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The Kevin Andrews ADF legacy

New ABC managing director - primary responsibility? To "augment" the Australian identity.

The ABC job ad for its new Managing Director describes the role's primary responsibility:    

"to ensure the ABC's success in augmenting..........Australia's culture and identity".

Augment,  verb  -  to make larger; enlarge in size, number, or extent; increase.

The ABC's Charter sets out what its Managing Director must do.   Changing or augmenting our identity isn't a part of it.

The framework for the ABC setting out what it should do with $1BN+ in tapayer funds each year is below, from the ABC's website.

The ABC Act 1983

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act (1983) (ABC Act) is the instrument which established the ABC.

The ABC Charter

The ABC Charter is contained in s6 of the ABC Act. It outlines the ongoing functions and responsibilities of the ABC.

 

Australia's people through our Parliament decided the ABC's charter - it's not up to the ABC to amend it, that's for the Parliament.    The limits set out in the Charter are important,  it is the law, not a guide.

This is the relevant line in the Charter describing the ABC's fundamental role:

......broadcasting programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community 

In other words, the ABC's a broadcaster of programs that help Australians to get a sense of ourselves, of our identity, of who we are - there's nothing about a helpful ABC augmenting that identity with add-ons that suit the ABC.

The job ad for the ABC's new managing director tells us three things.  

  1. It spells out what the ABC thinks its primary purpose is - to augment Australia's identity and culture and reinforce that augmented ABC view. 
  2. It shows the ABC's disregard for its Charter, the law.   The Charter requires the ABC to "contribute to (our) sense of (our) Australian identity (i.e. to celebrate and promote our identity as it is) and, like a mirror, to reflect our culture, with its diversity, as it is, not as augmented by the ABC's social engineers There are few more important occasions to quote the Charter than in briefing an incoming managing director.  
  3. "Augmenting" our identity explains the ABC's focus on reinforcing fringe Left/Green opinions, on niche channels like Twitter and on demeaning and ridiculing conservative opinions as if traditional views were illegitimate within current Australian orthodoxy.

 

If the people wanted a government agency to decide how to augment our identity - I'm sure we'd have one.   But that's not what we want in an ABC, we set it up to reflect, to promote and to reinforce our sense of our identity.  
 
Put simply, we have an ABC to reflect our culture and our diversity as we the people create and evolve it.  The ABC's role is to contribute to our sense of our  identity - not to decide what our identity should become.
 
We can argue the toss about the nature of our culture as it evolves.  But we can't argue about what's in the legislation.   The ABC shouldn't invent a fictional charter to suit itself, but the ABC doesn't see it that way.   It's been getting away with "augmenting" our identity, with adding its own "enlargements, additions and extensions" for years.
 
If the ABC genuinely reflected the breadth of our diversity, with appropriate weighting, there could be no complaint about it doing its job.   But it doesn't.  The ABC routinely rejects and ridicules conservative Australian traits we've traditionally valued - and which most Australians seem to hold dear now.    It reflects its own view of the Australia it imagines - created by its own in-house leftist culture.  
 
A few dozen ABC managers shouldn't be funded  to augment or change Australia's identity.   That job's been taken - by 24 million Australians and their Australian forebears.   We can argue what that identity is - but we can't argue the fact the ABC must operate within its Charter.  
 
That's the law.
 
 
 

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