Aunty’s insular little world of green-leftism

The national broadcaster’s producers and hosts don’t seek to reflect mainstream values but to demean them.

New Q&A host Hamish McDonald.

The fuss about Q&A and the latest obscenity perpetrated against taxpayers with their own hard-earned tax dollars is mind-numbingly tiresome. It demonstrates that the national broadcaster is beyond redemption; only the unlikely adoption of dramatic reforms or substantial budget cuts could ever quell its toxic influence.

On the bright side, moving one of Fran Kelly’s Monday night dinner parties into the studio probably saved a lot of guest-chasing and research costs; and it meant the stand-in Insiders host produced more than just one hour of TV for the week on her full-time salary. Perhaps tonight Q&A could have Barrie Cassidy and friends, doubling as Labor’s post-election post-mortem; it would be a compelling dirge.

The Q&A episode was just another low-IQ festival of wokeness, where perpetually teenage minds rail against society, tilting at the very establishment and taxpayers who fund them. You get this for most of the day, every day, on Radio National, and it comes in a funkier form on Triple J, and infects news and current affairs coverage on all of Aunty’s radio and television stations. Even if you never pay your HECS debt, you can keep the undergraduate vibe all your life thanks to the ABC.

Producers and hosts don’t seek to reflect mainstream Australian values but to demean them; rather than question those values, they assault them.

Their preference is for any fashionably green-left or anarchical views to be amplified without challenge. They exhibit an almost unfathomable lack of intellectual curiosity.

Pop into the ABC’s Melbourne and Sydney headquarters and you see a lot of people dressed in black and looking sullen. In the lead-up to the federal election they looked a little smug, but the dour Johnny Cash demeanour is back. Who knows what troubles them so? Perhaps it’s the drought.

If we can’t cut their budget, imagine tipping some bleach into their wash. We dream in colour; they dream in black.

The national broadcaster’s Sydney-Melbourne-Canberra axis provides the backbone of a media/political class that includes much of academia, public sector and media unions, environmental and animal rights groups, and the activist set from the professions and bureaucracy.

They cannot even discern national values because they have lost touch with them.

They elevate themselves above the masses, frowning upon the mainstream penchant for secure borders, cheap electricity, low taxes and the like.

This is why the ABC can field a team of dozens of political analysts and commentators yet still fail repeatedly to get an accurate read on federal politics, election contests and policy issues such as border protection, climate and energy policy.

They are deliberately and proudly out of touch with mainstream concerns and values.

When Kelly sits in the Q&A host’s chair, as much a feminist activist as the panellists around her, not even calls for violence disturb her sanctimonious green-left mindset.

There is no comprehension of how reasonable people would regard such rantings.

An exhortation to eat meat would have drawn a stronger rebuke. If a panellist had quoted scripture — like Israel Folau — the host would have challenged and resisted. The promotion of coal-fired electricity, cautious action on climate or tightly controlled immigration programs would have been slapped down and contested. But urge the killing of men or burning of cities? Knock yourselves out.

Like galahs in a cage, so many Ultimo and Southbank ABC hosts don’t know any different — the ABC staff collective has not only captured management, they have captured and isolated themselves from the real world.

This is how they can think coal is evil, Greens are mainstream, anyone opposed to same-sex marriage is a bigot, open borders are fine and supra-national governance is the ideal.

They see no hypocrisy in taking from taxpayers to fund their indulgence while simultaneously arguing for higher taxes or dismissing those resisting them as selfish. These people are a lost cause, and one of the problems is their tenure.

How long has Kelly been inside that bubble? How long for Cassidy and Heather Ewett, for Tony Jones and Sarah Ferguson, for Geraldine Doogue, Jon Faine, Virginia Trioli, Paul Barry and many others including their squadrons of ideologically left producers and researchers?

Who could blame them for falling victim to Ultimo or Southbank syndrome? They need to get out more.

They jumped on Alan Jones because he suggested someone should stick a sock in it but they are happy to broadcast calls for killing and burning.

They have feted shoe-throwers and given platforms to terrorist sympathisers, yet face no shaming or threats of boycotts from the social media activists they encourage.

They attempt to hold commercial media to standards they flout themselves. Obscenities and threats are forgiven so long as they target shared enemies. It’s as if double standards and hypocrisy are fundamental rules in the ABC style guide. It is endemic groupthink. Stuck in the never-ending university seminar of Radio National or other echo-chambers, their theories, ideologies and wokeness are seldom sullied by qualifiers such as reality, pragmatism or a reasonable-person test.

We hear it every day. They pretend that carbon taxes and renewable energy incentives might see shorter droughts or less severe bushfires in Australia.

They report a petition declaring a climate emergency, signed by 11,000 scientists, as some sort of scientific breakthrough; yet deliberately censor assessments about our drought not being linked to climate change or reports that Australia is on track to meet its Paris targets.

Cassidy et al can get every political issue and electoral contest wrong — from Donald Trump to climate change, from Brexit to boat turnbacks, from Tony Abbott to Bill Shorten — but never lose their political expert status.

You could get angry about it — the constant misinterpretation of a nation at its own expense, the undermining of all we have created — or you could ignore it.

But the smartest response would be to trim their budget, save taxpayers some money, limit the damage they do, and make them focus on what matters.

Until then, we can expect Q&A to accept any outrage, embrace any uprising and endorse any protest, until someone has the audacity to turn up on a Monday night and advocate going to church or making a profit.

Then all hell will break loose.