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

The parliamentary secretary has let it out of the bag. It is just unbelievable. Last year, research conducted by Newspoll found that 82 per cent of people actually believe—and I think they have good reason to—that the ABC is balanced and even-handed in its reporting of news and current affairs. Not all Liberals share the government’s hatred of the ABC however—amazing as that is. In March, the former leader of the Liberal Party John Hewson wrote in the Australian Financial Review:

... the Government’s recent decision to stop staff electing a director of the ABC board is a churlish pyrrhic victory for some of the ideologically-based antagonists in the Liberal Party and some of their sympathetic business mates.

John Hewson has it right. He has been freed from the shackles. He has got the ball and chain off, he can say whatever he likes now and he is telling it how it is. It is a churlish victory for the government to get rid of somebody on a board, just because it thinks they may do or say something that is not in the thought processes that this government is on about. John Hewson went on:

It is clearly against the best interest of the institution and the listening and viewing public.

I assume many Liberals in this House agree with their former leader, but will any of them have the courage to stand up and say so? Will any of them have the courage to stand up for ordinary people; will they stand up for workers? I do not think so, because we saw that today and we have seen it in legislation. They will not stand up for anyone except themselves and their big business mates. That is it.

Labor believes that the abolition of the staff elected director’s position will have a significant detrimental impact on the effectiveness of the ABC board and undermine public perceptions of its independence. The government is slowly chipping away at the block, slowly making sure there is no independence left. Everybody there will have some sort of a relationship. There are not too many spots unfilled that contain staff who are not related to somebody specifically in the Liberal Party or who have had some sort of staffer role or something like that.

The staff elected director, as I said before, has a unique insight into the ABC operations. They can play a key role in assisting the board to hold ABC management to account. The truth is that this bill is not about improving the ABC’s corporate governance; it is about fulfilling the wishes of the government. That is what this bill is about. It is just a further attempt by the government to undermine the independence of the ABC.

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