Real satire is a far cry from the ABC’s vile broadcast

Let’s begin with brilliant satire and then get to the crapola that is our ABC. Or should we say “their ABC”.

Rod Liddle was the kind of political satirist who enraged you, made you laugh and made you think even more. I didn’t read everything the British provocateur wrote or hear everything he said during a long and colourful career that spanned print journalism and radio. What I have read convinces me that Liddle sits comfortably in the pantheon of great modern-day maverick satirists.

Liddle died this week, aged 66. A long obituary in The Times summed him up in these few sentences: “Liddle’s detractors variously labelled him a bigot, racist, misogynist, homophobic attention-seeker. If no one liked the Millwall-supporting Liddle, he didn’t care. But plenty of people did like him and defended his function as a professional provocateur who pushed boundaries of taste in the name of satire, entertainment and provoking debate in the best traditions – from Jonathan Swift to Auberon Waugh.”

His former editor Fraser Nelson wrote about Liddle and his skill at penning a “cocaine intro”: “one sentence and you were hooked. It might make you laugh, gawp or wonder whether this time he really was about to go too far. Usually all three. But his trail always led to a subtle, serious and original argument – one nobody else had thought, or would think, to make or dare to do so. The result was the greatest satirical writing of our times.”

Liddle abhorred groupthink. He was a brilliantly controversial equal opportunity offence-making journalist. When he took the piss out of ideas, people, places and movements, his aim was deliciously accurate. Even if you didn’t agree that Welsh nationalists were “miserable, seaweed-munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill-tribes”, you knew his satirical writings had a point. Not just to make you laugh but to make you think. He could be rude to individuals, but never pointlessly. Not that I saw, anyway.

It’s demeaning to Liddle to mention his work in the same breath as an unknown wannabe comedian whose claim to satire is a foul fantasy that aired on the ABC a few weeks ago about sodomising Gina Rinehart with a stick.

Let’s repeat what this woman, Kate McGuinness, said and what the ABC aired as part of its documentary show Race Around the World on July 12: “when the revolution comes, will you hide under your bed or will you know exactly how to shove a stick right up Gina Rinehart’s butthole, stirring it round, mixing her guts up nice and smooth, making her into one big sausage roll, to make something outta nothing”.

This was not satire. It was gratuitous and vile public abuse of an Australian woman aired on a taxpayer-funded platform. Would the same content be aired by ABC honchos if the fantasy involved sodomising Foreign Minister Penny Wong? Or Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young? Or Governor-General Sam Mostyn? Or some other high-profile Australian woman, say eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant? Or Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody?

Every new chairman promises change at the taxpayer-funded ABC. Every new managing director assures us the ABC is Our ABC. And the same old biased behemoth drains the public purse to the tune of more than $1bn a year so it can do things like air content about impaling Rinehart’s backside. As Rinehart pointed out in a statement, this was not unscripted live comment. “It passed through production, editorial and broadcast processes,” her spokesman said.

Just as bad as the original judgment call by ABC producers and editors to air this content was the judgment call by those much higher up the ABC hierarchy after Rinehart’s company, Hancock Prospecting, asked for an apology from the ABC.

No apology came from ABC chairman Kim Williams or ABC managing director Hugh Marks. The board sat in silence, too. Until Thursday afternoon, 25 days after the clip aired, when the ABC finally caved in to public pressure.

What took them so long?

Out in the public domain, plenty of people knew immediately the difference between right and wrong. Government and Coalition ministers slammed the ABC.

Health Minister Mark Butler called the content “revolting”. “It’s not the sort of thing I think we should see on TV, whether it’s News24, a commercial television station or our public broadcaster, frankly,” Butler said.

“You don’t treat any Australian like that. You don’t especially treat an Australian woman like that,” opposition foreign affairs spokesman Ted O’Brien said.

Business leaders and sporting figures were quick to condemn the airing of this content, too. McGuinness issued an apology – weirdly, via the ABC – claiming her attempts at satire had misfired among some. “I apologise to anyone I’ve offended,” she said, after the ABC referred the matter to an independent ombudsman.

What was plain as day to everyone else was, until this week, beyond the wit of the two men in charge of the country’s public broadcaster. Tone-deaf and arrogant, the ABC’s most senior leaders left it to an ABC spokesman to say: “The ABC won’t be commenting further while the (ombudsman’s) review is in progress.”

