ABC shameful on Auschwitz

It beggars belief that amid the deepening crisis over grotesque anti-Semitism in our midst, the ABC and SBS have failed to properly acknowledge the profound significance of Monday’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp.

With the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Piotr Cywinski, warning on the anniversary’s eve that “never before in the post-war period has remembrance been so important as it is now”, monarchs, presidents and prime ministers from across the world were lined up for the sacred commemorations marking the camp’s horrifying role in the Holocaust.

Even King Charles was due to be there – the first British monarch to visit Auschwitz.

So, as Australia’s representatives, were Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.

But nowhere in sight, unless there was a last-minute change of heart, were reporters from the ABC and SBS among the hundreds of correspondents from across the globe reporting on what was always going to be a hugely important news event at a time of growing alarm about anti-Semitism.

As James Madden reported, print and digital reporters from News Corp and Nine Entertainment, and TV crews from channels Nine and Seven, were assigned to cover the ceremonies.

But not anyone from the ABC, flush with the $1.137bn it gets from taxpayers, or SBS. Despite boasting a well-resourced European bureau, a report on the ABC’s flagship television news bulletin on Monday night about the impending memorial service was prepared from Canberra.

It would be hard to think of a more disreputable, indefensible and absurd misjudgment about essential news coverage by the public broadcasters, especially at a time when fears about the insidious growth of anti-Semitism in our country are front and centre of the daily political agenda.

As a nation that opened its arms to many Auschwitz survivors, we have much to learn about what the Nazis did to the Jews and how that was reflected in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, slaughter of 1200 Jews, the worst anti-Semitic atrocity since the Holocaust.

Sadly, however, the ABC’s treatment of Auschwitz appears to accord with the hapless Albanese government’s attitude to the commemorations.

The Coalition’s new foreign affairs spokesman, David Coleman, is right to accuse Senator Wong of politicising Australia’s foreign policy “in a way that is completely inappropriate”. The results of this are evident in the misguided actions and absence of the ABC.