Justin Milne — from chairman to chump for ABC boss

The ABC chairman’s humiliating departure puts a pin in his grandiose plan to be the baby daddy of digital transformation.

Former ABC chairman Justin Milne leaves ABC headquarters in Sydney after resigning yesterday. Picture: AAP

Justin Milne’s humiliating departure as ABC chairman yesterday has finally put a pin in his grandiose plans to be the baby daddy of the ABC’s dramatic digital ­transformation.

But after blowing himself up with his own extraordinary demands of former managing director Michelle Guthrie, questions are now being asked about what drove Milne to push so hard to get rid of her.

Was she getting in the way of his grand vision for the half-­billion-dollar Jetstream project to digitise the ABC? Or was he taking riding instructions from the man who appointed him, Malcolm Turnbull, his close friend and former business ­partner?

Milne’s corporate swagger and a bad habit of referring to his ­female colleagues as “chicks” and “babes” appear to have won him few friends at the ABC.

One former ABC board member says his management style was completely at odds with the ABC culture: “He’s the kind of guy who likes to put his boot to your throat and not let go.”

Peter Manning, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney and a former head of ABC TV news and current affairs, says it was clear from the start Milne regarded himself as the real chief executive, sidelining Guthrie to second banana while he “roamed the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters like he was a media mogul”.

“He acted as though he was the editor-in-chief, confronting radio Triple J staff with his opinion on new proposals for youth radio, interfering in comedy programs based on his own editorial judgments and sense of humour,” says Manning. “He seemed to be in competition with his managing director. His attitude was, it was my way or the highway.”

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The damning accounts of Milne instructing Guthrie to sack two star journalists were a parting gift from the managing director, strategically included in a large sheaf of documents she presented to the board last Friday in her last-ditch appeal to avoid the sack.

Guthrie’s startling claims include that Milne ordered her to fire chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici and political editor Andrew Probyn because then prime minister Turnbull “hated” them.

“Basically she (Guthrie) gave him the warning shot — I’ve got all this dirt on you, if you sack me I’ll bring you down with me,” one senior ABC source close to the board tells The Australian. “He just didn’t get it was terminal for him.”

The final nail in the coffin for Milne was a leak in The Daily Telegraph yesterday about a June 15 conversation in which he reportedly ordered Guthrie to get rid of Probyn. Turnbull had savaged Milne in a half-hour phone call over a Probyn report — sourced to Australian government figures — claiming US President Donald Trump planned to bomb Iran, according to the Sydney newspaper.

By Guthrie’s account, included in her papers to the board, Milne had been so shaken by Turnbull’s call he told her it could jeopardise “half a billion dollars of (government) funding” for Jetstream. “You have to shoot him (Probyn),” the Telegraph quoted Milne as saying.

Turnbull and Communications Minister Mitch Fifield emphatically denied they had ever interfered with the running of the ABC or issued ultimatums to Milne to sack staff.

But Peter Fray, a co-director of the Centre for Media Transition and a former editor-in-chief of The Sydney Morning Herald, says the blanket denials from Fifield and Turnbull are “telling”.

“They have hung Milne out to dry,” he tells The Australian. “They’ve had no compunction getting up in parliament and personally attacking ABC journalists. This whole thing doesn’t cover anyone in glory.”

Minister for Communications and the Arts Mitch Fifield. Picture: AAP

ABC insiders say that beyond the grief from the PM’s office, Guthrie and Milne were never able to work together, repeatedly clashing over the direction of the ABC’s digital transformation, or at least how they were going to get there.

Milne was fixated with the idea the ABC needed $500 million in government funding to build Jetstream — a giant digital palace that could house the entire digital content of the ABC as analog systems are phased out over the next 10 years.

“There are risks,” Milne said of the project in a previous interview. “There were risks also with the introduction of television. But the bigger risk is doing nothing.”

Fray says Milne knew it would appeal to Turnbull’s shared obsession with big, bold, innovative projects after both men made a killing on OzEmail in the 1990s.

“Look at his background, the companies he chairs, NBN, MYOB,” Fray says.

