Descent Into Irrelevance

No wonder Australians are switching off the ABC. It is wallowing in the shrill, lunatic fringe, as this 'interview' with the PM illustrates. By Nick Cater.

The decline in the ABC’s relevance in federal election campaigns in the space of just four elections is a symptom of the public broadcaster’s drift towards the fringes of national life.

As recently as 2007, the daily cycle of an election began with the keynote interview ABC Radio’s AM, punctuated by the 7.30 Report and ended with ABC TV’s Lateline.

A dozen year’s later, AM is just another breakfast talk show swamped in a sea of chatter. ABC News 24, which was supposed to take up the slack, is a stream of mushy irrelevance. The 7.30 audience is a fraction of what it was, and Lateline, a once-substantial forum for national debate, was recently put out of its misery by ABC management.

Sky News is the station of choice for professional poll watchers who work on the assumption that if the story doesn’t break on the channel, Sky’s superior agility will have the story on it screens long before the ABC has woken up to it, if it ever does.

The issue here is not bias. The ABC’s coverage has had a red or greenish tinge for 40 years or more. Lateline in its heyday was presented by Tony Jones and 7.30 by Kerry O’Brien.

The question is whether Australians still take much interest at all in the ABC's coverage or if they are getting their election fix from elsewhere. The ABC is no longer the automatic host for debates between the leaders. In 2016 it hosted just one of three leaders debates. The first debate of this campaign, on Monday, will be hosted on Seven West Media. The second will be hosted by Sky News. There may or may not be a third.

The quality of today’s coverage on, say, AM is noticeably weaker, significant interviews fewer and its coverage more eclectic. For much of this week, for example, AM and News 24 ran obsessive stories about “Watergate”, a conspiracy tale concocted on the internet about alleged involvement by Barnaby Joyce in the allocation of water licences. Quite what the allegation is, who is making it or whether it matters in the scheme of things has never been made clear.

Suffice to say the ABC’s Virginia Trioli imagines it to be one of the “big issues of the day,” and elected to spend most of her interview with the Prime Minister this week labouring furiously to achieve a gotcha moment. 

Scott Morrison revealed hitherto undiscovered depths of patience in explaining that water deals are done with the advice of COAG ministers and public servants, not on the whim of government ministers. They are reviewable by the Auditor-General and the minister relies on the advice provided by his department, which acts at arm's length as required under the legislation.

Here is the key part of the “interview”:

Trioli: “But here’s the contradiction; so he says that it was ‘not his job’ and he says it was done at arm's length is the repeated phrase, but he put three conditions on the negotiations. He wanted advice on the impacts to employment in the region and then he wanted the Department to - and here is the quote –‘Report back to me on this and seek final approval before settling the purchase.’ So was it arm's length and not his job, or did he want all this detail and this close involvement in the matter?”

Morrison: “Well, the very things you’ve talked about are the very things that are routinely dealt with under those buybacks, the same things...”

Trioli: “So he was involved, he was involved then?”

Morrison: “Wouldn't you want to know what the impact on jobs is?”

Trioli: “Well yes, I would expect a minister to know that, so him wanting to know that, he was therefore not involved at arm's length, correct?”

Morrison: “He was dealing with a legal entity. There’s no suggestion that the company that was involved in the transaction was not a legal entity and in fact the Labor Party did a deal with the same company. So there was no questions raised about the integrity of the company when Labor did a deal with them, so why would there be questions raise if the Liberal Party does one? I’m not sure what the double standard is there. These matters...”

Trioli: “Well, I’ll share with you potentially - if I can jump in there because time is tight - potentially another double standard then. That is the Government is at pains to criticise Labor for everything, virtually everything. But now you're prepared to rely 100 per cent on Labor and they’re the font of all wisdom and truth, when it suits you in this particular issue?”

Morrison: “I'm not quite sure the accusation you're making there.”

Trioli refused to let go, her eyes lit up with the kind of zealotry one observes in the kind of people determined to prove the existence of a second gunman on the grassy knoll or the faking of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Trioli: “Sure. You said on this program on January 14, that you're ‘a Prime Minister for standards,’ was your quote. So is this the standard that we should then accept from you? Rather casual about accountability, casual about transparency and seemingly unaccountable about value for taxpayer money?”

Morrison: “Well, Virginia, I think they're pretty strong accusations you’ve just made there without providing any foundation for them… I don't know how you could make those allegations in the way that you have, I’d seem to think that would be a bit over the top from you.”

Triolo: “Well, we’ll see what the court of public opinion thinks. But thanks for joining us today, Prime Minister. Thanks for making time for us.”

Morrison: “Well, we’ll see what the Auditor-General says.” 

Trioli: “As well, yes indeed. Thanks very much, thank you.”

We can only guess if Trioli was greeted as a conquering hero when she returned to the office at the end of the show or if her colleagues, like most reasonably minded viewers, thought she’d made a fool of herself.

What is clear is that in the second week of a fascinating campaign, Trioli had wasted an opportunity to quiz the Prime Minister about the substantial issues at stake in the federal election and chosen instead to pursue a frolic of her own.

This was not the ABC as the corporation’s great postwar chairman Richard Boyer imagined it, an institute standing “solid and serene in the middle of our national life, running no campaign, seeking to persuade no opinion, but presenting the issues freely and fearlessly for the calm judgment of our people.” 

Indeed, it was the very opposite; a jittery voice from the bottom of the garden, lacking self-awareness, wallowing in the lunatic fringe of political debate. And completely irrelevant.