Stacking the ABC: Alan Knight investigates the Howard strategy

Arena Magazine, Oct-Nov, 2007 by Alan Knight

The ABC Board has been packed, rather than just stacked, with intellectuals from right-wing think tanks hostile to government enterprises, just like the ABC. This is part of a moral campaign waged by John Howard, a crusade aimed at those seen as the 'New Left counter culture' whom Rightists imagine dominate the arts, the universities and, most of all, the ABC. As a result of

Howard's interventions, all but one of the ABC Board has links with right-wing lobby groups or the Liberal Party. Howard tipped his hand at the fiftieth anniversary of the journal Quadrant last year. Quadrant and its supporters had 'fought the good fight' against 'stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias,' Howard said. 'There is a view that the pro-communist Left in Australia in decades past was no more than a bunch of naive idealists, rather than what they were: ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests' (Address to Quadrant, 10 April 2007).

Quadrant itself is aware that it can be described as 'conservative, neo-conservative, or rightwing'. It claims, however, that 'it is not necessarily any of these things, maintaining a sceptical approach to unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"' (Quadrant, 'About Quadrant Magazine', 2003). The plan of attack on the ABC had been flagged in a Quadrant editorial published six years earlier. It advocated changing the corporation's culture 'at the top', with changes to the Board and managers it appointed. According to Quadrant, the ABC should not operate independently: 'The term "independence" when applied to the ABC is code for a particular set of values and prejudices, which include contempt for the prime ministership of Robert Menzies, for the present Prime Minister, hatred of business, and a whole suite of "progressive policy positions"'. And further, 'only the one-eyed "Friends of the ABC" would be so unreflective as to accept ... a simple-minded and obviously unacceptable notion of independence; and the same goes for all those staff members of the ABC who are determined to deny and to sabotage the crying need for reform in the public broadcaster' ( Quadrant, Editorial, December 2000).

Quadrant's view represents a radical rethinking of the ABC's governance. Ken Inglis, in a lecture to the Fabian Society, noted that Board members were to be 'worthies, representative of the nation at large: as Joseph Lyons described them on [the ABC's] opening night, "able and impartial trustees"'. While past governments, both Coalition and Labor, have tended to appoint sympathisers to the ABC Board, those appointments have usually been low key. Efforts were made to see that all states were represented, and there was, at least in appearance, diversity in Board appointments. Conservative governments might appoint a token trade unionist (usually a fairly conservative one); the Fraser Government appointed playwright David Williamson, while the Hawke Government appointed Ian McPhee, a former Liberal minister (and well-known 'wet').

According to the ABC website, 'the duty of the Board is to ensure that the functions of the Corporation are performed efficiently with maximum benefit to the people of Australia, and to maintain the independence and integrity of the Corporation'. The Board was to provide hands-off governance of the ABC, which was established as a major public sector institution, free from political control. But a series of appointees hostile to the ABC has compromised the ABC's independence.

The chair of the ABC, Maurice Newman, is at the apex of the free market system in Australia. In his day job he is chair of the Australian Stock Exchange, and as a broker he has a long and intimate relationship with the big end of town, cultivating close links with right-wing intellectuals. A former Director of the Centre for Independent Studies, Newman this year delivered a speech at the Centre paying tribute to the arch-priest of economic rationalism, Milton Friedman.

One might remember that Friedman argued that market principles should be applied to public institutions: in keeping with this view governments systematically denationalised, deregulated and privatised public enterprises and services. He also famously declared that the sole business of the managers of publicly held corporations was to maximise the value of outstanding shares. He equated any effort to use corporate resources for purely altruistic purposes to socialism.

Newman has been on the ABC Board before. He resigned in 2004, after a member leaked his role in hiring a media-monitoring firm to check ABC TV and radio broadcasts for political bias. At the time, he pointed to the refusal of the staff-elected Board Director to agree to the Board's governance protocols. The government subsequently abolished the staff position. Newman told The Australian that such a controversy was unlikely to happen while he was chair ( The Australian, 26 July 2007).

ABC Board member Steven Skala was another Director of the lavishly funded neo-liberal think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies. Founded by a former schoolteacher, Greg Lindsay, CIS champions 'free markets and free enterprise', as espoused by Friedman and propounded by Friederich Hayek. According to former Liberal politician and Quadrant editor Peter Coleman, the CIS resulted from 'the unwillingness of the Fraser government to dismantle the Whitlam legacy of regulation and control' ( The Australian, 19 August 2007).