Still broadcasting without fear or favour

This scheme might well have gone ahead, for good or ill, but for strenuous lobbying against it by the staff-elected director on the board, Kirsten Garrett. The government has lately used its newly gained majority in the Senate to remove that board member. It has also appointed three new members, Ron Brunton, Janet Albrechtsen and Keith Windschuttle, who had been severe public critics of ABC programming policy.

Mr Windschuttle’s appointment seems to me the most provocative ever made. Last year he said in a lecture that the ABC should be commercialised in order to break its Marxist culture. The Minister, as Errol Simper observes in The Australian, has “all but publicly invited the ABC board to consider advertising”. Recent appointments may well have yielded a majority on the board favourable to that innovation.

From the beginning of 2007 the board will have a new Chairman. Donald McDonald, who has held that position for ten years, and has done at least as much as any of his predecessors, I believe, to protect the traditional character of the ABC.

What if the new Chairman (to be chosen by the end of the year) were to ask the government on behalf of the board to clear the way for advertising by amending the Act? So long as no Coalition Senator defected, that could be done as briskly as the abolition of the staff-elected directorship. The new managing director would then be managing an organisation rather different from the one that has been nurturing our culture for the past 74 years.