One Nation says the ABC costs too much and too few Australians watch it. But Pauline Hanson has a long and difficult history with the national broadcaster, a well-developed dislike of difficult questions and, at times, a remarkably thin political skin. So, is this really about taxpayers and ratings — or is it about the journalism?
I have been critical of the ABC. I don’t think Insiders has been as good since Barrie Cassidy left. I am sorry for the demise of Q+A, and I lament the loss of journalists of the calibre of Quentin Dempster and Kerry O’Brien. I suspect most Australians who regularly watch, listen to or read the ABC have been critical of it at some point too.
Sometimes I think its journalists get things wrong. Sometimes I think particular interviews are unfair. Sometimes I watch 7.30 and find myself arguing with the television. And, like everyone else, I have ABC programs I wouldn’t watch if you paid me. That’s the thing about the ABC: you can value it enormously without believing it is beyond criticism.
But there is an enormous difference between criticising the ABC and proposing to dismantle it, and Pauline Hanson has crossed that line.
This isn’t simply an off-the-cuff response to the ABC’s current industrial dispute. Hanson had already put the national broadcaster on notice in her National Press Club address in June, proposing that the ABC become a subscription service outside regional areas and accusing it of political bias. With ABC employees taking industrial action over pay, conditions and the use of artificial intelligence, she doubled down.
Hanson told Sky News there was an “easy answer”: defund the ABC. She would retain regional radio because, she says, regional broadcasters “do a great job”, but as for the rest: “shut ’em down and make them subscription only.”
This is now One Nation policy. Importantly, it wasn’t dreamed up in response to a 24-hour strike. Hanson had already put the idea before the country. The strike simply provided another opportunity to tell us what she intends to do.
That should receive considerably more attention than another colourful Pauline Hanson soundbite, because One Nation is asking Australians to take it seriously as a political force. Its policies therefore deserve to be taken seriously too. And this one troubles me.
The first problem is Hanson’s justification. She says the ABC has “lost its ratings” and isn’t getting many people watching it. There is just one slight difficulty with that argument: the numbers.
Recent ABC figures report its screen content reaching 12.3 million Australians each week, while ABC iview reaches 3.8 million weekly. You can argue about individual programs, demographics and whether taxpayers receive sufficient value for money. Those are legitimate discussions. But suggesting hardly anybody uses the ABC simply isn’t a serious description of reality.
More importantly, public broadcasting isn’t supposed to operate according to the same test as commercial television. If ratings were the sole measure of public value, we wouldn’t need a public broadcaster in the first place. Commercial networks are perfectly capable of chasing the largest possible audience and selling advertising around it.
The point of the ABC is that it can do things the market may not. It can provide children’s programming without trying to sell children something every few minutes. It can commission Australian drama, comedy and documentaries. It can cover elections, Parliament, science, education, the arts and international affairs. It can maintain journalists and services in places where the commercial return may not justify doing so.
Then there is something even more fundamental: the ABC provides information without first asking for your credit card.
Turning the national broadcaster into a subscription service changes its very purpose. News and public-interest broadcasting cease to be something available to Australians as citizens and become another product available to those willing and able to pay.
We already live in an information environment increasingly divided by paywalls, algorithms and social-media bubbles. Reliable journalism costs money to produce, and the commercial media organisations that produce good journalism deserve support too. But surely there remains a place for at least one major national institution whose primary obligation is not to advertisers, subscribers, shareholders or a wealthy proprietor.
And this brings me back to the question in the heading: why does Pauline Hanson want to defund the ABC?
She tells us it is about cost and ratings. Perhaps it is. But her history with the ABC makes the question worth asking.
In 2017, Hanson announced that she had “had a gutful of the media” and would boycott the ABC following critical coverage of One Nation, including a Four Corners investigation. Her battles with the national broadcaster go back even further than that. Now she wants to remove most of its public funding.
There was also a revealing little exchange when she restated her policy. Sky News host Chris Kenny observed that the ABC had “attacked” Hanson “for 30 years”. Her response? “I know.”
And this isn’t simply ancient history between Hanson and the ABC. In recent months One Nation has excluded ABC journalists from events and press conferences. At a Perth event in June, the ABC was not allowed inside. Hanson has defended her refusal to deal with journalists whose reporting she considers unfair.
Then there was her appearance at the National Press Club in June. Guardian journalist Sarah Martin asked Hanson about the employment of her daughter by One Nation. Rather than simply answering the question, Hanson called Martin a “trashy journalist” and told her not to approach her for future interviews. One Nation has also excluded, or threatened to exclude, journalists and media organisations whose coverage it regards as unfair.
There is an irony in all this. Pauline Hanson has built much of her political persona around being someone who “speaks her mind” and “tells it like it is”. Fair enough. But telling it like it is seems to be considerably easier when nobody has the temerity to question what you have just told them.