“He’s a little bit like Malcolm, as Abbott said, ‘the man who invented the internet’. They’re both middle-aged men, a bit late to the party, but he fancies himself as a bit of a technologist and he just fell in love with a piece of tech. If it cost $5 he wouldn’t give a shit about it.”

Guthrie, however, thought Jetstream was hardly a priority given the ABC was facing next year’s federal budget, when it will have to go cap in hand to the government for its next three-year funding deal — worth more than $3.3 billion.

After an indexation freeze that robbed the ABC of $83.7m in the last budget, Guthrie was also convinced the government would never agree to underwrite such a massive bill.

In the end, Milne would cite the future of the Jetstream project as one of the many reasons Guthrie had to go, in his surprisingly brutal statement on Monday.

“We just need to embrace Jetstream wholeheartedly and move forward with that,” Milne told the ABC News channel. “And that’s a big infrastructure build, and it’s a difficult thing to decide to do ­because we will be building infrastructure that won’t be used for sort of three years.

“This is a difficult moment for the ABC and none of this is a reflection on Michelle, but the difficulty that we have here is that we now need to plan the next 10 years, and that’s what we’re attempting to do, and Jetstream will be a significant part of that.”

Fray says: “In the public sense, who knows anything about Jetstream? That message was for internal consumption.

“Clearly, storing and archiving is important in a digital universe, but whether it was worth dying for or killing your managing director for, I don’t think so.”

The grand irony is that Alberici — bane of the Turnbull government — set in train the crisis that would destroy the careers of the two most senior ABC executives.

Alberici was once great pals with Guthrie, publicly defending her when staff were in meltdown over the dismantling of Radio National and TV’s Lateline program. The pair often drank together and joined each other at social events.

With Milne gone, Guthrie appears to have been recast from hapless MD who didn’t care about journalism to unlikely fearless ­defender of staff who “stared down” down her chairman.

But that narrative grates with ABC insiders, who say her mishandling of that crisis goes a long way towards explaining Guthrie’s failure as a leader who couldn’t bring the team behind her.

The government’s criticism of the ABC has escalated over the past year, with Alberici and Probyn the targets of multiple Coalition complaints about inaccurate and biased reporting.

Several sources have confirmed that from the moment ­Alberici first became a government target over a contentious February 14 article, Guthrie had “ghosted” her.

The Australian understands Guthrie had no idea whether she had grounds to sack Alberici and it was ABC editorial director Alan Sunderland who strongly advised against it.

Far from supporting Alberici as the government attacks against her continued, Guthrie never spoke to her again.

ABC reporter Andrew Probyn.

“Emma hasn’t heard a word from Guthrie since the (February 14) article,” a senior ABC journalist tells The Australian. “Not an email, not a phone call, not even a text. Nothing.”

The ABC did act on the first complaint about Alberici’s February article — which had accused 400 Australian companies of not paying tax for three years — by removing it from the ABC website on the ground that it contained errors. But it was Alberici who had to force the ABC to republish a new, edited version of the article, bringing in her own lawyer, Chris McArdle, to join a crisis meeting with the ABC’s legal counsel and the chief of human resources.

Critically, Milne attended the meeting but Guthrie — the one person who should have been there — was absent.

Milne had placed himself in the driver’s seat, a position insiders say Guthrie never managed to wrest back.

Manning says the ABC has ­become such a plaything of the Coalition government, it’s difficult to imagine the crisis over its future being resolved any time soon.

One small comfort, he says, is that much of the agony and chaos of the past week “can be laid at the feet of Malcolm Turnbull” — both when he was communications minister and later when he was prime minister.

“Far from being a friend of the ABC, Turnbull turned out to be one of its most persistent critics, deriding, complaining and harassing staff, executives and chairs of the ABC,” Manning says.

With Turnbull and Milne gone, it’s unlikely Jetstream will find a champion anytime soon. For now at least the ABC faces the huge and immediate problems of a deeply unsettled workforce and stretched budgets, yet more redundancies and a relationship with Canberra that’s at an all-time low.