The ABC’s no better than a whining child

The green-left ABC and its cheerleaders are no longer capable of serious debate.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young checks her phone as former prime minister Kevin Rudd appeared via video conference before the Senate inquiry into media diversity. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Debating the modern green left is like wrestling smoke. A combination of passive aggressive sulking, tantrums in search of victim status, and a new reverse cancel-­culture squirrel grip help them to avoid discussing alternative viewpoints or the issues at hand.

In their hysterically simplistic world of good and evil, you are either in favour of saving the planet or against it. You pretend renewables can power the world, or you are a climate denier. You subscribe to paranoid overreach on pandemic management, or you are an anti-vax extremist. You accept the altruistic intentions of the communist dictatorship in Beijing, or you are a warmonger.

The lack of intellectual integrity, disdain for nuance, and refusal to engage with other views should alarm us. The inability to challenge assumptions or search for common ground suffocates whatever passes for our public square, polarising our polity.

When Scott Morrison rightly (and belatedly) this week called on state governments to eschew vaccine passports and allow unvaccinated Australians most of the normal rights afforded the vaccinated, the response from Queensland Deputy Premer Steven Miles was unhinged. Miles accused the Prime Minister of “throwing his weight behind dangerous fringe elements” and pulling together a “coalition of anti-vaxxers” for political gain.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews used the same tactic, smearing critics of his proposed new pandemic laws with the death threats and theatrical nooses ­paraded by extremist protesters – he even accused Morrison of indulging in “doublespeak to extremists”. The tactic is obvious and distasteful – duck the arguments and just demonise your opponents so that you can run a battle ­between white hats and black hats.

Leftist media voices such as Barrie Cassidy and Van Badham have run the same sick arguments on the pandemic, happy to tarnish anyone on the right with the actions of the nutters, while avoiding the substantive arguments. Yet these people do not use the violent protests, death threats and effigy burning by far-left protesters over climate change and other issues to tarnish the broader left. Go figure.

Indeed, when unionists turned violent in the face of vaccine mandates, many green left commentators tried to blame all the trouble on far-right infiltrators. Hypocrisy is the currency of the green left – think of the Miles anti-vax slight against Morrison and consider how the Queensland government and its former chief health officer did more than any other to undermine confidence in the Astra­Zeneca vaccine.

Constructive and robust debate is central to a health democracy. But the cancel culture collaborators choose not to even try to win arguments, preferring to cancel civil discourse.

The green-left cancel culture proponents even pretend to fall victim to it so they can claim victimhood. This explains how an ABC director can end up publishing a silly piece in a major newspaper pretending that I want to “cancel” the ABC (that sounds like a simple enough task, but what would I do after smoko?)

ABC board member Joseph Gersh wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald last month that in these pages I had suggested action to ­reform the public broadcaster: “Force it to be fair and useful and clip its wings while you are at it.”

Actually, I was paraphrasing LNP senator James McGrath, but I guess we should not quibble about Gersh’s sloppy reporting given he is not a journalist. “Such responses to the ABC,” Gersh pontificated, “are symptomatic of the very ‘cancel culture’ that traditional conservatives implacably oppose.”

Really? To reform the ABC so that it is fair and useful, and to constrain its multi-platform expansionism, is to cancel the ABC? Absurd.

Lucy Turnbull, wife of the malcontent former prime minister, tweeted recently about the government wanting to “silence” the ABC. Kevin Rudd too had been smoking the ABC cancel culture crack pipe, declaring that Rupert Murdoch had tasked Scott Morrison to “kill public broadcasting”.

If these people are correct, Morrison must be sacked for incompetence. What sort of a leader would kill public broadcasting by allocating $1.5bn annually to the ABC and SBS, allowing them to run half a dozen television stations, five dozen radio stations, and an infinite array of online, digital and mobile options?

The only way the ABC will ever be silenced is if it drowns itself out in the sounds of its own self-­indulgence. Yet to criticise the public broadcaster now is to try to cancel it – apparently, this billion-dollar behemoth’s very survival is threatened by mere commentary in a newspaper column. How precious.

