Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Tonight I rise to speak in opposition to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Amendment Bill 2006. Like my colleague, I wish to be up-front in acknowledging that I am also a member of the New South Wales, and specifically the Illawarra branch, Friends of the ABC and that approximately 80 per cent of my scarce viewing and listening time is spent enjoying the excellent programs offered by ABC television and radio.

I joined the Friends of the ABC a number of years ago as I grew concerned by the concerted and, indeed, borderline paranoid attacks on the independence of the ABC by the former Minister Alston. I note that this legacy has been taken up in the other place with gusto, particularly by the newly elected Senator Fierravanti-Wells.

Like the majority of Australians, I believe the ABC in its various broadcast forms provides the most informative and unbiased reporting in Australia on current and world affairs. I also appreciate the range and breadth of the journalistic opinion which is on offer. Unlike some on the other side of the House, I do understand that opinion, when offered, should not misrepresent itself as news. In my experience, the ABC is far more rigorous in making this distinction clear in its programs than is often the case in the commercial media.

I acknowledge that the ABC, like some of the individual journalists and reporters in the commercial field, can give governments—and, indeed, oppositions—a torrid time in pushing and questioning their actions and explanations. They certainly did when Labor was in federal government. We copped it most times. Sometimes we argued with the ABC about it, but we did not undervalue the democratic importance of its role and did not seek to starve or bully it into submission, as has been occurring under this government over the last 10 years.

The minister claims that this legislation is necessary because the ABC staff elected director position is an anomaly in corporate governance. To the contrary, such positions are not at all unusual on many boards that govern other types of organisations such as tertiary and cultural institutions—for example, the University of Wollongong in my own electorate—and health systems. Indeed, some more progressive private enterprises and businesses that value the corporate knowledge and shop floor experience of their own staff also make provision for a staff elected director position. Even multinationals, I understand, such as Mercedes Benz do this. There are certainly extensive examples of boards that are too insular to have protected the organisation they oversight, and there are many cases where this has led to corporate collapses or public scandals. Surely it is only good governance to seek a broader gene pool of talent to draw from, rather than to minimise it and fall into the trap of cloning existing board members. Indeed, the current scandal with AWB shows that boards can only benefit from wider gene pools, particularly one that delivers some independent and critical thinking.

Former staff elected director Quentin Dempster has outlined circumstances in which past staff elected directors have been critical players in identifying problems with board considerations that have resulted in avoiding significant loss or embarrassment. In interview, Mr Dempster referred to the role of the staff elected board director in the creation of the board ordered inquiry into the breaches of the ABC Act and the ABC board editorial policies through ‘backdoor sponsorship’ of television infotainment programs by vested interests. He further outlined the role of staff elected directors acting to protect the ABC’s independence in policy and operational terms in opposing the failed proposals for commercial partnerships with John Fairfax Holdings Pty Ltd and Cox Communications of the United States in subscription or pay television and with Telstra in broadband content with access to all ABC content.

The government argues that a staff elected director carries an inherent conflict of interest between their directorial responsibilities and some form of constituency responsibilities arising from being elected. The government does not provide—and I believe has not successfully provided—an argument about why a director who is elected is more bound to their electors than a director who is appointed is bound to their appointee. All directors are bound by the ABC Act’s clauses covering duties of directors, pecuniary interests and removal, regardless of the method of their elevation to the board. Mr Dempster outlined the case that in the backdoor sponsorship issue the staff elected director’s actions were contrary to any narrow sectional interests of journalists, producers and support staff, as it resulted in infotainment being taken off air and, again in the pay TV case, 100 jobs being lost.

In trying to make the argument for this amendment based on the Uhrig report of 2003, the government is ignoring the fact, as has been identified by other speakers on this side, that the report deals with the types of boards and circumstances that are not identical to the staff elected director of the ABC board nor to the functions of the board. The report by and large referred to taxation regulation and provision of services and failed to make any reference in its 133 pages to the ABC board, its membership or circumstances.

In reality, most government members have risen in this House and in the other place to claim that they really value the ABC and that this amendment is about good corporate governance, not about attacking the ABC. Strangely and almost without exception, they then proceed to attack various presenters, journalists or shows. As an example, I particularly refer to the speech delivered on this bill by Wollongong based Senator Fierravanti-Wells, who listed a string of complaints against the broadcaster in her newly appointed Alston successor role. The senator seems to feel that the ABC should censor the range of views and opinions that can be presented on their news and current affairs coverage and that, if the range of people she identified as inappropriate are allowed to appear, the ABC should act as an alternative voice and debate the issue. This is a profound misunderstanding of the role of effective journalism. Certainly a good journalist should push for an interviewee to be accountable for their views and actions, but this is far from being an alternative voice.

The senator then goes on to tell the ABC what question it should have asked the former ALP leader Mark Latham. Personally I think the media did a good job with a pretty willing participant to dump buckets on the ALP, but this was not enough for the senator. She launched an attack on the ABC journalist for not asking one question which she feels was crucial. If this is giving her so much angst, perhaps she should have considered a career change to journalism rather than to the Senate. But this is a distinction that government members seem incapable of comprehending in this debate.

Those on the other side of the House have no problem with the commercial media running many of the same stories as the ABC, reporting many of the same events, providing air time and columns to the same characters, asking or failing to ask the same questions or using or failing to use particular terms and references—so why the special criticism of the ABC? The answer to this question lies at the heart of this bill. Government members believe the government should own the ABC body and soul. They should be director, editor, producer and reporter. They should be judge and jury of every story. The senator concludes her contribution by claiming that the ABC is actually under threat by ‘the pernicious left-wing influence that permeates far too much of the ABC’s biased and unbalanced coverage’. This bill is certainly about the independence of the ABC. This bill is about the real problems this government has with the very independence that the ABC maintains, despite attempts over the last 10 years to starve it into submission.

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