Spigelman's appointment as ABC chair offers a rare opportunity for bipartisan reform

A RETHINK of the ABC Act is overdue and Spigelman's appointment as chair offers a rare opportunity for bipartisan reform.

AT the tail end of the Whitlam government, media minister Moss Cass held an indiscreet meeting with ABC staff during which he reportedly praised a recent radio discussion of pederasty and encouraged producers to keep up the good work. "If you were looking for a consistent thread, it was, I suppose, that commercial radio and TV was universally crappy and the ABC was the nation's only hope for a communications temple of truth and enlightenment," an anonymous ABC source told The Bulletin.

Last week, Cass's departmental head in 1975, Jim Spigelman, was named the next chairman of the temple of truth, an appointment that was welcomed across the political spectrum.

Spigelman's record over a 40-year legal career, which ended last year with his retirement as NSW Supreme Court chief justice, leaves little room for the accusation that he is Labor's man. Indeed, the conservative consensus was that Spigelman is the best appointment Kevin Rudd never made when he was overlooked for the role of Supreme Court chief justice in favour of Robert French in 2008.

It has been rare in recent times for an incoming chairman to arrive with so little political baggage. Donald McDonald's close association with John Howard proved crippling and Maurice Newman was dogged by the perception that he too was there to fight Howard's war against the cultural Left.

Spigelman joins a stable board that is strong on legal and business experience, but light on professional media expertise. Acting chairman Steven Skala, who was himself contender for the top job, is another politically independent board member; he was a Howard appointment in 2005 and a Rudd reappointment in 2010.

Spigelman's arrival next month offers a rare opportunity for bipartisan reform, should Labor or an incoming Coalition government be bold enough to seize it. It offers a window to declare a truce in the culture war, and to open a public and parliamentary debate about the government's $1.2 billion intervention in the media market.

The ABC's activities have expanded in directions that were not imagined by Alex Dix's report, the last serious review of the ABC, now more than 30 years old. Its charter sets out the ABC's purpose in a mere 355 words (the BBC Charter is almost 13,000 words long) , leaving much to the discretion of its managing director and a board, which has somewhat constrained formal powers.

The 1983 act that emerged from the Dix report obliged the ABC to provide "innovative broadcasting services", yet none of the parliamentarians who debated the bill would have used email or browsed the worldwide web, which had yet to be invented. Their TV viewing would have been restricted to five analog channels and they would have struggled to understand the function of a "guest tweeter" on a serious late-night TV news and current affairs program.

The case to revisit the act appears unanswerable; indeed many ABC supporters are privately urging a fresh review. It would allow parliament to re-establish the ABC's public purpose and help it avoid entering fields where it crowds out the private sector.

The ABC charter merely instructs the corporation to note what the commercial and community media sectors provide; the BBC, on the other hand, has a statutory responsibility to take account of "the competitive impact of the BBC's activities on the wider market".

In the short term, Spigelman should be cautious about wading into the contentious issue of bias. Newman was not afraid to tackle the issue head on, accusing ABC staff in a closed meeting in 2010 of "groupthink" towards climate change. Like previous chairmen, however, he discovered the ABC's tendency to adopt the hedgehog position in the face of an outside threat.

Spigelman will no doubt recall Malcolm Fraser's spectacular failure at restoring discipline at the ABC after its Whitlam-era exuberance. His appointed chairman Richard Bland walked headlong into a pointless censorship row over the TV series Alvin Purple and never recovered; he resigned after six months without landing a blow on the ABC's fiefdoms.

Revisiting the ABC Act would be an opportunity to clarify the role of the chairman and the board. Since the ABC was founded in 1932, the board has always struggled to shake off Billy Hughes's warning that they would be "mere puppets . . . men of straw" controlled by the government of the day. The BBC's governing body, the BBC Trust, makes it clear that its job is "to represent the public who own and pay for the BBC".

A chairman of Spigelman's considerable ability deserves a mandate as robust as BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten, who has the resources to run extensive audits of the BBC's output and the authority to enforce its public purposes: "sustaining citizenship and civil society; promoting education and learning; stimulating creativity and cultural excellence".

Nick Cater is editor of The Weekend Australian