Guthrie lacked the skill set needed to run ABC

In her first major interview after taking up the reins at the ABC, Mich­elle Guthrie spelled out the reasons why she should not have got the job — she had no experience in journalism and public broadcasting; she had worked for international giants News Corporation and Google in Asia; and she was a woman.

Yet those were the reasons why she was appointed. The former chairman of the ABC, retired NSW chief justice Jim Spigelman, was insistent the national broadcaster needed a change agent and for him, no one else would get his support. Even then, Michelle Guth­rie was Spigelman’s second choice. He wanted his long-time friend Kim Williams to take over but other board members convinced him this was unacceptable because of controversies surrounding Williams’s time as CEO of News Corporation Australia .

Guthrie got the job because she ticked Spigelman’s boxes as a ­digital-savvy female outsider. The problem, as Spigelman’s successor Justin Milne slowly discovered, was Guthrie was not qualified to do many of the things essential to the smooth running of the $1.1 billion a year media monolith.

Her sacking yesterday came as a surprise. Rumours of board disquiet and frosty relations between Milne and Guthrie were never stronger than gossip until Stephen Brook revealed in yesterday’s Media section in The Australian that a deep rift had developed over the future of the ABC.

 

Sources say Milne and a majority of his board believed Guthrie lacked the skills required to run an organisation of the ABC’s size and was incapable of effectively lobbying on its behalf in Canberra. This was regarded as a vital deficiency as the ABC approached its triennial funding negotiations with a government inclined to reduce its allocation of taxpayer funds.

The Guthrie sacking parallels the 2001 departure of Jonathan Shier during his term as managing director of the ABC. After years of chaos as a result of Shier’s attempts to reform ABC internal structures, then chairman Donald McDonald engaged in a public arm-wrestle with his chief executive before Shier resigned with a $500,000 payout.

There was no public brawling before yesterday’s announcement but in both cases the departures at the top were deemed to be “in the best interests of the ABC”. Board members are now letting it be known that the decision was “a long time coming, but eventually we were left with no choice”.

Guthrie was Spigelman’s candidate from the beginning. He was impressed with her track record — 14 years with News Corporation (owner of The Australian) including a stint as chief executive of the Hong Kong-based Star TV satellite service, and, more recently, a senior executive at Google.

Both jobs were high on the media ladder, but neither had the scale of the ABC. Spigelman further argued that appointing a woman would also send positive signals to contemporary Australia, and Guthrie’s part-Chinese origin made her “the dream candidate from City Casting”.

Guthrie hit turbulence early when she was criticised for taking time off to attend monthly board meetings for Auckland Airport, a New Zealand-listed company. She denied her obligations had any influence on her job at ABC headquarters, but the pressure caused her to resign her directorship in March last year.

She came under further pressure last year when one of her star broadcasters, the long-term Melbourne radio breakfast announcer Jon Faine, openly challenged her over her apparent lack of commitment to selling the ABC’s agenda.

“We do not understand why you are so reluctant to do more,” he told her. “We need a public champion, not a managing director who hides from the media or from public engagement.”

Guthrie recognised her lack of experience in journalism and public broadcasting. She recently told editorial managers that she was “hands-off in this area” because she was not a journalist, but she promised to back her team in producing better journalism. Critics say that remans a work in progress.

Guthrie pushed through a much-needed reform of the ABC bureaucracy, a significant achievement that will now become her legacy. This reorganisation is expected to save more than $50 million a year. Other workplace reforms were more problematic. She instituted policies designed to make the ABC a family-friendly workplace, allowing flexible working conditions and extended ­periods of time off. She has been accused of regularly taking advantage of her new rules.

Also puzzling for many staff was her support of a cult-like cartoon character, Larry, who was introduced to applaud workplace activities. It was ostensibly an effort to lift workplace morale but Larry became a figure of fun and so did his greatest supporter.

As the end came, fingers of blame were pointed directly at Spigelman. The consensus is he was blinded by her digital track record, which in fact amounted to ­little more than platitudes. He also overestimated the impact of her being the first woman to hold the job. The reality is she had never done a comparable job and managing and transforming a billion-dollar organisation was beyond her skill set. Yesterday, this harsh truth finally caught up with her.