There is nothing more excruciatingly embarrassing than watching One Nation give a press conference.
Out came Pauline, flanked by Malcolm and Brian, to gleefully shove it up the arse of the ABC.
How dare they ask questions about her plane, sorry James’ plane, or is it Bill’s plane. How dare they question Malcolm’s citizenship. How dare they still talk about climate change when there is no empirical evidence.
We all know they are “jihadi sympathisers” and “harbingers of terror apologists” who have “a fatwa on Pauline Hanson” as Malcolm Roberts told the Daily Mail (seriously).
Senator Burston bravely said he would block government savings measures unless ABC funding was slashed by at least $600 million in the last Federal Budget.
Well Pauline’s going to teach them a lesson!
Buoyed by her success at removing the head of Australia Post (according to her), Pauline has demanded that the ABC provide details of the wages of any staff receiving over $200,000.
What she intends doing with that information is unclear. If we are going to demand that people who are paid by the taxpayer justify their wages then we could start with our politicians.
“The Government has also agreed to undertake a competitive neutrality inquiry into the ABC and to legislate a requirement for the ABC to be ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’,” Senator Hanson said.
Now you can’t tell me that Pauline came up with the phrase “competitive neutrality”. Perhaps the “extensive consultation with industry bodies” was helpful in putting the words into Pauline’s mouth – like “fair and balanced”, the Fox News slogan.
When asked what she meant, after an awkward silence, she said she didn’t think the ABC should be allowed to bid for sports telecasts.
Gee I wonder who put that thought in her head? Are all those regional viewers Pauline is so concerned about expected to sign up to Foxtel if they want to watch sport?
The ABC Charter already compels it to be “impartial” and “accurate.” When asked how that was different from “fair and balanced”, Malcolm Roberts fired up, no doubt remembering his humiliating appearance on Q&A, saying impartial meant they could, and do, ignore whole sides of arguments.
According to the dictionary, impartial means “treating all rivals or disputants equally”. Synonyms include: unbiased, unprejudiced, neutral, non-partisan, non-discriminatory, objective, open-minded, equitable, even-handed, fair, fair-minded, just.
What Malcolm fails to understand is that, when you talk shit, informed people call you out on it.
Pauline proudly announced that “the Government has agreed to greatly enhance the ABC’s provision of services to rural and regional Australians.”
No new funding, they just want a bigger slice of it spent on regional areas despite the 2016 annual ABC Appreciation Survey finding that “79% of Australians believe that the ABC does a ‘good job’ covering country and regional issues, in comparison to the 43% that believe commercial media does the same.”
Pauline has also secured a commitment to provide an additional $12 million dollars in funding for community radio measures. Funny, I didn’t hear her complaining about the last budget in which the Community Broadcasting Program lost $1.4 million per year over the next four years. Pauline thinks community radio provides a “diverse and independent voice” as she signs up to allow Murdoch to take over our media completely.
One Nation has also requested a register of foreign ownership interests in media companies.
“If any foreign ownership is at 2.5 per cent it must be on a public register,” Senator Hanson said. “Higher than that – 5 per cent – it goes to the Foreign Investment Review Board to be looked at.”
I wonder if she realises that Rupert is a foreigner?
According to the survey, “A large majority of Australians – 86% compared with 84% in 2015 – believe the ABC performs a valuable role, with 49% rating the ABC as ‘very valuable’, the highest level since 2009. A large majority believe the Corporation provides quality content, and that is doing a good job satisfying its charter obligations.”
Pauline can only dream about an approval rating like that.
I will close with a rather disturbing excerpt from PHONy Senator Brian Burston’s maiden speech just to underline what fruitcakes this crowd really are.
“A further example of elite contempt for ordinary Australians is public broadcasting. The cultural Marxist takeover of the ABC began in the late 1960s when Allan Ashbolt stacked the current affairs department. Ashbolt introduced the radical critique of mainstream Australia that had become fashionable in university departments of humanities and social science. Almost 50 years later, there is not one conservative program or anchor on the ABC – not one, in a billion-dollar enterprise. The ABC’s oppositional stance to traditional Australia has grown to include the two other taxpayer-funded public broadcasters, the Special Broadcasting Service, SBS, whose explicitly ethnic mission is to cater to the identity and interests of the multicultural community, and most recently the National Indigenous Television network, NITV, created to represent the identity and interests of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. For budgetary reasons, NITV is now within the SBS stable. All three broadcasters are biased against mainstream Australia. They distort Australian political culture and support aggressive political multiculturalism. The systemic bias of public broadcasting is one of the clearest manifestations of a hostile cultural establishment. This bias has been known for decades but the conservative side of mainstream politics has failed to correct the situation. The time for complaint and diagnosis is over. It is time for the nation to break the bias of public broadcasting before that bias breaks the nation.
How might this be done? The main proposals have been to defund and privatise the ABC. But the country needs public broadcasters. Despite or perhaps because of their biases, the ABC, SBS and NITV have constituents who benefit from their services. It would be sad to throw the babies out with the bathwater. Might not balance be achieved between channels? A fair balance might be struck by leaving the minority ethnic channels intact while transferring funding from the ABC to establish a new channel that might be called the Patriotic Broadcasting Corporation, whose explicit mission would be to represent the identity and interests of mainstream Australia. It would present news and current affairs from the perspective of the historic Australian nation. Stripped of its mainstream content, the remaining ABC structure would receive funding commensurate with the size of its inner city, Greens-voting constituency.”
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