Hottest 100 decision makes inner-city hipsters feel good

The decision to move an annual radio event from Australia Day tells us all we need to know about ABC management.

Just how tone deaf can the leadership of the ABC be? After three Victorian local government councils moved against Australia Day celebrations, and two were stripped by the federal government of their right to conduct citizenship ceremonies, our ABC has chimed in with a ludicrous example of inner-city moral posturing.

It has moved the date of its annual Hottest 100 hits, which has been aired on Australia Day for almost 20 years.

It’s not the world’s biggest story but it does tell Australians a lot about the political incompetence of managing director Michelle Guthrie, chairman Justin Milne and a board of directors already under intense scrutiny for their regular political missteps and biases. It also says a lot about who the ABC thinks its audience is.

Not Aboriginal leaders such as Jacinta Price, Warren Mundine and Anthony Dillon, who have all written passionately in support of preserving Australia Day on January 26, the day Governor Phillip landed in Port Jackson in 1788.

Moreland City Council on September 13 voted to scrap any references to Australia Day as a mark of respect to Aboriginal Australians. It voted to keep citizenship ceremonies on January 26. A month earlier the federal government had stripped Yarra and Darebin councils of the right to conduct citizenship ceremonies they had planned to move to another date.

Into this hotbed on inner-city poseurs stumbles Triple J, which polled its listeners to find 60 per cent of 65,000 responses supported moving the Hottest 100. Next year it will be run across the January 27-28 weekend but some years it will fall on the 26th if that day is on the last weekend of January.

The poll is no surprise. The station’s website says it targets 18 to 25 year olds. But what of head of radio Michael Mason, who oversees Triple J?

Next year Mason will become head of regional and local under Guthrie’s ABC organisational revamp. Having lived and worked in regional north Queensland, I am sure Mason won’t find much support for tokenism on race in his new role.

And why make the change in the middle of a passionate debate that only alienates mainstream Australians who want Australia Day to stay where it is and whose taxes pay for Triple J?

As usual, the ABC has been unable to provide any individual manager, or board member, to discuss the issue, because, as Gerard Henderson told Andrew Bolt on Sky News last Tuesday, Triple J is a workers’ collective that is part of a much bigger workers’ collective and in reality no one is in charge.

Despite pocketing $1 million a year to perform the MD role, ­Guthrie was conspicuous in her absence yet again. And so was Malcolm Turnbull, who appointed Guthrie and Milne and shares a similar technology background. All three have plenty of business process skills but show zero understanding of content and even less of politics.

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield fired up against Triple J and wrote to the board slamming the decision, but Turnbull said nothing. That’s a pity because this is exactly the kind of cultural issue that could do him good were he to speak out on behalf of mainstream Australians. But he has a tin ear for what they think.

Like the ABC and its board and management, he is too close to the inner-city values many Coalition voters, and certainly One Nation defectors from the Coalition, despise. And it is not like any Triple J listeners are ever going to vote for him.

Fifield, however, made some good points: “I am bewildered by the ABC’s decision ... (it) shouldn’t be buying into this debate.”

To my mind, the decision represents something worse in the national debate about race than the ongoing Australia Day controversy: the privileging yet again of the feelings of metropolitan white and immigrant Australians over concern for — and action to fix — the destructive living conditions of regional and outstation Aboriginal people, who are still dying 20 years younger than the rest of the country and whose women and children are too often subject to unspeakable abuse.

Two stories last week showed how almost two decades on from the impossibly pompous Sydney Harbour Bridge march of apology — the one Noel Pearson refused to attend because he said his people did not even know what reconciliation was — much debate about Aboriginal Australia remains a way for metropolitan middle-class people to display their moral ­superiority.

Look at Tony Windsor’s vile Twitter insult against former Labor Party national president and former head of the PM’s Aboriginal Advisory Council Warren Mundine. And then read the comments of the Yothu Yindi Foundation from the Northern Territory about the threat to impoverished Aboriginal Australians from the 100 per cent rise in self-identifying Aborigines in Sydney and Melbourne since the turn of the century.

The foundation, which runs the Garma Festival in Arnhem Land each August, argued to the Productivity Commission that “counting indigeneity in the formula used to allocate GST revenue might be hurting those in areas with the highest need”.

Just ask any teacher in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne how many extra resources go to kids from what may seem like white middle-class families that have come late to their indigeneity. It is a scandal the media should examine but it is cowed by Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Windsor, the former independent member for New England, is a campaigner on environmental issues, even though he sold much of his farm land to a coal company before entering federal parliament. His tweet was in response to Mundine’s support on Q&A last Monday night for the Adani coal mine in central Queensland, a mine that will provide many jobs for local Aboriginal people.

Windsor removed the offensive tweet and apologised to Mundine, saying he did not mean the comments to be offensive. It is impossible to see how they could have been taken any other way: “Sad to see Warren Mundine raise the issue of token Aborigines when he had made himself into a token Aborigine as a means of making a living ...”. Well, not the Mundine I know as a friend.

For me, it was all of a type with Sydney law professor and ABC radio host Larissa Behrendt’s 2011 tweet that Jacinta Price’s mum Bess, also appearing on Q&A, was more offensive than watching a man having sex with a horse. The smug moral middle class loves its own feelings more than it loves its fellow black Australians.

So back to Australia Day. How will the people Price, Mundine, Dillon and Pearson advocate to be helped by a posturing decision to move some Triple J music programming? Would it not be better to show some real solidarity with Aboriginal people of genuine need? Under its charter, the ABC really has a legal duty to report on the plight of outback Aborigines rather than just curry favour with inner-city hipsters on race issues they really know nothing about.

Chris Mitchell is an ambassador for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation. Warren Mundine is its chairman.