This Lattouf saga is the worst ABC whodunnit ever

When the ABC brought us Yes, Minister, The Games and Utopia, its business was entertainment, not self-portraiture. By 2023, these comic masterpieces had become, for senior management, corporate training videos.

There is not enough space here to recap the entire fiasco of the Antoinette Lattouf unlawful termination case playing, for one week only, in the Federal Court. Too many buses, too little time to detail every player throwing everyone else under one.

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

Maybe it’s sufficient to ask how the ABC allowed it to get this far and what is really at stake. Let’s start from the top and see where we go.

Ita: Packer protegee, a name so recognisable she had an eponymous magazine, and by 2023 the Morrison government’s appointee as ABC chair and avatar of a personality cult.

In December that year, the ABC was not a place where the chair, upon receiving complaints about an obscure radio presenter on a five-day contract, would reply, “Thank you for your interest, here’s the address of our complaints department, and they will deal with this today.”

Instead, it was an organisation where the chair asked her managing director, David Anderson, how an “activist” radio host had been given a gig. When he didn’t know, she sent next manager down, Chris Oliver-Taylor, six emails in 19 minutes. “Has Antoinette been replaced. I’m over getting emails about her,” she later messaged Anderson. It was Christmastime. After wrapping her presents, Ita suggested pretending Lattouf had COVID.

This wasn’t pressure, it was a suggestion to “save face”. Ita was hinting at more than a “managed exit” for Lattouf. Time for “damage control”. (Utopia exploits the comedy in insider jargon coming out of not-quite-right mouths. Oliver-Taylor, a career exec, told a colleague, “The Oz is running a yarn” and the ABC had to “get ahead of it”. It reads as journalist-adjacent as Mike Moore at his best.)

To interpret the chair’s urgency as pressure to remove Lattouf, Ita testified, is a “fantasy”. She was not speaking as the boss, but as a “general observer of life”. If she’d wanted Lattouf sacked, she would have been more “frank”. As in, Frank. Or Kerry.

But the ABC is not a private business. Private businesses transfer their liabilities to complex corporate webs and offshore tax havens. Statutory bodies like the ABC transfer theirs to complex onshore webs of organisational chaos and blame-shifting havens. You have to be so careful, when every word might one day be exposed by Senate estimates committees or leaked to News Corp. Or, worst-case scenario, brought to court.

As the evidence unfolded, the scripted comedy became increasingly poorly written. Rather than a whodunnit over the question of who sacked Lattouf and why, the number of bodies being thrown under buses produced a confusion of was it dun at all? Did it dun itself? What guidelines had she broken? Nobody knows, then or now. Was she sacked, or did the band break up on Wednesday and re-form without her on Thursday? Did Oliver-Taylor pull the trigger or was he, as he testified, just the “senior” person in the room where the decision (in the passive voice) was made?

By Thursday, the court show had run longer than Lattouf’s radio days. (She had been paid out for her full week, by the way, as if that might shut her up. Bet she wishes she was on barristers’ rates.) ABC managers were finding new buses to throw colleagues under. It was efficient: every bus was on time and none was cancelled. Laura Tingle and Patricia Karvelas got collaterally thrown under mini-buses, when their off-air political opinions were used as comparisons. Even the Jewish lobby itself was thrown under a passing bus, the ABC’s legal team accidentally doxxing them by failing to redact their personal contact details from court documents.

I told you there wasn’t enough space. So let’s jump to the end, as the ABC magically did, from the chair to the freelancer, whose marching orders had descended from some mist-wreathed realm “higher up”. Every communication within the ABC appears to have been designed with accountability in mind, in the sense of dodging it.

On show is a textbook study in the consultant Ron Askhenas’s explanation, in the Harvard Business Review, for why accountability gets fuzzier in large entities: managers work hard to make it that way. “To avoid career-limiting consequences, managers go through all sorts of gyrations to diffuse or re-direct accountability, such as: blaming others, referring to circumstances outside their control, shifting resources to other areas, reorganising, changing measurements mid-stream, or any number of other creative deflections.”

Antoinette Lattouf outside the Federal Court in Sydney this week.Credit: Kate Geraghty

The stakes here are much larger than individual careers. The managers involved – Buttrose, Anderson, Oliver-Taylor – no longer have ABC jobs to lose. As Ita said, this was always about the ABC’s reputation, and here’s where we get to the nub of it.

In this game of lose-lose-lose, who won? Those who wanted Lattouf off air got their result, sort of. In emailing the ABC chair directly, they found a weak spot, and power trickled down through weak spots down the line to the individual gig worker, who was in the weakest spot of all.

But did they really win? Look at Ita’s wording. She was “over” their complaints. When it was done, she told Anderson wryly, “It’s nice to get congratulatory emails” from them. The wording is a telling detail, more revealing the more you look at it. It is not the wording of the establishment being pushed around; it is the establishment placating a nuisance. The more you look at these formulations, the more a deep and too-little-discussed lineation of our current political moment reveals itself.

By now comprised entirely of plot holes, the Lattouf saga became the most unsatisfying Sunday night ABC whodunnit ever. The court case has shone a light on a system engineered to deflect responsibility from individuals to the institution itself. Institutions are thought to be strong enough to absorb this – until they’re not. The ABC is always under attack, but in this episode the ABC’s management did its enemies’ work for them.

We cannot take our institutions’ survival for granted. This is the real cost and these are the real stakes. A Roy Morgan Poll of 26,000 Australians, conducted at the time of the Lattouf farrago, found that Australians’ trust in all institutions was at a historic low and falling further. Opaque accountability systems destroy trust. Without trust, institutions will go under. They rot from within. When the external foe comes along to pulverise national institutions like the ABC, all they are doing is finishing the work done by all the internal arse-coverers and blame-shifters who came before.

Malcolm Knox is an author and columnist.