Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say at the outset how delighted I am to speak on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Amendment Bill 2006. I love the ABC. I love the ABC as the Australian broadcaster, but I do not love all of the ABC. There are elements of the ABC that I do not love. But when I was a schoolteacher I loved having BTN on in the classroom because that was something that the kids really got a lot out of and something that, as a schoolteacher, I saw as fundamentally valuable. That is what the ABC’s function is: to provide great information as a national broadcaster. I will shortly refer to the elements of the ABC that I do not love, and I will explain them in detail.

This bill, as we know, is to amend the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 to remove the position of the staff elected director from the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, or the ABC. As a bit of background, the first staff elected position on the governing body of the ABC was introduced by the Whitlam government without legislation in 1975 and subsequently abolished by the Fraser government. The current position was created by the ABC Act in 1986. The make-up of the board, until this legislation is passed, must include a managing director, a staff elected director and no fewer than five and no more than seven directors. The membership of the ABC board, as at 1 April 2006, is as follows: Mr Donald McDonald AO, the managing director; Mr John Gallagher QC, the deputy; Ms Ramona Koval, who I will come to in much detail later; Dr Ron Brunton; Ms Janet Albrechtsen; Mr Steven Skala; and Mr Murray Green. That makes a total of seven. I will return to those people later.

The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts announced on 24 March this year that the staff elected director’s position on the ABC board would be abolished. There are a number of issues that the Uhrig report goes into. Basically, the staff elected director’s position has become a conflict of interest. For example, the modern corporate principles of governance do not provide arrangements for staff elected members on corporations and boards generally throughout the rest of the corporate world. By way of example, another public broadcaster in Australia, the SBS, does not have a staff elected representative. So let us not get too excited about this position being removed. The SBS functions quite well, thank you very much, without a staff elected director.

The Uhrig report was released on 12 August 2004 and it made a number of recommendations and observations. The review concluded that there was ‘no universally agreed definition of corporate governance’ and suggested the following definition:

Corporate governance encompasses the arrangements by which the power of those in control of the strategy and direction of an entity is both delegated and limited to enhance prospects for the entity’s long-term success, taking into account risk and the environment in which it is operating.

It said a lot more, and time does not permit me to go through all the detail; you can read the Uhrig report. But it did not support representational appointments as per the member opposite; the Uhrig report made that quite clear. It does set out quite a number of obligations of elected board members. It says, for example:

Whether staff representatives make a practice of prosecuting the interests of staff is moot but it is clear that the legal duty of such board members is not to their constituents but to the organisation more generally.

Yet, as we will find out, Ms Ramona Koval considered that the staff that elected her to the board were her constituents. So we already have a conflict of interest. The duties of directors include duties of care and diligence and that they must act in good faith. They have a duty not to misuse their position and a duty not to misuse information, which I will come to in some detail. We know that the Senate committees have examined this issue, and the fact is that Ramona Koval was asked to sign certain ABC protocols and she would not do it.

Let me say at the outset that the ABC board is generally like most other boards of governance, and it is a government appointed board. Let us be fair—there have been appointments from both sides of government. For instance, we know that right back at the beginning Senator Neville Bonner was one of the first appointed members of the ABC board. I do not hear any complaints about Senator Neville Bonner. He obviously carried out his duties. Yet he was a Liberal senator.

Right throughout the history of the appointments to the ABC board there have been appointments by governments of people in whom they have a great deal of faith—for example, on our side of government, we have had Michael Kroger, a well-known member of the Liberal Party, and Ross McLean, the former member for Perth. But, on the other side of the equation, we have to look no further than Mr John Bannon, the former Labor Premier of South Australia—we are talking about political appointments—and Wendy Silver, who I knew well in Perth and who was a good friend of the Burke government. The Reserve Bank and other government instrumentalities have appointments by the government of the day. And when another government comes, of course they appoint alternative people.