Hiding behind a process was a profound error of leadership. Immediately after the first error of judgment in airing the content, the ABC should have apologised to Rinehart – and to taxpayers.

Just because something is legal, or even inside the ABC’s notoriously flexible editorial policies, does not make it the morally right thing to do. The power to do or not do something is both seductive and corruptive. It can lead good people to stray from the decent thing to do. That’s what appears to have happened here. Only when the public condemnation continued did the ABC fall on its sword.

Airing indefensible slurs against Rinehart echoes what happened to my colleague Chris Kenny. In September 2014, the ABC aired a foul skit depicting Kenny as having sex with a dog. Before the clip aired, Kenny had publicly raised questions about funding for the public broadcaster.

Once again, this was not off-the-cuff content. It was scripted, produced and aired under the noses of ABC producers and editors. Kenny demanded an apology. The ABC refused.

If the public broadcaster had apologised, it would have been the end of the matter. Instead, those running the ABC at the time – managing director Mark Scott and ABC chairman Jim Spigelman – allowed executives to defend the program. It was a cop-out when leadership was called for.

Kenny began defamation proceedings. Using taxpayer money, the ABC started to defend the lawsuit. “I was victorious in my battle with the ABC, winning an on-air apology and financial settlement, because of public opinion,” Kenny told me this week.

“A key turning point came when 2GB’s Ben Fordham asked then prime minister Tony Abbott whether he was happy for taxpayers’ money to be spent on legal fees defending the ABC’s right to call me a ‘dog-f..ker’. Needless to say, Abbott wasn’t, and nor was the public.”

It took seven months for Scott to apologise. In April 2015, he issued a statement saying: “The ABC apologises to Mr Kenny for the harm and hurt occasioned by the broadcast.” Scott said the content depicting Kenny as a dog-f..ker was “tasteless and undergraduate” and should not have been broadcast. You don’t say. And here we are again, the ABC acting only after the public expressed disgust.

The ABC is a recidivist offender when it comes to making poor decisions with our money. ABC executives decided to dip into the broadcaster’s deep pockets – filled with our hard-earned money – after ABC journalist Louise Milligan tweeted a false and unjustified slur against federal Liberal politician Andrew Laming.

Laming threatened to sue Milligan for defamation. The ABC journalist had posted the slur on her personal social media account. The ABC said “particular and exceptional circumstances” warranted using taxpayers dollars to pay Milligan’s legal costs to settle the matter. We, the poor schmuck funders of the ABC, have never been told the total cost of that mess.

Just months later, the ABC used taxpayer dollars once again to pay mediation costs in a defamation case launched and then discontinued by former Liberal attorney-general Christian Porter.

The pattern is unmistakeable. Conservatives are targeted in appalling ways that progressives would never be. The ABC digs in. Then uses taxpayer money to scurry away.

At least Williams and Marks apologised to Rinehart before this ended up in a courtroom where our money might again have been used to defend the indefensible.

Just as the Australian Communications and Media Authority found in Kenny’s favour in June 2014, even after the ABC finally apologised to him, the media watchdog just might do the right thing here for the obvious reason that the ABC’s content about Rinehart was gross and gratuituously offensive.

Journalists at the ABC should have spoken up loudly and pre-emptively about content aired by their employer that mused about causing violence to Rinehart. Imagine the uproar at the ABC if a News Corp publication ran a piece suggesting, in a poor attempt at humour, that ABC journalist Patricia Karvelas be impaled by a stick and stirred around to “to make something outta nothing”, to quote McGuinness. To her credit, Leigh Sales labelled the content “nasty”.

Left-leaning journalists outside the ABC should have been brave enough to speak up, too. But they weren’t. Some may want a job at the media organisation that has deep pockets filled with our money. I wouldn’t take a job from the ABC if they begged me.

Alas, I’m safe saying this because they would never offer a conservative like me a job. The only gig I got was a spot on the ABC board, appointed by former prime minister John Howard, where for five years I saw first-hand how entrenched the culture of bias and arrogance is at this organisation. I liken the experience to going into ABC offices and hitting my head against a wall for six or seven hours, emerging each month concussed by their intransigence.

It didn’t matter what board members said, what they queried, how many times they asked that the ABC charter be adhered to. The inmates ran the asylum. And they’re still running it. On our dollar. On 1.29bn of our dollars this year.