Surely speaking your mind is only half the democratic bargain. The other half is allowing journalists, and the rest of us, to question it, challenge it and occasionally tell you that you might be wrong. You don’t get to claim the mantle of fearless straight-talker while demanding that the people asking uncomfortable questions leave the room.
And that is where a pattern starts to become troubling: criticise the journalist, exclude the journalist, accuse the media organisation of bias – and now, in the case of the ABC, propose removing the public funding that allows it to operate.
None of that proves why Hanson wants to defund the ABC, and we shouldn’t pretend that it does. But it certainly makes the question considerably more important.
Difficult questions are rather important in a democracy. Politicians are entitled to complain about journalists, and journalists themselves should be scrutinised. The ABC should be held accountable for accuracy, impartiality and the expenditure of public money. But politicians also need to understand something equally important: a media organisation asking questions you don’t like is not, by itself, evidence that the media organisation should cease to exist.
Imagine applying that principle more broadly. A government dislikes reporting by a newspaper, so it looks for ways to financially cripple it. A politician objects to an investigation, so the organisation responsible should be shut down. A party believes journalists are biased against it, so those journalists should have to “reapply for their jobs”. We would recognise immediately how dangerous that principle could become.
And there is a wonderful contradiction buried inside Hanson’s proposal. She wants to preserve ABC regional radio because it “does a great job”. On that point, Pauline and I agree. Regional ABC radio does an extraordinarily important job.
But where does she imagine that regional service comes from? It is part of the same national public broadcaster she proposes to gut. Regional services don’t exist in some magical administrative bubble completely detached from the journalists, technology, infrastructure and national newsgathering operation of the ABC.
Anyone who has lived through bushfires, floods or other emergencies in regional Australia understands that the value of public broadcasting cannot always be measured by ratings. Sometimes its value is measured by whether somebody receives accurate information when they desperately need it.
There is another contradiction in saying the ABC should become subscription-only while regional radio should remain free. Why should a person in Tamworth be entitled to publicly funded ABC radio but have to pull out a credit card to watch 7.30, Australian Story, Four Corners or ABC News? And what happens to Australians who cannot afford another subscription?
This is the problem with treating public broadcasting as simply another streaming service. The ABC isn’t Netflix or Stan. It isn’t there solely to produce programs sufficiently popular that people will pay a monthly subscription to watch them. It is a public institution.
That doesn’t make it perfect. It doesn’t make every program worthwhile. It doesn’t make every journalist impartial or every editorial decision correct. And it certainly doesn’t mean Australians should write it a blank cheque.
We should debate the ABC. We should argue about its funding. We should demand impartiality. We should complain when journalists get things wrong. We should question executives about salaries, management structures and priorities. ABC journalists themselves should never fall into the trap of believing that being part of a public broadcaster places them above criticism.
But when a politician with a long history of hostility towards a broadcaster proposes defunding it, we are entitled to ask whether this is really media reform. It can start to look uncomfortably like settling a score.
And that is what troubles me most. One Nation is no longer simply a protest vote sitting somewhere on the margins of Australian politics. It wants Australians to regard it as capable of exercising serious political power. Fine. Then we should examine its policies with the seriousness it is asking for.
When the leader of a political party proposes effectively dismantling Australia’s national broadcaster – an institution that reaches millions of Australians, tells Australian stories, provides regional and emergency broadcasting and maintains journalism that Australians can access regardless of their capacity to pay – we should ask considerably more than whether Pauline Hanson likes the ABC.
We should ask why she wants to defund it. Is it really about $1.2 billion? Is it really about ratings? Or does three decades of being questioned, criticised and investigated by ABC journalists have something to do with it?
I can’t answer that question for Pauline Hanson. But given that she is asking Australians to give One Nation considerably more political power, I think we are entitled to ask it.
And perhaps we should look across the Pacific before dismissing all this as just another Pauline Hanson outburst. The comparison should not be overstated, but in the United States we have watched Donald Trump’s hostility towards media organisations he regards as biased or hostile move beyond angry words. His administration has targeted public broadcasting funding, and Trump has repeatedly called for regulators to act against broadcasters whose coverage he dislikes.
Whatever your view of Trump or the American media, there is a lesson there worth remembering. Political attacks on the media look rather different once the politician making them has the power of government behind them.
Politicians having thin skins is nothing new. Politicians complaining about journalists is nothing new either, and journalists should never be immune from criticism. But when a politician’s response to journalism she doesn’t like is to exclude journalists from events and propose removing the funding that allows a public broadcaster to exist, we should pay attention.
We have seen elsewhere where that road can lead.
I would rather Australia didn’t start walking down it.
Denise McHugh is an experienced educator in Tamworth. She is Chair of the NSW ALP Education and Skills Committee and Deputy President of the Independent Education Union (IEU).
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