I suppose we really could call this the Ramona Koval amendment to the ABC bill, because she has precipitated this. I feel sorry for the other staff members—Tom Molomby, John Cleary, Quentin Dempster, Kirsten Garrett and Ian Henschke—because none of them has really had to be so obviously dragged into the spotlight because of their misuse of their position on the board as has Ramona Koval. And, yes, I do agree with the member opposite: Quentin Dempster is a highly regarded member of the ABC. He is an excellent, quality reporter, and I do not think his independence is questioned. He is in the position of being elected, before this bill comes into place. And he can thank Ramona Koval for the gross leaking and her lack of loyalty to her corporate governance duties, which resulted in this position being abolished. Other members of the ABC staff might also want to thank Ramona Koval for bringing this position into disrepute and having it examined in terms of a conflict of interest, because she is largely the one who has brought it into conflict.

We know that this was brought to a head when Maurice Newman, a board member, abruptly resigned, citing a gross breach of boardroom confidentiality. Mr Maurice Newman is a very credible man—he was also the chair of the Australian Stock Exchange—and he blamed the decision directly on the ABC staff elected director, Ramona Koval. He said that he could not continue as the serious lapse of boardroom confidentiality had the potential to destabilise the corporation and that he had no faith that the accepted governance standards would be observed by the board while they allowed Ramona Koval to continue in that position.

Ms Koval justified the leaking. It was reported in the Australian that she had said that it was her duty to send emails to staff on the deliberations and the decisions taken by the ABC board. She may think that leaking board information for the benefit of sectional interests within the ABC rather than for the benefit of the corporation as a whole was the right thing to do.

Who did she leak this information to? Interestingly—and I will move to some of these other people in a moment—none other than that great left-winger David Marr, who was the ABC’s Media Watch representative for some time. In fact, if there was still an active communist party in this country, I imagine David Marr would be the president, secretary and general manager of the whole shooting match; he is so left wing he is out of kilter. Interestingly, he is still a great friend of the cultural echelons of the ABC—you see him on Insiders regularly. But I will return to Mr Marr shortly.

The question the board may wish to ask Koval is why she thinks she is entitled to send memos to staff about boardroom machinations. Koval admitted to the Australian that since her election to the board she has sent out eight memos. We are not talking about somebody who has been misinterpreted or who has got it wrong. In an article on 26 May 2004, she admitted to the Australian that since her election to the board she has sent out eight memos to the staff, reporting on boardroom meetings. Revealingly, those memos included a preamble that said that her report to staff contained a summary of the representations she had made on behalf of staff and decisions taken by the board. Koval needs to understand whether she is there in the interests of the board or in the interests of her constituents, as she calls them. Obviously reform of the ABC board is needed when you have this situation.

Returning to the culture of the ABC, let me say again that I have always been a great supporter of the ABC. I generally like its news coverage, its educational coverage and its National Geographic type coverage with David Attenborough and all these sorts of things that are fantastic for young people and educators. But the ABC has absolutely left the rails in the current affairs area. We have to look no further than the political links of the broadcasters who are on the ABC today and who have been previously with the ABC.

We do not have to go any further than Kerry O’Brien, who has been the ABC’s 7.30 Report reporter for 10 years. In the electorate, people come to me and say, ‘Why can’t you blokes do something about that Kerry O’Brien? He is just so biased towards the conservative side of government.’ I have seen him interviewed on this, and he said, ‘I don’t care. I’m here. I’m so powerful that nobody is going to address me. I’ll do what I like. If they don’t like it, so what? I’ll go.’

That is fine. He is obviously a man of intelligence and somebody who is quite good at an analytical report. But it is where he slips off into his left wing rhetoric that it gets people. When he interviews the Prime Minister or a minister or member of the coalition, his body language is turbid and angry. Yet when Mr Beazley or someone from the other side is before him, it is almost, ‘Oh, buddy, old pal, how are you? How are we going?’

