George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's not surprising we have this MPI, this glorified schoolkids' debate, over the ABC and apparent funding cuts. These guys over there are always dancing with the one that brung-em, and the ABC brung-em. The systemic bias in the ABC has to be noted in this debate. The other day I saw the managing director of the ABC, Michelle Guthrie, apparently complaining to her staff that the freeze in funding was going to 'make it very difficult for the ABC to meet its charter requirements and audience expectations'. I thought that if the organisation or the managing director can't do their job with more than a billion dollars every single year, then either it is time to get a new organisation or time to get a new managing director. A billion dollars and you cannot meet your charter—it is ridiculous!

I, too, used to grow up watching Dr Who and The GoodiesI still do. We can reminisce about all that, but times have changed. You can get that stuff on YouTube, on other free-to-air channels and on DVD. Most people do. As the good member for Fadden said before, the ABC's ratings are going down because we're living in different times. If another organisation were there and they followed their charter they probably wouldn't waste taxpayers' dollars producing some current affair show that aired left-wing bias and bashed up regional Australia at every chance it got, like they do on Four Corners. I could talk about the Four Corners show last year digging into Adani, which presented every green activist masquerading as an independent critic or independent analyst. Or I could talk about the recent story they did on a sugar tax, which was just lining up person after person to attack the sugar industry. Or I could talk about their attacks on the live trade.

There is a consistent pattern here with shows like Four Corners. They often attack the productive end of Australia. They are often attacking regional Australia. We do have regionally based journalists on the ABC who do a very good job. But most of the funding the ABC gets from the government ends up being channelled into Ultimo, into the capital cities, leaving those guys less-resourced. Yes, there was some shift in funding a few years ago under our watch, but there should be more and the ABC should direct it more into the regional areas, principally to make up for the anti-regional bias on their main flagship shows, like Four Corners.

A few years ago the Lewis efficiency study report came out—the ABC's own finance executives were involved in it—which talked about where savings could be achieved in the ABC. The report suggested many different things: a lot of inefficiencies in their back office functions; that they could rationalise technology; remove duplication; standardise solutions; retire old assets; centralise procurement; reduce managers and administrative support staff; outsource the payroll function; and work in conjunction with other taxpayer funded broadcasters such as the SBS. Yet, in 2014 we saw the ludicrous situation where the ABC went and outbid its fellow national broadcaster—a taxpayer-funded organisation, the SBS—for the Asian Cup football tournament. Why would you do that? That is just nonsense! It is the sort of stuff we see from the ABC. The ABC threw $1.5 million of taxpayers' money down the drain with that. There's a litany of these sort of sins that the ABC has committed. Why would they waste taxpayers' money on establishing Fact Check when we have PolitiFact—an independent private one that is doing it. Were they worried that they were somehow not going to be skewed left enough for them?

What about the fortune they spent on Vote Compass, which can only be seen as this manual on how to cast your vote? It's ridiculous stuff. Why do we have this comedy channel that's really just this left-wing panel masquerading as humour, which is as funny as a 'Life. Be In It' T-shirt at a funeral? This is the sort of stuff we get. Double J: a channel for people to listen to music—the same sort of rubbish that we didn't listen to 10 years ago. This is the stuff they spend their money on, and they can't find an efficiency dividend? I'm sorry, the ABC can find some savings and they can do it without affecting regional Australia. They should do it without affecting regional Australia and they should clean up their problem of bias as well.

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