Laura Tingle’s abuse of Australia reveals how rotten things are at the ABC

It is hardly surprising that standards at the ABC are plummeting – management is not motivated to bring errant staff into line.

ABC 7.30 political correspondent Laura Tingle speaking at the Sydney Writers Festival.

Laura Tingle can likely expect to be invited back to the Sydney Writers Festival next year after delivering her self-described “little rant” last Sunday.

“We are a racist country, let’s face it,” she told the festival’s audience. “We always have been and it’s very depressing.”

There is an upside to Tingle’s public display of ignorance and political partisanship. The ABC’s most senior political journalist has single-handedly exposed just how rotten things are – not in this country but within the ABC.

Worse, we are funding this public loathing twice over. It’s bad enough that taxpayers pay Tingle for her role as chief political reporter at 7.30. Topping her wallet up with more tax dollars to be staff-elected director is patently absurd. Is it any wonder that standards at the ABC have dropped into the dunny?

Tingle’s public comments reveal that she feels entirely free, as the ABC’s senior political reporter, to make partisan comments about Liberal leader Peter Dutton while giving the impression that she’s moonlighting as chief spruiker for Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Tingle criticised Dutton, telling the audience at Sydney’s Carriageworks that she didn’t recall a leader of a major political party “to be saying … everything that is going wrong in this country is because of migrants”.

After listening to Dutton discuss migration and housing issues during his budget reply speech a few weeks ago, she said, she “had this sudden flash of people turning up to try and rent a property or at an auction, and they look a bit different – whatever you define different as – (and) that basically he (Dutton) has given them licence to be abused, and in any circumstance where people feel like they’re missing out”.

Accusing the Opposition Leader of licensing Australians to abuse migrants shows a vile lack of professionalism, even by the ABC’s standards of rampant politicking and partisanship.

Tingle’s partisanship is unplugged: two weeks ago, she was bagging John Howard at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

So, what happens next at the ABC?

ABC boss David Anderson could act as editor-in-chief and admit that Tingle’s partisanship is terrible for the reputation and professionalism of a national public broadcaster.

Anderson and new chairman Kim Williams, as the ABC’s leadership team, could expand on Tingle’s previous politicking, pointing to her comments in 2020, after ABC budget cuts, when she described Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison as “smug” and complained about “government ideological bastardry”. Back then, Anderson admitted during Senate estimates that Tingle’s social media post “doesn’t necessarily align” with the ABC’s code of conduct for journalists.

He said that had she not removed the post – after a word from her executive producer – “we would have looked into the matter further”.

Given that in this case Tingle can’t hit delete after a quiet word from her boss, Anderson and Williams could play this one straight. They could say if Tingle were Joe Blow, no one would care what she thinks about Dutton or the country. But Tingle holds a privileged position as a journalist at the national broadcaster, whose charter mandates impartiality and balance. She has let the organisation down by expressing wildly partisan and ignorant views about Australia being a racist country. We’re drawing a line in the sand for the sake of the ABC’s reputation and out of respect for Australians who fund the national broadcaster.

Anderson and Williams could say Australia is not a racist country and it’s ignorant and unprofessional for any ABC journalist to say so, especially one as senior as Tingle. That she is setting a poor example for other journalists. And then they could say that, given she is a repeat offender, another dressing down is plainly inadequate. Rather, they could say, she must be dismissed.

Crikey. That was a delightful dream.

That’s not how things work at the ABC. At Aunty, a brazen show of politics is not punished, it’s rewarded. Long-time ABC watchers are betting that Tingle will continue to be regarded as a role model, indeed a national treasure.

Tingle’s forays into politics remind taxpayers of the partisan stench within the national broadcaster, and unprincipled management. In January, the ABC sacked Antoinette Lattouf for sharing a Human Rights Watch post about the Israel-Gaza war. Why not Tingle? She is a senior journo setting the standard for others.

Many say Anderson is scared of Tingle, along with others such as Louise Milligan, making them ABC untouchables – and the national broadcaster a farce.

Given Tingle’s weekend mentoring for younger ABC journalists, why would they take seriously the ABC Act, their charter or the compact with the Australian taxpayer – that we agree to fund this media monolith to the tune of more than $1bn a year in return for fair, accurate and impartial journalism?

This legislative compact was a bad joke before Tingle’s latest exercise in political mentoring.

On Australia Day in January ABC Indigenous Affairs editor Bridget Brennan, a Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta woman, told ABC News Breakfast that Australia “always was and always will be Aboriginal land”.

Which senior manager or senior journalist is going to tell Brennan – or any other journalist – that she is entitled to her private political views, but she is not entitled to use her taxpayer-funded position to be an advocate?

Who is going to enforce this rule? The flagrant abuses suggest the answer is no one. Instead, when discussing the failed voice referendum, Brennan echoed Tingle’s partisanship last weekend telling the writers festival audience that “there is so much racism embedded in this country”.

Who can forget the various vendettas run by the ABC against cabinet ministers and members of the former Morrison government? Milligan’s bogus charges against Andrew Laming for allegedly upskirting are a legend of the genre. The hatchet jobs on Alan Tudge and Christian Porter, and the lack of any remotely credible attempt to put the other sides of those stories, may have achieved the sort of political outcome Tingle might applaud, but was it journalism? More critically, was it journalism of the kind the ABC Act demands?

As one former ABC journalist told me after hearing about Tingle’s latest political spray: “Can you imagine BBC giants like David Dimbleby or Jeremy Paxman making those kind of remarks? Or the late Jim Lehrer or Robert MacNeil from PBS Newshour? Or even the ABC’s own saints, Andrew Olle and Maxine McKew? Tingle is the Australian version of the kind of ‘progressive’ American journalist that shows why people vote for Trump.”

The Howard government abolished the ABC staff-elected board position in 2006. The Rudd government brought it back, the regulations stating that the position “will benefit both the management of the ABC and ABC staff members by ensuring that a unique and important insight into the general operation and concerns of ABC staff members is heard by the ABC board”.

Tingle has brought the ABC into further disrepute. And God help us if her public spray about a racist country represents an insight into ABC staff.

In a small mercy, under the ABC Act Tingle can’t seek another term as staff-elected director. Still, if Dutton won’t commit to turning the most boring, partisan bits of the ABC into a subscription-only service or making a sizeable cut to the ABC’s colossal budget, the least he can do is promise to abolish this daft position.

It’s a piffling matter compared with cost-of-living issues, energy challenges, housing policies, anti-Semitism and foreign wars. But still, it sends a signal that enough is enough.