His history is that he worked as a press secretary for the Labor leader Gough Whitlam and then for the deputy Labor leader Lionel Bowen. He has a bit of a CV on the other side. He is a Labor staffer. How can you say that he is not unbiased? Kerry O’Brien has probably been responsible for the ABC disappointing many people in the public and, I know, our party. We are sick and tired of the way that he continually drives home his ideological hatred for the conservative side of government. Kerry O’Brien basically does a good job, as I said, but he has to get himself out of this left wing bent.

Another strong ABC current reporter—and he seems to be a nice bloke—is Barrie Cassidy. He does the Insiders. I like watching the Insiders. But again he is a former Labor Party staffer. He worked for Bob Hawke as specialist media adviser from 1987 until about August 1991. You cannot get away from your past. You are what you are because of what you have been. These guys are very strong supporters of the other side.

There is a left wing culture in the ABC. They bring their families through the same cultural incantations and inductions to become members of the ABC staff or in broadcasting. This is where we have a bit of a problem with current affairs. They are not balanced. We know that when Richard Alston did an inquiry into this, he found 68 occasions just during the Iraq war where the reporting was quite biased.

I suppose I should mention Maxine McKew. Maxine McKew—even though I am not going to deliberately say that she has been involved in the Australian Labor Party—is married to a former national secretary of the Labor Party, Bob Hogg. In the Latham Diariesthat name that should not be mentioned here—what did Mark Latham say about Maxine McKew? He said that they were going to try to fit her up for the seat of Fowler. I do not know what the current member for Fowler thinks about that. They were going to put her in the seat of Fowler because they wanted to anoint one of their hereditary peers. But Maxine McKew did not want to go and live there. She could not stand the people. She lives in the leafy suburbs by the shore. She did not want to go and live with those grommets over in Fowler. They were not her kind of people. So she declined. There is a fair bit of history.

The funny thing about it is this. At the national level, the ABC carries on with this sort of behaviour. The further away from Canberra you get, the less shrill it is. In Perth, for example, there is no greater political reporter than Peter Kennedy. Peter Kennedy is balanced. He is a gentleman and he does a fantastic job in the ABC. He is very unbiased. As late as today we had the ABC’s Fran Kelly on the Radio National Breakfast program, absolutely getting stuck into the government and this side of politics about customary Aboriginal law and banging on about political correctness.

This is the problem that we have with the ABC. I had the Friends of the ABC in Perth write to me about Iran and Iraq, the hard right lobby groups and the Howard ministers and their other cronies—complaining about Alston’s 68 complaints on the ABC et cetera. I have to tell the Friends of the ABC in Western Australia that I have never seen anybody so embittered as them. They do not represent mainstream opinion in this country.

The member opposite said that the ABC had been denuded of funds. The previous director, Mr Russell Balding, was very pleased with the previous budget because the ABC had received $88.2 million for new initiatives. That is a huge top-up of money. It did not expect anything close to that amount. Can I say that the ABC really needs to focus itself on local talent, on local productions and on local drama. Previously, the ABC was where young actors, drama writers et cetera in this country cut their teeth. The ABC gave them an opportunity to do short dramas, particularly Australian based dramas. To make sure that that does not get overlooked in the current affairs shenanigans that the ABC likes to run, $30 million of this is for local TV content—in other words, local dramas. That has been dedicated, as it should be, to the local talent in this country. It will be great to see how the ABC uses this in its new directions because, ultimately, this is where the future of this country is.

The ABC has a role to play in this country as the national broadcaster, but the fact is that if you cannot run a board because somebody cannot abide by the corporate governance rules then you cannot have them on the board. At the end of the day, Ramona Koval is somebody who has gone outside the boundaries. She would not sign any compact on this. Basically, she said that she is going to do what she can to spill the information on a large corporation like this. As a result, we had to look at reforming the board.

In conclusion, a general proposition of modern Anglo-American governance theory tends not to support the appointment of staff elected representatives to major boards of large corporations. In this case, I strongly support this bill for the direction in which it is going to take the ABC. (Time expired)

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