Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I will take the interjection from the minister. I thought he was denigrating the Australian Taxation Office so I was defending the Australian Taxation Office. I know you are denigrating the ABC, so I will defend the ABC as well. I believe in defending all of our Australian institutions—unlike this government. The ABC is one of Australia’s most important national institutions. Labor believes it has a vital role to play in developing and reflecting our culture and national identity—very important. It has been doing that for more than 70 years, something this government—and these government members present—has been opposed to for a very long time. Labor believes that it is inappropriate to apply a template developed for agencies like Centrelink, for example, and then take that template and try to squeeze it over the top of the ABC.

There is a strong case for retaining the staff elected director position on the ABC board. This position has always been occupied by experienced public broadcasters. In the election to appoint a new staff elected director earlier this month, the ABC staff elected Quentin Dempster. Mr Dempster has given many of my colleagues—for example, members of the Iemma New South Wales government—a tough time on the New South Wales Stateline program. It is not as if any of us are exempt from raising the hackles of the ABC staff, but that in itself is no excuse to defund them, try to shut them down, do something like getting rid of the staff elected director or apply some pain to them, as seems to be this federal government’s course of action. Mr Dempster is a journalist with tremendous broadcasting experience. He has worked as a journalist at the ABC for more than 20 years. During this time he served as the staff elected director in the mid-1990s—and I referred to that earlier. This sort of expertise in public broadcasting has been in short supply on the ABC board over the last decade, the 10 years since this government came to power.

See this speech in context