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

The proposition that the staff elected directors suffer from a conflict of interest is completely without foundation. Section 8 of the ABC Act is quite clear: the obligations of all directors, regardless of how they are elected, are the same, regardless of whether they are elected by the staff or appointed by the government.

I heard an interjection, ‘There’s more coming,’ or ‘You’ll see.’ If the directors’ responsibilities are the same, regardless of whether they are elected by the staff or appointed by the government, you would use the same arguments. If there is some conflict of interest in the view that perhaps a board director elected by the staff would feel obliged to maybe represent the staff, could you not use that exact same principle, in theory, to say, ‘A board director appointed by the government may feel obliged as some sort of duty to represent the government’?  The government cannot have it both ways. If their argument is that a staff elected board director may feel obliged to represent the people who elected them to that position, I would say, ‘Perhaps the people who the government appoint feel obliged in the same manner, as human beings, to have some sort of allegiance to the government.’ I would be very careful if I were a government minister proposing that as the reason this position must be abolished. It is a very interesting theory from the government.

During the Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Legislation Committee inquiry into this bill, the government completely failed to produce any evidence that staff elected directors had themselves failed to comply with their duties to the ABC. They simply complied with all their responsibilities and duties to the ABC. There are a range of provisions under the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act and the ABC Act that are available to discipline directors who breach their duties.

There have been rumours and unsubstantiated innuendo about leaking and there always will be. Governments, particularly this one, are always very panicky that somebody out there might actually find out what they are doing. Everything has to be watertight. They do not want anyone to know what they are doing. It all has to be watertight. You cannot have somebody reporting what is going on. That is what they are really concerned about: the possibility that someone has leaked something. This is a bill that is driven by one thing and one thing alone—extreme ideology in a desire to control the ABC.

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