The ABC is biased. Incestuously so... I have proof of that from people I used to work with.
ABC staff campaigns fail to serve public interest
The Australian
12:00AM March 3, 2018
Judith Sloan
My guess is that Emma Alberici has had better months. She has become the emblem of what many perceive to be the central weakness of the ABC — its unceasing and lopsided advocacy of left-wing positions.
But we should be clear about one thing: it’s not just Alberici.
Before I identify other ABC economic/business commentators who regularly make prejudiced contributions to various ABC outlets, let me point out that it is the legislated duty of the board of the ABC to “ensure that the gathering and presentation by the corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to recognised standards of objective journalism”.
Given the Alberici affair, it is clearly arguable that the board is failing to fulfil this duty. But it goes much deeper than the two highly dubious articles on company tax that Alberici produced, as well as the egregious comments she made on ABC radio.
Let me identify three other commentators whose contributions it would be hard to describe as “accurate and impartial”.
They are all men: Ian Verrender, Stephen Long and Michael Janda. Each has waged long campaigns on issues they personally regard as important.
Verrender, in fact, has been banging on about supposed corporate tax avoidance in Australia for a long time and is as dismissive as Alberici of the case for lowering company tax rates in this country.
He has even used the same suspect table sourced from the US Congressional Budget Office on international comparisons of company tax rates that Alberici referred to in her latest contributions.
For anyone with the slightest knowledge of Australian company tax arrangements, they would have looked at that CBO table and thought the figures are just wrong.
Apart from being sourced from 2012 data, the first two columns give the game away. Australia’s statutory company tax rate is recorded at 30 per cent but the average rate is listed at 17 per cent.
But since we had a flat rate of company tax at that time, this figure for the average rate makes no sense; it is also 30 per cent. At that point, it becomes important to read the footnotes.
This is where we learn that what the CBO did was to compare average corporate rates for US-owned foreign companies with the rates faced by foreign-owned companies in the US. In other words, the table has nothing to do with the company tax rates paid by Australian companies or, for that matter, other foreign-owned companies, other than from the US.
But that didn’t stop opposition assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh, who should know better, from making the misleading point that Australia’s company tax rate is between the middle to the lower part of the G20 pack.
Clearly, these complications were beyond Verrender’s wit to grasp. He ended his misinformed piece of puffery with this Alberici-esque flourish: “As we’ve seen time and again, big corporations with the aid of the Big Four accounting firms look for the lowest rate of tax globally, domicile themselves there and shuffle their profits through those countries.
“It’s not about investment and it certainly isn’t about creating jobs or growth … Still, we race to the bottom.”
Where was his supervisor when this article was published last year? Where was the editor-in-chief? And where was the board?
Then there is Long’s lengthy campaign against the Adani coalmine in northern Queensland. It just beggars belief that his supervisor hasn’t told him to move on to other topics. His campaign to ensure that the mine never goes ahead has been relentless and completely bizarre at times.
Adani is a crook; the environmental conditions can never be met; Adani has already violated its environmental obligations; the project doesn’t stack up economically; the market for thermal coal is about to tank; the project will never get finance; the Chinese government would have to approve any loans; and the number of jobs that will be created is trivial. His blocking reasons, many imaginary, just go on and on.
This isn’t journalism; it’s just plain advocacy using the ABC platform.
Again, what have his supervisor, the editor-in-chief and the board been doing while this campaign has been unleashed on taxpayers who have no choice but to contribute to the funding of the ABC?
Then there is Janda, who goes by the title senior digital business reporter. Clearly, he thinks he’s a bit of a dab hand when it comes to investment and public policy matters, although often he seems to be simply regurgitating the lines fed to him by the likes of the left-leaning Grattan Institute and Tasmanian-based economist Saul Eslake.
In Janda’s world, the deduction of expenses associated with investing in an income-producing asset should be removed from the individual income tax code even though this has been a feature of our income tax arrangements since 1917.
According to Janda, it would be much better for first-home buyers if negative gearing were eliminated, even though there would be a minimal impact on house prices. Figure that one out, if you dare. How precisely will first-home buyers be better off?
He then takes the word of so-called experts that negative gearing doesn’t influence rent levels even though it is obvious that investors are motivated by post-tax returns on their investments. What he is claiming in effect is that the supply of rental properties doesn’t slope upwards (lower post-tax returns will reduce the supply of rental properties), which is a bold call for someone who doesn’t seem to even understand that he is making this claim.
Then there is his observation that while there are many more middle-income property investors using negative gearing — the teachers, the nurses, the ambos — than higher income property investors, the latter have larger loans. Gosh, that’s a surprise.
Consider also the economic commentators who are regularly invited on to ABC Radio National and local radio. They are almost all cut from the same cloth: old-fashioned Keynesians, supporters of government intervention and distrustful of business.
Mind you, it is surely ironic that Jon Faine, local radio presenter in Melbourne, regularly invites Marcus Padley (of the Marcus Padley Newsletter) on to his show to talk about stockmarket developments. Talk about free, effective advertising for Padley.
And this is from an organisation that refuses to name stadiums by their rightful sponsors’ names because this would be a form of advertising.
Again, go figure.
The core issue that emerges from the Alberici affair is that ABC journalists are given free rein to campaign on their pet topics with insufficient supervisory control or oversight.
It was not always the case. ABC journalists regularly were refused permission to write opinion pieces and were cautioned if they overtly took sides on contentious policy matters. There is a strong case for returning to those arrangements. It is a public broadcaster, after all.
If ABC journalists want to campaign for their heartfelt causes, they should leave to set up their own sites or join the media outlets that might have them. We deserve better at the ABC.