Truth is, of course, the ABC is a dab hand at cancellation itself. It has effectively blackballed free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, while a host of green-left think tanks and media organisations provide endless talking heads.

Indeed, it is a couple of years since I’ve been invited for a discussion on the national broadcaster. Never mind, I get a fairly regular run on Monday nights when Paul Barry employs deceitful edits of Sky News shows to mislead audiences about what I and others have said.

The latest hyperventilation and desperate grab for victim status by the ABC was started by Ita Buttrose. The ABC chair issued a shrill response to the announcement of a Senate committee inquiry into the ABC’s complaints handling processes.

Buttrose knows the complaints processes require attention – she has launched her own review – yet ran a disingenuous line that a Senate examination of the same issue threatened the ABC’s independence and amounted to government seeking to control ABC content. This was the moment Buttrose abrogated leadership and became just another advocate for this staff-run collective.

Forget reason, forget facts, forget mature debate, just paint yourself as victim, and claim you face cancellation – this is the reverse cancel-culture squirrel grip. That way, instead of addressing the arguments advanced by your critics, you just gather the Love Media hordes in a social media pile-on against them.

It was very sad to see Buttrose reduced to this level of public discourse. She was cheered by the Greens, Labor, the likes of Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, and the Twitterati – a sure sign the arguments are beyond the pale.

The ABC employs no conservatives, hosts too few as guests, and ignores or mocks their arguments. It runs an intellectually shallow, ideologically homogenous sheltered workshop for the progressive green left, and then when it is called out by mainstream conservatives it cries foul and pretends to be under siege. If the ABC were a famous couple, it would be Harry and Meghan. Uber woke, courting progressive approval, but whingeing and demanding privacy when stunts and hypocrisy are exposed.

Cancel culture is now so rife and its proponents so committed that they pretend anyone who ­disagrees with their arguments is trying to cancel them. It is a confected tactic that not only ducks debate but attempts to provide cover for the green left’s push to ­silence all dissent.

Not happy with having the digital media giants ban a contest of ideas over pandemic policies and treatments, pushing climate alarmism in schools and bureaucracies (government and corporate), or marginalising mainstream views on the public broadcasters, the green left now try to generate false outrage about their views being silenced. It demonstrates both their lack of intellectual ­integrity and their absolutism; and it needs to be countered.

According to this phony narrative, Yassmin Abdel-Magied was not a provocateur who failed to handle the reactions she deliberately stirred, but a bullied member of a minority group who was hounded out of her country. Likewise, Emma Alberici was not an economics reporter who confused profit and revenue, but a woman who was pilloried for challenging the status quo.

Andrew Probyn is not a jaundiced political reporter who ­allowed his anti-conservative disdain for Tony Abbott to skew his coverage, but an objective observer targeted vindictively by conservatives. I guess somehow the conservatives are to blame for the feral Twitter leftists who attack any ABC host who has ever allowed a conservative politician to make a point.

So ludicrous has this become that Rudd and Turnbull – two blokes with multimedia megaphones, social media footprints, journalistic friends and financial backing that would rival Harry and Meghan – claim they are under threat of cancellation too.

Malcolm Turnbull.

When former foreign minister Alexander Downer told Sky News that Rudd and Turnbull were undermining their own standing by bitterly attacking their successors, Rudd suggested that Downer had been wheeled out by Murdoch as part of a “cancel culture” push against the pair.

It is mind-numbingly inane stuff from a former prime minister. Especially one who has repeatedly declined invitations to appear on the very media company he claims wants to cancel him.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young echoed Buttrose’s claims about a Senate examination of public broadcasting complaints processes being a threat to the ABC’s independence. Yet Hanson-Young has chaired a media diversity inquiry preoccupied with attacking News Corp and openly canvassing new regulation to curb its influence.

The illiberal intent of the green left is to create an ideological ­monoculture, and if you call this out you are part of the problem ­because you are trying to cancel them. There are sandpits that have hosted more sophisticated arguments.