Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Communications and the Arts (Senator Fifield) to a question without notice asked by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (Senator Wong) today relating to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

For those who were here—perhaps you were at question time; perhaps you weren't—Senator Wong asked a series of questions about what's actually going on with the ABC. Sadly, the minister stood up and attempted to give an answer to the senator's questions about political interference with our ABC—it belongs to all of us as Australians, not to the Liberal Party. The Australian Labor Party and many people across this nation who care about the ABC think the minister should not be in that seat anymore; he shouldn't be in that chair. He's not fit to be a minister, based on what's been reported about what he did around the ABC.

Let me take you through a little bit of why we think this minister should resign and why the current Prime Minister, Prime Minister Morrison, should ask him to resign, if the minister won't walk away himself. There was a meeting, which has been reported on the public record now, between Mr Turnbull, Minister Fifield and Justin Milne, who was the chairman of the ABC. We know Mr Milne was chosen by this government. He was recommended to the Governor-General by Minister Fifield himself, and it's on the public record that they said he would do the job well because he was close to the Prime Minister and had a good relationship with the government, and they were very happy about putting him in. Clearly they thought he was quite a capable person. He was able to understand what they were saying. He was able to implement his role as chairman. That's what they said: they said he was the right man for the job.

When things started to get reported in the paper independently of this government—a report by Emma Alberici in particular, and another one by another journalist, Mr Probyn—this government got pretty upset. Now, they've had a good go at the ABC on the way through. Since 2014 they've taken $360 million out of the ABC, when they said there would be no cuts to the ABC. They've cut to such a level that 800 jobs have been lost at our ABC. They think it was okay: 'no cuts to the ABC', and that's what they did. We've seen a drop in Australian content and services. That was under Mr Abbott, but we've got Mr Turnbull in between, right up to his eyeballs in what I'm talking about, and now we've got Mr Morrison, on watch when they cut $83.7 million this year. So this is what's going on with the ABC: it's constantly under attack, under review—over and over again—and the subject of three pieces of legislation to change its charter while this government has been in charge.

Mr Milne got a call from these two—from Prime Minister Turnbull and from this minister—and they basically went hell for leather with Mr Milne, saying to him, 'This is wrong, and you have to get rid of these journalists.' They're standing up in this place and saying: 'No, we didn't say that. Yes, we did have a meeting with Mr Milne'—they accept that. But they continue to deny the nature of their conversation with Mr Milne. But Milne, the smart guy that they put in, knows what was going on and what they said. They basically said to him, 'Go back, sack Alberici and get rid of Probyn.' We know this because Ms Guthrie, who was the CEO of the ABC, was sacked and, in her defence, gave documentation to the board of the ABC. That documentation says the most outrageous things about her conversation with Mr Milne, so we have on the public record in reports that have been published in The Australian and in The Conversation, by Michelle Grattan, that this minister and the Prime Minister so intimidated Mr Milne that he went back and had a half-hour conversation with Ms Guthrie and said that she should sack Emma Alberici and she should get rid of Mr Probyn as well—that she should kill him off. They continue to deny this, but these outrageous claims have been put on the record for the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who are supposed to be standing up for us.

I put to you that the minister's answers were inadequate. He should resign. He is not fit to hold this role. He has intimidated the ABC, he has taken away from the independence of our great institution—our ABC, not the Liberal Party's ABC—and he is severely in breach of the ministerial standards to which he should be held accountable.