Analysis
Posted
Neither organisation would probably like the
comparison, but this week has revealed that the Coalition Government and
the ABC have had a bit more in common than they might think.
The
furore that has surrounded the sacking of the ABC managing director,
Michelle Guthrie, and the subsequent resignation of chairman Justin
Milne has revealed two organisations that feel under perpetual siege. The only difference may be the source of the besieging. In the government's case, it has been besieged from inside: its civil war has left all the participants hyper-sensitive to criticism — not so much factionalised as tribalised, and seeing the world even more than ever in terms of those for and against it.
In such a world, the crude caricatures of the culture wars too easily come into play and, in some circumstances, create a confusing context in which what would otherwise be relatively normal battles are fought out, and subsequently judged.
In the ABC's case, the events of the week have shone a rare spotlight on the pressures that have been building up, in the last five years in particular, on the public broadcaster. In this case, of course, the besieging is coming from outside, and from the government.
It's not just the extraordinary claims that Mr Milne told Ms Guthrie she should get rid of journalists — or even "shoot them" — because the prime minister hated them.
The spotlight has been shone on the besieged mindset in which such discussions are taking place.
Anti-ABC feeling can defy logic
There has been plenty of commentary in the past week about the long history of politicians attacking the ABC. But this tends to downplay the fact that the past five years has seen an unprecedented institutional assault on the organisation.All media organisations have been facing savage cuts in funding so the ABC is hardly unique in that regard.
But other organisations have not been subjected to that plus at least two inquiries further aimed at constraining their activities — a competitive neutrality review and an efficiency review — and a relentless political assault on its journalism.
Of course, the governing party's membership has also voted to privatise the ABC.The virulence of anti-ABC feeling in some parts of the Coalition sometimes defies logic. Since joining the ABC in May, I've been criticised by ministers over pieces that have actually appeared in the Financial Review, not on an ABC platform, because they displayed my "ABC ethic".
And all this has played out against the backdrop of an unrelenting assault on the ABC by News Corp papers which assign compliant journalists — or those not in a position to say no — to pursue controversies about the broadcaster which are often so ludicrous as to be laughable.
(The relentless pursuit of the question of who was hiding behind the aspidistra in a re-enactment of a political story is just one recent example).
There's a whiff of a coup
There's even a whiff of the drama more usually associated with political leadership coups around the recent events at the ABC: the search for some new outsider or outsiders at the top who might transform the circumstances of the siege; what seems like an extraordinarily short time frame in which the outsider is assessed as being up to the task; and, when it all goes pear-shaped, the strategic leaks to inflict maximum damage on rivals.It's small wonder that, in such circumstances, events have played out the way they have, even if we actually still don't really know what has happened here.
But this should be where the focus goes, or where the lessons should be learnt from this week's events.
What do we know, or can confidently surmise, about what has happened in the management of the ABC and its relationship with the government?
We know that the prime minister was unhappy with a couple of ABC journalists, Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn. But that was already clearly on the public record.
We know that Malcolm Turnbull denies telling the ABC chairman to sack, or even "shoot" them (though clearly he made his displeasure abundantly clear). We know that the ABC chairman apparently told the managing director that action should be taken against those journalists because the prime minister was unhappy. And we know that, whatever was said and by who, nobody was sacked.
What remains unclear is whether the prime minister linked his unhappiness — whether it involved demands people be sacked — directly to threats about ABC funding in his conversations with the chairman, or whether the chairman believed that he had.What we also really don't know is how big a role any of this political drama played in the mindset or day to day management of the organisation.
Opportunity for a reset
We know that there were myriad other issues — including financial ones — that have been cited as problems in the organisation, and in the decision to sack Ms Guthrie.Despite the similarities with political leadership coups, Ms Guthrie was not the leader of a political party. She was not elected managing director by the ABC staff.
Whether the staff liked her or not should be completely immaterial and it is unfortunate that some staff's comments about her demise has given comfort to ABC critics who believe the problem with the broadcaster is that the staff think they run it.
Guthrie was appointed by the board to do a difficult job. Whatever her other strengths and weaknesses she oversaw a process which more successfully restructured the broadcaster's middle management than many of her predecessors.
But that still does not tell us how she, Mr Milne and the board dealt with the difficult issue of its interactions with a hostile government.
The chairman and managing director are now gone. But it is important to know how the rest of the board dealt with this hostility.The events of the past week offer the opportunity for a reset.
Bipartisan approach is unlikely
As a new prime minister, Scott Morrison has been most concerned about keeping the focus on issues that matter in a day to day sense to voters rather than what he describes as the concerns of Canberra.While lots of voters value what the ABC does, it is nonetheless true that much of what has been going on in the past week would be seen through the Morrison prism as Canberra navel gazing.
"The ABC board is responsible for the reputation of the ABC and its independence and we support them in being independent and I want to ensure that, as we deal with this issue, that the independence of the ABC is not in question", the prime minister said on Thursday.
Labor and the Greens have called for a bipartisan approach to the choosing of Milne's replacement. That seems unlikely to happen.
But, only months from an election, the government will no doubt tread carefully in its next choice for the board.There is an irony in the fact that, after such a tumultuous week, the governance of the ABC is likely to subside in the news cycle as a result of the release of the interim report of the banking royal commission.
For it was the diligence of ABC reporting that exposed the various corporate outrages that finally forced the government to bring the royal commission into existence. And there could be no better reminder of the value of the public broadcaster than that.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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- Hundreds of ABC staff demand Justin Milne step aside as chairman
- Emma Alberici responds to claims ABC chairman Justin Milne wanted Michelle Guthrie to sack her
- Senior ABC staff threatened to quit over Guthrie's performance: source
- Michelle Guthrie's challenging years as the head of the ABC
- Michelle Guthrie sacked from ABC managing director role halfway through term
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