Let’s swap jobs, Ita, there’s so much for you to learn

Cartoon: Eric Lobbecke

If you are a little bemused and confused by the artsy crowd in this country, join the club. As the Morrison government considers a funding package for the arts, playwright David Williamson says “some middle-class audiences at the theatre are finding it a little tiresome to get yet another play from yet another minority group that tells them that they are unconscionable … some sections of the audience are sick of being told they’re horrible.” Too right. Many have had enough of being beaten about the head, labelled oppressors of minority groups.

On one view, the arts must be in strife when a luvvie such as Williamson says so. But, sadly, there is more hypocrisy than epiphany to Williamson’s comments. A few months back, the playwright denounced international travel as a climate travesty, and in the next breath recounted his planned trip to Germany to retrace Johann Sebastian Bach’s life, followed by a few weeks in Provence to enjoy lazy days with friends. “My only (very poor) excuse is that the lure of Provence in summer and great German concert performances are too hard to resist,” he told The Australian Financial Review.

The truth is that Williamson has a longer history of preaching to middle Australia than understanding this group. He is more than happy to beat the same group of Australians over the head for taking a different view on climate policy to him. In his 2005 Sir ­Rupert Hamer Lecture at Melbourne’s Swinburne University he mocked aspirational Australians’ “obsessive focus on material acquisition, encouraged by governments who worship economic growth and little else”.

Williamson recounted that aboard a cruise to Noumea (he and his wife won the trip at a charity auction), he noticed passengers were not discussing Proust or ­George Eliot. He discovered that “John Howard’s beloved ‘aspirational Australians’ ” liked to talk about “new cars”, “kitchen refits” and private schools. Having poured buckets of scorn on middle Australia in his essay Cruise Ship Australia for caring about economic growth, educating their kids and building nice homes for their family, Williamson concluded “this cruise ship was a kind of metaphor for Australia. Cruise Ship Australia, all alone in the south seas sailing to god knows where. And … like Australia, many of the passengers didn’t care where we were headed.”

There is more preaching in his recent play Family Values, where Williamson castigates middle Australians for supporting immigration policies that shut down people-smugglers and stopped deaths at sea. Without coming up with a solution to stop a global business model that causes untold misery to millions, Williamson’s diatribes amount to nothing more than feel-good virtue signalling.

Beyond Williamson and his artsy ilk, there is a wider protected class that is equally disconnected from mainstream Australia. For example, Australians might imagine that, in return for sending the ABC more than $1bn each year, the concerns of middle Australians would get a decent run across the broadcaster’s myriad platforms. Instead of being at the forefront of demanding a longer and deeper lockdown, and breeding fear and panic over COVID-19, the taxpayer-funded ABC might have offered taxpayers informed coverage of the other serious costs to people’s livelihoods and lives.

Whereas the BBC has been able to reflect a diversity of views on responses to the pandemic, from the start the ABC has espoused views that suit the protected class in this country — those who have not lost jobs, or had their hours cut, or faced reduced incomes by the economic lockdown.

Only members of a protected class, such as senior ABC management, could ignore suggestions five weeks ago for a pause on the proposed 2 per cent staff pay rise in October.

As Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said on ABC News Breakfast last week: “This is a time when many Australians are out of work (or) have had to take substantial reductions in their income, and it’s appropriate that government employees should have a pay freeze. The ABC as a government organisation should be part of that.”

Arts Minister Paul Fletcher.

Instead of doing its day job better by presenting intellectually cur­ious journalism to Australians, the ABC is full of cosy little cliques that carry on their in-house activism over climate change. If even some among this protected species walked in the shoes of those who fund them, we might have a public broadcaster that reports on issues that matter to middle Australia.

In that vein, here’s an idea sparked by a tiny error in a regular email to our members at the Institute of Public Affairs a week or so back. In an inadvertent slip of a few computer keys, Ita Buttrose was described as IPA chairman. “Ye gods!” said some. But what a canny idea. Send the ABC chairman on secondment to the IPA so that she might better hear the ­voices of middle Australia. (Being a patriot, I could switch with her for a while. Odds on she will learn more than I will in our new roles.)

Former ABC board member Janet Albrechtsen.

ABC chair Ita Buttrose. Picture: Kym Smith

Ita’s new role could be an eye-opener. For starters, we use the word chairman at the IPA. It’s not some misogynistic plot to put little women in their place. We use chairman because it is the etymologically correct term; it comes from the Latin word “manus”, meaning hand on the tiller. With that sorted, Ita will learn that middle Australia does not hate this country or feel the need to apologise for our history.

They condemn episodes of racism without concluding that the country is racist. They understand that tolerance is not predicated on having an Australian Human Rights Commission or a preachy arts industry. She will hear from people who go to the footy for the footy, not to be smacked over the head about perceived racism, and who believe that supporting diversity need not bump the traditional family out of public conversations.

Ita will hear from small business owners, hardworking Australians, those who make up one-third of the economy and employ 40 per cent of private sector jobs. They want to grow, employ more people, rather than get handouts to maintain zombie jobs.

Ita will learn that you can be an environmentalist and also understand that cheap, reliable energy is how we build industries, create jobs and send taxes to Canberra to build schools and hospitals.

When Ita returns to her nice office at ABC headquarters in Ultimo, she might send a few of her high-profile journalists on secondment too, to run a cafe in Penrith, a garage in Dandenong, a gym in Holden Hill, a beauty salon in Longreach. Maybe that will return the public broadcaster to its rightful owners — the millions of Australians who cough up each year to fund the largest media organisation in the country, only to be snubbed day in, day out by the incessantly narrow agendas of ABC journalists.

Switching places for a decent spell should be mandatory for anyone on the public teat so they can do their job better.