Turnbull and his ABC mate Milne need courage

Good businessmen don’t necessarily make good politicians and the evidence is they seldom make good media executives.

Good businessmen don’t necessarily make good politicians and the evidence in the media industry is they seldom make good publishing or broadcasting executives ­either. Look at the board of Fairfax Media any time over the past two decades. Jammed with retail heavyweights with no publishing experience, the board has been singularly unable to affect the editorial culture of the company’s newspapers or to reverse their decline.

Bizarrely, the board has often bragged it has no say in editorial matters, as if that were a positive. Presumably new chairman Nick Falloon, a long-time broadcast executive, has a different view. Trevor Kennedy, the former editor of The Bulletin and man­aging director of Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press, got it right in this paper a few years ago when he wrote in response to such a Fairfax statement, “editorial is the business”. Indeed.

In newspapers and in broadcasting the revenue lines depend on editorial to drive reader and viewer numbers. Whether it’s circulation sales revenue, display ad revenue or old-fashioned jobs and cars classifieds (or indeed television and radio ads), editorial is the glue that links buyers and sellers and creates revenue.

Undoubtedly Malcolm Turnbull mastered the business of banking when he was chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs Australia in the 1990s. He was a digital innovator with a $500,000 investment in OzEmail in 1994, so is no doubt right to fancy himself as an expert in digital delivery systems. Yet he has shown a remarkably flat-footed approach to politics, where the transactional nature of business leadership does not always translate into sharp political instincts.

Yet like wartime prime minister John Curtin, himself a journalist, many journalists have done well in politics. Turnbull was one for a short time at The Bulletin, and so were PMs Alfred Deakin, ­Andrew Fisher, James Scullin and Tony Abbott. Other journalists who made a mark in state and federal politics include Bob Carr, Peter Collins, Pru Goward, Alan Carpenter, Brian Burke, Gary Hardgrave, Clare Martin, Mary Delahunty and Peter Andren, to name only a few.

And what did their media background give them that Turnbull’s has not? A good commonsense feel for public opinion. That’s the same skill set that works the world over in big media businesses.

But Turnbull, who the polls would suggest has a poor radar for public opinion, seems to think that a media skill set is the last thing needed for board members of the national broadcaster.

From the quotes he has given in interviews in the past 10 days, Turnbull’s old friend from OzEmail days, Justin Milne, may struggle to make any mark at all in his new role as chairman of the ABC. He seems to think a businesslike approach to process will suffice, much as Turnbull imagined such an approach would work in government. And without the commercial imperatives that easily provide meaningful KPIs in private media businesses, success in the ABC has always been much harder to define.

This is not just a question about the perceived left-wing bias of the corporation, although affecting the culture of the ABC seems a lost art, as rare today as strong political advocacy. After 10 years in the chair, the previous managing ­director, one-time Liberal Party staff member and former journalist Mark Scott, was unable to meet his own benchmarks on bringing more editorial balance.

The last leader to really take the ABC editorial bull by the horns was David Hill, who famously complained one weekend that the lead news item on the hourly radio news had not changed all day. That’s the sort of editor’s involvement that is really needed. It is not the approach being taken by new MD Michelle Guth­rie, who has ­bitten off some tough structural ­issues but shown no sign of wanting to roll up her sleeves in the way the editor-in-chief position she commands really does require.

With a board largely comprising successful business people and a chairman who told this newspaper he did not see any bias ­within the ABC’s news services, the status quo — staff dictatorship under the guise of editorial independence — is likely to continue. While even the corporation’s former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes, himself a quintessential ABC progressive, has admitted the corporation’s left-wing bias in capital city radio, Milne told this newspaper last week: “I don’t come to the job thinking I need to fix the perceived bias in the ABC because I don’t know there really is a bias.”

In 24 years as a daily newspaper editor, I never once denied The Australian was a paper on the centre right with a bias shaped by a ­desire to see the country more prosperous and more powerful. It is unashamedly pro-business and pro-development in all fields of life from the arts to the economy, education and sport. The ABC has for decades attacked both sides of politics from the left based on a set of values largely shared by the staff: environmentalism, anti-Americanism, anti-racism, big government, higher taxes and pro-minorities.

At this point supporters always cite polling by this newspaper’s pollster, Newspoll, suggesting the ABC is the most trusted news source to bat off the bias allegation. That is rot. Just as pollsters misread the Trump and Brexit elections because many voters would not admit their own intentions, fearing being seen as unfashionable, polling on media trust will ­always inflate the ABC because people who never watch it want to seem better educated by nominating it as their most trusted source.

Mr Milne, his board and his MD seem likely to be just as ineffective as the PM has been. Driving change in government or in media requires a level of mental toughness and courage that seems to have evaporated at the top of government and business in modern Australia. Courage to stand up and be counted on values, and to stand before a large group of staff and demand better performance.

Like calling out the poor effort by our national broadcaster last week in north Queensland during Cyclone Debbie. With a budget of $1 billion a year and more that 4000 staff, our ABC’s television coverage of the biggest domestic news story of the year was smashed by the Seven and Nine networks. Once the ABC would have dominated such a story.