Extract from The Guardian
It’s only week one of the election campaign but Peter Dutton has made it abundantly clear how he feels about the ABC’s funding and its journalists. Pressed repeatedly by 2GB broadcaster Ben Fordham to name his favourite ABC journalist, Dutton came up with no one.
“My favourite ABC journalist, I might have to go back a fair way, Ben, to identify that,” he told the Nine-owned Sydney radio station.
“But I think there are some who, frankly, are just partisan players, and people see that on their TV screens every night. And again, the ABC is using taxpayers’ money.”
This barb came the day after the opposition leader hinted he may cut the ABC’s funding, and he repeated his line to Fordham.
“Nobody at the ABC gets $1 of pay without it being funded by Australian taxpayers. And as I’ve said before, if we find waste in the ABC, then we won’t support that, and I think Australian households and businesses would expect nothing less.”
The ABC is almost certainly facing yet another efficiency review if the Coalition is elected, and chair, Kim Williams, said at the Melbourne Press Club it was “game on”. It will be another review to add to the many. We counted 14 ABC efficiency reviews between 2003 and 2018 alone.
The ABC Alumni chair, Jonathan Holmes, told Weekly Beast it’s standard play by conservative governments to have an efficiency review of the ABC. “And almost always they’ve come to the conclusion that in programming terms, the ABC is really an efficient organisation,” he said.
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