Extract from The Guardian
Head of public broadcaster dismisses detractors while saying federal police raids on its headquarters were ‘clearly designed to intimidate’
Last modified on Mon 23 Nov 2020 21.03 AEDT
The ABC chair, Ita Buttrose, has warned of an escalating campaign targeting the public broadcaster and labelled claims it runs agendas and campaigns against free enterprise as “malicious garbage”.
In a speech recorded on 12 November but published on Monday, Buttrose also threw her support behind a media freedom act and declared last year’s Australian federal police raids were “clearly designed to intimidate”.
Buttrose told the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation that she was worried critics of the broadcaster were now escalating their attacks on the ABC.
“Lately the campaign against the ABC has become more strident,” Buttrose said. “It appears to have gone up a notch this year. And this development concerns me.
“Recently one of our detractors said there was a need to curb the spread of public broadcasters into every technological and programming niche. ‘They should be ring-fenced into set stations, networks and roles, lest they crowd out a thousand flowers in a thousand digital niches.’
“I thought, my goodness, is the ABC being equated to a weed?”
Buttrose said that some had claimed the broadcaster’s exposés on live animal exports and greyhound racing, which led to policy changes, were proof that it ran agendas and campaigns against private enterprise.
She labelled the claims “malicious garbage”.
Buttrose also asked why “some individuals and some commercial media outlets [were] campaigning loudly for its demise”.
“Don’t they understand the value of public broadcasting?”
Buttrose also derisively suggested “leftwing critics” were attacking the broadcaster as being “patsies for conservative causes and the same commercial interests that seek to tear us down”.
“The old adage still holds that if you are offending everyone, you must be doing something right,” Buttrose said.
Buttrose gave the speech after the recent Four Corners episode on the sexualised culture in Parliament House.
The episode drew savage attacks of bias from Coalition senators at a Senate estimates hearing that night, before the episode aired. The ABC also said it had faced “extreme and unrelenting” pressure from “multiple representatives of government”.
In her speech, Buttrose sought to contrast the ABC as “accountable to the public” in ways that its commercial competitors were not.
“Often the way that concentrated commercial media organisations, such as the Nine group and News Corp, present their news is skewed,” she said.
“It often reflects the views of the editors or proprietors or the perceived preferences of their audiences and advertisers. And that’s fine. That’s the way it is and that’s the way they do it and it works for them.”
Buttrose noted the broadcaster’s competitors also “break news stories and expose corrupt behaviour”.
The Australian federal police raids on the public broadcaster were a “bleak day for democracy and media freedom”, Buttrose said. But she also insisted the raids were “a calculated move, clearly designed to intimidate”.
“I doubt though that the AFP expected such a strong reaction from the media and Australians generally – who have long valued, but perhaps taken for granted, a free press.”
Buttrose said she supported a media freedom act that would mean politicians would need to take media freedom into account when drafting national security laws.
It would also give the courts a “benchmark when they are adjudicating on cases that touch on press freedom”, she said.
“Australia is one of the few western democracies that doesn’t have press freedom written into its constitution.”
On the perennial question of funding, Buttrose said the broadcaster also wanted the indexation pause lifted, as well as certainty about news gathering funds and a boost to emergency broadcasting funding.
She said Deloitte research commissioned by the ABC had found the broadcaster contributed $1bn to the Australian economy, which was “on a par with the public funding of the corporation if you include transmission costs”.
The ABC was not just a “taxpayer expense item”, she said. “It also contributes to the Australian economy, something that is rarely acknowledged.”
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