Attacks on ABC and unis won’t stop. This is a government seeking control.

Most of the discussion of the Liberal Party council’s vote to privatise the ABC last weekend has been focussed on the amateurish boneheadedness it demonstrated about the party’s organisational ranks. All eyes were on the reactionary ideologues, untainted by political realities and how the party will look to the electorate when it publicly attacks one of the most trusted institutions in the country. All fair enough. Although the irony is that it was Bill Shorten and Labor who were supposed to be under threat of embarrassment from the ALP party conference, not the other lot.

The focus on the embarrassment inflicted by the party, and the land speed records set by the Prime Minister and senior ministers — not to mention the one-time supporter of ABC privatisation, Mitch Fifield — to distance themselves from what their own members demanded by such an overwhelming majority, isn’t the full story. At a deeper level, there is congruence between the government and the Liberal Party on the ABC, not conflict. A profound intolerance of dissent and criticism has emerged on the right, and while party apparatchiks and media commentators don’t have direct access to power to express that intolerance, government ministers do, and have used it.

The government has pursued a policy of ever greater control wherever it can, as we’ve previously described in detail. The relentless attacks on the ABC — on individual journalists like Emma Alberici, via vexatious complaints from Fifield and other ministers, via funding cuts in the hundreds of millions, via a constant series of inquiries and reviews, via a stacked board — are part of this agenda of control.

[An incomplete list of evidence that Australia is becoming a police state]

Moreover, it has worked. Michelle Guthrie’s feeble “fightback” notwithstanding, the ABC has been cowed. The treatment of Alberici — hung out to dry publicly by her own managing director, and with only a belated acknowledgement that she was not responsible for what many of her government, News Corp and Fairfax critics alleged — was intended as exemplary punishment and a warning to other journalists. Nor will the attacks on the ABC let up. More are on the way, and serious ones. Guthrie and her senior managers will discover the truth that giving into bullies doesn’t make them stop, it merely encourages them.

Wherever the government has some power, or levers to pull, it will pursue an agenda of control and punishment. The latest is ANU’s refusal to oblige the backers of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, a right-wing thinktank with News Corp backing looking for a fig leaf of legitimacy from a respected academic institution. ANU (rightly) refused to cop it after Tony Abbott made clear exactly how unacademic, how unrigorous and intellectually shabby, the “Centre” would really be in an explainer for Quadrant’s dead white male readership. For their sins, ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt — a man who has contributed a hundredfold more to Western (and global) civilisation than all his critics combined — and the university have been attacked. Inevitably, this ended up with calls for the lever of control the government has in relation to ANU to be pulled. Senator for the IPA, James Paterson, demanded that ANU be punished by having its funding cut.

Just like the ABC.

The intellectual rigour of a school where one can only praise ideas. The free speech of punishing outlets for critical journalism. The transparency of a government that hunts down whistleblowers. The national security of a government that breaks the law and then tries to cover it up by harassing those who reveal it. The commitment to privacy of a minister who releases private information to smear a critic. The support for freedom of a government that serially curbs freedoms.

The attacks won’t stop. If there’s a lever available to the government to attack dissent and criticism, its instinct is to seize it and use it, however inappropriate, however at odds with the traditions of conservatism supposedly cherished by so many in its ranks, however inconsistent with the core beliefs of the Liberals. These are bullies with access to lots of money, vast security agencies, lots of personal information and who can change the law to get their way. Why on earth would they stop?