Why no sackings at ABC after Louise Milligan fiasco?

Scott Morrison went ballistic over the Cartier watches awarded by Christine Holgate but overlooks the ABC’s $200k payment of the costs of Louise Milligan’s defamation.

ABC journalist Louise Milligan with her 2019 Press Freedom Medal. The quantum is 40 ‘ScoMo Cartiers’ against four for the former Australia Post chief. Picture: Brett Costello

If four “ScoMo Cartiers” gets you the very public humiliation of a – fortunately, only proverbial – flogging from the prime minister, culminating effectively but definitively in the demand that you be sacked, what should at least 10 times that, at least 40 “ScoMo Cartiers”, get you?

A literal flogging, perhaps, for starters? Well, maybe not.

But at the very least the same and arguably a much more explicit demand that you be sacked; and, for my money, the very appropriate penalty of permanent banishment to, oh I don’t know, Parramatta?

That must surely be in the “gift” of a PM; or perhaps he would need good friend Premier Berejiklian to, well, lock it down.

Our Andrew Bolt made a very good and very pertinent point on his show on Sky News on Thursday: where was the prime minister in relation to the disclosure that the ABC was picking up the tab for the private expenses of one of its journalists, Louise Milligan, over a private and quite simply indefensible defamation?

As everyone knows, so I won’t reheat the details, PM Scott Morrison went ballistic over the infamous four Cartier watches awarded by then Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate to four executives for sealing a major value-adding contract for AusPost.

In the process, the PM established for all time the “ScoMo Cartier” as the metric for measuring outrageous wastes of taxpayer money.

In the Holgate case it was all of $20k, with one “ScoMo Cartier” set at $5k.

Yet, as Bolt noted on Thursday, the PM has not simply been silent over, but made no demands at all over the ABC’s decision to waste probably more than $200k of the taxpayer’s money, at least 40 “ScoMo Cartiers”, by the payment of the costs of Milligan’s defamation of federal MP Andrew Laming.

As media writer Sophie Elsworth detailed this week, the ABC is paying at least $129k of costs incurred directly by Milligan in her defamation.

The ABC’s own – undisclosed – costs would take the total above $200k. At least 40 “ScoMo Cartiers”.

Why then hasn’t the PM publicly demanded that the ABC’s chief David Anderson be immediately stood down over this outrageous waste of taxpayer money while an investigation was launched into the affair?

And if he wasn’t prepared to stand down, then “he could go”?

Why hasn’t the responsible minister, the very same Paul Fletcher from the Holgate saga, been immediately on the phone to ABC chair Ita Buttrose, as he did to AusPost’s chairman Lucio Di Bartolomeo, demanding Anderson’s standing down?

Apart from the quantum – 40 “ScoMo Cartiers” against four – the AusPost awards were defensible and indeed appropriate, while the payment to Milligan is clearly neither. Laming didn’t sue Milligan and the ABC, he sued only Milligan over a private tweet.

The ABC has stated only that the decision to take over her case and to pay all the costs arose from “particular and exceptional circumstances”, but refused to provide Elsworth with an explanation of what they were.

In the Holgate case, the reasons for the payments were fully and publicly stated: the four executives had won a multimillion-dollar contract; somehow I don’t see a defamatory private tweet in the same category.

In its statement the ABC made the bizarre claim that Milligan’s “several” – not just one – tweets were made in “good faith”.

Apart from the dubious nature of that claim, why on earth is that relevant to the ABC decision to pay her private costs, unrelated to her employment with the ABC?

So, PM, when do we get the inquiry into the ABC’s actions – of its CEO and perhaps its board of directors – with the CEO to stand down while it takes place? When do we see the ABC chair asked to endorse this?

Now, let me switch tack and argue that the same PM, along with his health minister Greg Hunt, have copped an utterly absurd rap over the so-called “vaccine stuff-up”.

The two central assertions are that they put all our vaccine eggs in the one – AstraZeneca – basket; and then they took a leisurely (“it’s not a race”) approach to both the production of the vaccines and their rollout.

The government did not put all its eggs in the one basket. Apart from AstraZeneca and Pfizer, and the contracts with Moderna, it had also backed the Queensland university vaccine, which unfortunately fell over, but would also have been manufactured like AstraZeneca, on home ground at CSL’s Broadmeadows plant in Melbourne.

Think about that: we could have had two different vaccines manufactured in Australia.

Plus the two imports.

Contrast that with most of our peer group countries, many of which have trusted in only one vaccine; and further, trusted in being able to import it.

New Zealand certainly did put all its eggs in a single basket and a totally dependent imported one at that: Pfizer.

PM Jacinda Ardern might not have uttered the “not in a race” words, but that’s certainly been her approach.

Both of us did have the luxury of not racing to vaccinate quickly; to see how both individual vaccines and the vaccines generally played out, unlike those countries where the virus had become endemic.

A measured approach focused on vaccinating the vulnerable was exactly the right one, built as the government did on the combination of domestic production of AstraZeneca and programmed imports.

I’m also amused, but not the least surprised, by the demand from the “sharing, caring” left led by opposition leader Anthony Albanese that we should have grabbed as much of Pfizer as we could ahead of less favoured nations more acutely – indeed, deadly – in need of it.

Consider the counterfactual: we rushed to vaccinate pervasively early; and then even more and worse side-effects had surfaced.

Morrison and Hunt would have been shredded by the same voices for rushing recklessly to vaccinate when our low level of infection had given us time for a more measured approach, just like the commentariat’s beloved “gold standard, NZ.