New ABC managing director - primary responsibility? To "augment" the Australian identity.
Monday, 21 September 2015
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.
- It spells out what the ABC thinks its primary purpose is - to augment Australia's identity and culture and reinforce that augmented ABC view.
- 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.
- "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.