ABC chair Ita Buttrose (Image: AAP/Dan Himbrechts)

Remember the IPA? It’s still kinda going, even though it’s lost its direct line to government, and its megaphone, The Australian, is a ruin, gutted by cuts. Now Tim Wilson et al are in some weird crypto unit at RMIT (public) university, and bearded Senator James Paterson looks like the aromatherapist your divorced mother married.

But in its glory days, the IPA had dreams, and chief among them was the privatisation of the ABC. But it saw it as a fond hope, a pole star. The affection for Aunty was so widespread across the political and social spectrum that budging it seemed impossible.

But the IPA didn’t count on progressives, who have come to its rescue. The flailing attacks on the ABC in past weeks for some sort of allegedly deeply racist culture are simply adding to the delegitimisation of public broadcasting, without making any specific charges.

This has been part of a wider festival of white guilt, recrimination, collective soul-searching, etc, prompted by the politics of affect with which the Yes campaign for the Voice is being run (towards triumph or disaster).

ABC management has made some admissions and also engaged in the more general public performance of anguish now required in this sort of politics. OK, better processes need to be in place internally. But we now have a situation where News Corp — News Corp! — can bag the ABC for its “culture of racism”.

It’s time for the board and management to end the pity party and make a full-throated and uncompromising defence of the ABC and public broadcasting. Not only to say that its very existence is a good and essential part of our society, but to make the goddamn obvious point that the ABC and SBS together do a vast amount of program-making about and by non-white and non-Anglo people, and that they are the only broadcasting outfits doing this in any significant volume.

What is most striking is how vague all this is. There’s no unmasking of white supremacist cells in this or that department, or specific projects getting canned, or not greenlit where white/Anglo filmmakers got a go-ahead. Stan Grant raised some questions about how the ABC had covered Queen Elizabeth II’s death, and how the coronation was going to be covered. That was about it as far as specifics went.

Those vague accusations had seemed to break down into three groups, collated in an article by Osman Faruqi and Max Walden in the Nine papers a week or so after it all broke. They were that of vicious social media abuse of non-white presenters; of non-white staff getting snide remarks about being “quota hires” or similar; and of programs and projects by non-white staff getting sidelined.

Well, social media abuse is not good. But is there anything the ABC can do about it? Social media is simply the circulated form of what was once yelled at the TV in the pub. There was quite a lot of racism then; there’s probably still a fair bit now.  

Stan Grant, in the extended public performance of emotion followed by self-laceration that began this — exhausting, like sitting through your actor cousin’s one-man show about Kafka — said that management should offer more public support.

But would such an intervention make things better or worse? Elite leaders of public broadcasting publicly tut-tutting about the plebs making snark about elite TV stars? Yeah, that’d put a stop to it. The melancholy fact is that racism exists, social media may well make it worse, but endless moral lecturings won’t change that. The failure to indulge the fantasy of “eliminating racism” does not make the ABC racist.

What about workplace exclusions, preferences, nasty remarks? There may well be a surplus of a certain type of such in the ABC. Any organisation with a moral agenda will have a problem with passive aggression, the return of repressed hostility, etc. The question is whether the ABC is significantly worse in that respect than any other such large organisation, and whether the persistence of such should be the occasion for damning the whole organisation as a racist outfit.

Finally, there are the accusations, aired without specifics, in the Nine piece that non-white people are getting their programs and ideas sidelined. Again, not good if happening. But once again ABC management can talk back to this somewhat. Media is a field of disappointment, not dreams. Most people don’t get what they want, most ideas die on the table, most program proposals don’t get made, no matter how far they get. It is also not unknown for people to seek reasons other than simple bad luck for why they didn’t get preferred. We’re not required to take every such accusation at face value. ABC management certainly isn’t.

This is all the more ridiculous when you look at the projects and programs that the ABC and SBS do make, compared to the commercial output. You have to consider the two public broadcasters together, because the very existence of SBS skews the ABC’s output and talent pool, depriving it of a number of talented non-Anglo program makers. Together they make dozens more programs featuring and by non-Anglo talent than the commercials. Even without SBS, the ABC clearly outstrips them.

I mean there’s something surreal in having a week-long harangue of the ABC for racism, in a mediascape that includes Channel Nine, Channel Seven and Sky As Dark AF. The latter has derisory ratings — Sharri Markson will be going ’round to individual living rooms to do her show in six months’ time — but the former are big beasts. They remain, as they have always been, white, Anglo, and racist, not least by who and what they omit.

Channel Seven, the runt of the commercial litter (Ten is youf; Nine is king) has always been casual about straying into a white Anglo chauvinism/racism; a “race-baiting horror factory” as Nadine von Cohen described it.

Watching Channel Nine, part of the conglomerate Faruqi has a gig at, is like watching TV in a world where the Germans won WWII. Married At First Sight? Despite a few recent additions, it looks like a blondes breeding camp. And check out the credits list for that show or The Block. One of the reasons there might be less racial or cultural tension at such places is because they still overwhelmingly hire Anglos, and a few European-Australians. In February, Faruqi wrote an entire story about Australian TV product, name-checked those shows, and didn’t say a thing about their dazzling whiteness. One wonders if he’d still have a column if he had.  

Well, people are going to talk. What really matters is what ABC leadership does. Many of the ABC’s critics from the left are either blithe about the real political risks to public broadcasting, or now actively do not care. This discontinuity is part of the wider historical discontinuity on the left/progressive side, in which we cannot honour, defend and advance the achievements we have made, because everything is now being seen through the lens of colonialism, and the implicit notion that nothing done since its inauguration can be valued or have moral worth.

ABC management, board, supporters, the left, unions and other progressive groups now need to make an unequivocal defence of the organisation in particular, and public broadcasting in general. They need to talk back to the weird self-indulgent, self-serving festival of second-guessing and endless apology, which is the opposite of a genuinely radical race politics, and assertively advance the ABC’s record on diverse programming, and on its own processes of dealing with internal problems.

That does ask of them some minimal courage in this era: that of going against people whose approval they seek, and who have, on their grounds, a case. But ABC management’s first job, in this register, is to defend the institution, its achievements, aims, intent and role in public life. Otherwise, the IPA will get from the ABC, by way of progressives, what it couldn’t do itself: a TKO.