If anything became painfully obvious over 2021, it is that living in Western Sydney is like living in a regional centre. The physical newspapers ceased their physical print runs in 2019 and while the big media companies pretend to keep the mastheads alive online, those mastheads are hidden behind paywalls and the actual news stories which pretend to sit exclusively behind them, do not.
It used to be that the local newspapers, in return for publishing an unruly amount of real estate adverts (because that's all that the Australian economy appears to have been reduced to these days), would send out reporters to small sports days, people pointing at minor complaints in the community, and to council meetings. None of those things happen any more. Whatever news about the local area that we get, has to come from outside; which means that in effect, Blacktown is not a lot different to Bega and Mt Druitt is not a lot different to Mt Isa.
That meant that during the council elections late last year, I bet that only a very minor percentage of voters did any kind of due diligence at all and bothered to find out who any of the candidates were; much less look into their backgrounds. When it comes to state and federal politics, people might have an idea of who the Prime Minister, Treasurer, Premier and State Health Minister are, but beyond that they won't have much of an idea. As it stands though, people made decisions about who was going to be responsible for local government; more than likely without a clue who they were voting for. In a media environment where you have no idea who anybody is, how are you supposed to make informed choices about democracy?
In Sydney, there is a semi-famed imaginary line called the "Red Rooster Line"; which is defined by the existence of a Red Rooster restaurant in an area. To the left of the line is where all of the Red Roosters are and to the right, is where all of the Charcoal Charlie's are. I have no idea if the two chains are owned by the same group or not but it is telling that they do not encroach upon each other's patch.
I bet that if you were to take a survey of where all of the journalists in Sydney lived, then I would be surprised if any of them lived to the west of the Red Rooster line. Furthermore, I doubt whether any of the journalists have been west of the Red Rooster line for reasons other than reporting on sport, accident, or crime.
Imagine then, my abject horror when on the evening of the 23rd of Nov, Senator McGrath of Queensland said in the Senate:
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation needs to be reformed to be saved from itself. The ABC is a $1.1 billion organisation funded by the taxpayer, yet the ABC, along the track, has wandered off course, leaving us in the unfortunate position we are in now, wondering what we should do with the ABC. We saw that today in the Senate where Labor and the Greens combined to stop an inquiry into something as innocent as the complaints process within the ABC. What we're seeing is a grotesque, left-wing, back-scratching orgy of flatulent arrogance from the ABC and those on the Left. This ABC who sneers at us is led by an arrogant chair who sees the ABC as a country apart from Australia. And that is quite sad.
The inevitable result of decades of free rein, of grossly excessive budgets and diminished accountability is that we've ended up with an inner-city hive of woke workers, hiring woke friends to do their woke work in their quest to wokify the world. But in conjunction with the first-night crowd, the chair of the ABC and her fellow first-nighters are at the opera, chinking their champagne glasses, sneering at middle Australia and at those who believe in a pluralistic, diverse media market. It is time for there to be reform of the ABC. It is time for the recruitment process to be opened up. It is time for their inner-city headquarters to be sold and for their staff to be shifted to regional Australia. It is time for there to be a proper review of the charter of the ABC.
But it needs to go beyond that. I have written to the minister for communications calling for an inquiry into the future of public broadcasting in this country. We have the ABC model, which is essentially an old wireless trundling along, yet we have a pluralistic, diverse media market. And the ABC, this taxpayer funded monolith, is not fit for purpose in the 21st century. So we need an inquiry into the future of public broadcasting in Australia. We need to determine whether there is a need to fund triple J and all these different TV and radio stations. I will say, as someone who lives and spends a lot of their time in regional Queensland, there is a place for a taxpayer funded broadcaster in regional Queensland and regional Australia because there is not a diverse media market there. But in terms of the rest of our country, it is time for a royal commission into the future of public broadcasting in this country. It is time that we stood up for the taxpayers of this country who are not getting value for money, and it is time that the board of the ABC—that most arrogant organisation—realise they are losing middle Australia because we have choice. There is so much diversity in our media market and it would be sad if the ABC were to fail and fall over. I want the ABC to be saved. I want it to be reformed so it can be saved from itself.
- Senator McGrath, Senate, 23rd Nov 2021
The one thing that Senator McGrath is correct about is that the ABC is somewhat city centric. However, his suggestion that the ABC sells its studios in the cities, is monumentally stupid and deliberately so.
The ABC, as indeed media generally in Australia, is generally based towards the centre of major cities and that's because that's where the majority of news happens. All of the parliaments in Australia are in the capital cities, most of the major sporting venues are within the capital cities, all of the stock/business exchanges are in the capital cities, and the transport networks which ferry people forth and back are primarily designed to connect the capital cities. Now had Senator McGrath spoken of plans to decentralise government generally, then maybe there might be some merit in his proposition but as he is nothing more than a slimy ideological parasite with no plans beyond destroying public assets, then his suggestion needs to be firmly thrown into a wastepaper basket and set on fire.
