When it comes to commentators, the ABC forgives and forgets

You’ll find no argument in the Crikey bunker if you want to argue that corporate Australia is subject to fairly toothless regulation. The analysis presented by economist John Adams on the ABC, alleging that less than 1% of complaints received by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) are investigated, is certainly a shocking stat. But this isn’t the first time the ABC went to Adams for comment — and it didn’t go nearly so well the last time.

In June 2020, Adams tweeted, in a caps-heavy hyperbolic style typical of his feed:

BREAKING I just received a phone call from an ABC Sydney based producer seeking a comment about the game of chess! The ABC have taken the view that chess is RACIST given that white always go first!

…Trust the taxpayer funded national broadcaster to apply ideological Marxist frameworks to anything & everything in Australia!

The story — culture war manna from heaven — was picked up by media all over the country for days. And so the ABC has clearly forgiven and forgotten, and culture war preoccupations and a click-hungry social media presence certainly do not mean you can’t be insightful on the issue of corporate regulation.

But a further wrinkle does come from Adams’ presence on Telegram, where he’s posted some deeply questionable stuff — as Crikey‘s Cam Wilson points out, this includes amplifying One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts’ baseless claims of electoral fraud, or conspiracy theorist Jamie Sale’s claim that Paul Walker, Anthony Bourdain and Anne Heche were all working on documentaries about human trafficking and paedophilia at the time of their premature deaths.

It’s all done in a “presented without comment” way, but raises questions about what level of weirdness an expert is permitted outside their area of expertise before it calls that expertise into question.