that Australian Story and Four Corners still sometimes turn up stories that can move us to tears, indignation or genuine awe. It’s true your news service occasionally justifies the money spent on it, even if it too often seems as second-rate as its half-starved commercial counterparts.

It’s true that series like Rake and Mystery Road and The Code and Jack Irish hit the spot, sometimes brilliantly.

But. You knew there was a “but” coming.

What about that bloody Q&A? And what about the hopeless joke of a breakfast radio show that replaced Red Symons?

Qanda first. Something that started out with such a promising premise a decade ago is sinking into a quicksand of tedious political correctness. Like passengers on a boat gradually taking water, the not-so-good ship Qanda’s inmates seem oblivious. The erudite and articulate Tony Jones has slid slowly from the epitome of the polished professional broadcaster to an excellent impersonation of one.

The early Jones of Lateline fame struck longtime ABC watchers as firm but fair, the prototype referee — never uninterested in the game but always disinterested in the result. But times change and maybe it’s hard not to change with them at our ABC.

The Jones timing and vowels are still as perfect as his suits, but when the apparently inevitable and usually one-sided “Left v Right” tent-boxing erupts every Monday night, he can seem like a butcher who slips his thumb on the scales to tilt them.

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The erudite and articulate Tony Jones has slid slowly from the epitome of the polished professional broadcaster to an excellent impersonation of one.

This week the show jumped the shark when Jones had to cope with someone’s regrettable decision to give a platform to a deeply unpleasant panellist, Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Not so much a writer as a shouter, Ahmad spent what seemed like half the available airtime bellowing and snarling.

Jones tried half-heartedly to rein him in but, like a weak parent, decided to avoid a scene.

That meant that other writers on the panel, people like John Marsden and Sofie Laguna, who have actually sold large numbers of books, could only just get a word in.

It seems they politely pretended to be interested rather than intimidated and spoke gently so as not to give offence by being too “white”, to use Ahmad’s pejorative use of the word. Only one, Trent Dalton, who has probably written the Australian novel of the year, was willing to try to have his say.

The rest were very close to being shouted down.

Which is exactly what should have happened when some genius proposed that one half of the replacement team for Red Symons on Radio 774 would be a recent arrival from the subcontinent. Not so much a stand-up comic as a stand-in comic, he is now undertaking English-for-broadcasting lessons at our expense. It ain’t gonna work.

All this within a year of losing someone like John Clarke.

Aunty, please explain.

Andrew Rule is a Herald Sun columnist.

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