There is more than a hint of irony that in calling for the privatisation of the ABC and SBS, the shutting down of Triple J and the abandonment of ABC News Radio, that I heard his malevolent bleating on ABC News Radio (630AM in Sydney). It has been comprehensively proven that private media organisations simply will not cover news if they do not see any profit in doing so. This is the reason why the entirety of what once was both the Fairfax and News Corp local newspaper networks, is now exactly nil. News Corporation even had $30m of public monies thrown at them to improve local news collection; they promptly retrenched virtually the entire workforce of what was 121 local news papers and now there are none.
I fail to see in what realm Senator McGrath thinks that privatising the ABC is going to lead to either an expansion of local news services, or increased training of media staff, or the apprenticeship of new media staff, or more local content, when thus far all private media companies have demonstrated that they refuse to any of those things. Private media groups are essentially parasitic when it comes to the skills base of the media industry.
Having said that, there is one grain of truth which is wrapped in this many layered pass-the-parcel of lies. In addition to the fact that no major news organisation apart from the ABC really bothers to gather, collect, report, and analyse the news outside of the capital cities, they also don't really employ anyone from outside of the richer areas of those capital cities either. I bet that if you were to do a survey of every presenter and column writer across tv (both FTA and Pay), radio, and print media, in my fair city of Sydney, that less than 5% of them would live west of the Red Rooster Line. That also goes for News Corp, for whom Senator McGrath has gone in to bat for.
During the height of the pandemic lockdowns in Sydney in mid-2021, although media companies might send camera crews into the west to take reconnaissance footage, they would retreat back to the east. Now that the most visible threat of the pandemic has past, the media can get back to quietly ignoring us except if there's something on fire, someone has been murdered, or there is a sporting event. There are no other narratives which exist out here according to the media.
I think that it takes a certain kind of malevolent denial to imagine that closing the ABC and SBS is going to lead to any kind of expanded regional reach of the media. Senator McGrath of Queensland lives, in Queensland. I know that sounds obvious to you and me and even Blind Freddy knows that, but Senator McGrath of Queensland doesn't appear to know that he lives in Queensland. Queensland is basically a three newspaper state; with only one daily newspaper in Brisbane (the Courier-Mail) and has even less editorial independence than where I live in Sydney. The Courier-Mail carries stories from newsdesks in Sydney and Melbourne and only really makes a concession to the fact that it is in Queensland. 4BC buys in national radio feeds from 2GB in Sydney on a regular basis.
The ABC on the other hand has a network of local radio stations which is the biggest in the world. Most nations are too physically small to warrant the need to set of local offices and so that only means that the United States, Russia and China are large enough to even need this kind of state infrastructure.
NPR (National Public Radio) in the United States is not really a network but a lot of semi-affiliated stations that buy in NPR programming from each other, but mostly from Washington, Chicago and Boston of all places. From what I can determine of Russian radio, there is one national broadcaster and everyone else is left to fend for themselves. China as far as I know has a few provincial state-run radio stations but nothing as vast as ABC Local Radio.
Senator McGrath I assume would have the ABC Local Stations broken up and sold off but if Fairfax and News Corp have proven with their mostly ex-newspaper networks, there simply wouldn't be a buyer who could be bothered to but them. I can say categorically that no private company would dare but the ABC as a working concern for the simple reason that the amount of capital needed to buy all of it is massive and unless you are someone like Amazon, Wal-Mart, or Apple, you do not have that kind of capital. Even if you did, the existing players in the TV and radio market would be horrified to have someone with that much capital and presumed power, simply entering their space. Seven West, Nine Ent Co, Ten, Nova Radio, and even News Corp itself would defend the space that they've eked out for themselves because while they pay lip service to the idea of competition, they're really really anti-competitive.
Furthermore, I do not see by what mechanism that the proceedings in parliament would be reported upon or analysed without the ABC being the front line broadcaster. There is no profit in broadcasting parliament and while it can be said that that could be streamed out of the parliament's own websites, Senator McGrath's own demonstration of voting against any kind of Federal ICAC indicates to me that he would prefer that those proceedings simply never be reported at all.
More generally I have the question of who exactly has paid off Senator McGrath. If nobody, then this idea to privatise the ABC and SBS has come out of his own head and therefore I have to consider him to be an economic terrorist who intends to destroy the assets of the Commonwealth. If he is being paid off by someone else, then we have malevolent actors who also mean to destroy the assets of the Commonwealth and as their agent, I think that should render him disqualified to hold the office of Senator under the vagrancies of Section 44 of the Constitution.
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