Mister Buttinski

LET US  all play a little guessing game, shall we?

On Q&A tonight, how many times will Tony Jones interrupt, and who will he interrupt the most?

Here's the field:

Kate Lundy, Minister for Sport and Multicultural Affairs
Eric Abetz, Liberal Senate Leader
Archie Roach, Indigenous singer-songwriter
Sekai Holland, Zimbabwe Minister for National Healing & Reconciliation
Grahame Morris, Political adviser

At the Billabong, the betting is that Roach will not be interrupted at all, Holland only in the most deferential manner and Lundy perhaps once or twice.

Morris and Abetz can expect more static, with Morris likely to be the more frustrated of the pair, since he does not sit in the Senate and can exert little influence on the ABC budget.

Birds Of A Feather

WHAT is it with the Jones family and meat production? Lateline/Q&A host Tony's missus, Sarah Ferguson, was the reporterette whose Four Corners' show on abuses in Indonesian abbatoirs knocked the live-cattle industry for six, accusations that a slaughterman was paid to abuse cattle for the activists' cameras emerging only much later.

Now it's the head of the household's turn to wrap dead flesh in another of those unique ABC perspectives. The injury outside the Baiada poultry plant came about, to quote Jones, when "a security guard tried to drive through the crowd."

Watched the video? So what do you reckon? Was it the monstered security guard who caused the trouble by trying to report for work, or do you think it might, just might, be the howling mob that surrounded his vehicle, kicked in its door, tore off the rear-view mirror and, just for good measure, threw quite a few punches through the open driver's window?

If Jones had been handling his wife's Four Corners cattle scoop he would have reported that the cow incited all that kicking and mistreatment.

Control, It's Grist For The Milne

ABOUT the time Q&A’s audience was bagging the editor of Hobart’s Mercury for not denouncing his employer on the front page of a determinately provincial publication, the urge to switch off the telly became almost irresistible. Almost. Was it the perverse pleasure to be mined from outrage that kept the screen alive, or that the dregs of a nice drop and their bottle were not worth carrying all the way out to the study? Probably the latter, so the Monday night ritual of pap and piety and ex cathedra pronouncements was allowed to continue its drone and whine from the corner of the livingroom. The bottle died and, soon after, so did the box. The web had won the battle for attention once again, as it increasingly does, and the ABC lost another viewer to its omniscient rival.

The nastiest notes from Tony Jones’ orchestration of imbalance were still echoing on the stroll through the garden, fresh bottle in paw. So, too, the irritation that surges almost every Monday night. Why had Jones felt it necessary to introduce that poor editor as “a Murdoch editor” and to do so almost with a wink? How could he permit that lisping pommy pistil-fiddler to thunder so, mostly about the magnificence of his own, planet-loving moral worth? And when the creature from the green lagoon reviled The Australian for leading simple souls astray, why did Jones not pull her up, point out that the Gillard Gouge is genuinely unpopular and that Rupert Murdoch, even at the height of his wicked powers, could have fanned no more than a small front of such a fire?

Because he is Tony Jones and it is their ABC, that is the simple answer. After yet another Monday festival of sneer and bias, a parade that begins with 7.30, runs often through Australian Story, and builds to its preachy climax with Four Corners, Media Watch and the Q&A, the conclusion that the fix is in is undeniable.

And last night, as the Billabong’s computer fired up, so did a sense of rueful astonishment.  How did the rather appealing idea of an honest, inoffensive national broadcaster metastisise into such an ugly growth. Every Monday sees the pillorying of the unfashionable. On other nights, much the same via other vehicles. Mark Scott, the media mogul who needs not turn a profit, swears his ABC is a “market failure broadcaster”, that it plugs a gap the commercials will not fill. How then to explain Crownies?  Young hornbags shedding their gear to the accompaniment of a clunky script, it’s a concept quite thoroughly explored, one would have thought, by Seven, Nine and Ten (not to mention cable’s cavalcade of tits and teeth.)

 

Somehow it happened, the transformation from Mr Squiggle to Mr Straight Party Line. At televisionau.com, a site devoted to the history of Oz viewing and its ephemera, the buffs have very kindly collected images of what they call “classic TV Guides”, and last night, after Christine Milne’s use of the ABC pulpit to promise that “hate media” would soon be examined, judged and regulated, it seemed worthwhile to turn back time and take a quick look at the ABC of three decades past.  The entry for July 29, 1981, isn’t relevant because all stations’ schedules were dominated by live coverage of Princess Di’s wedding, but a facsimile page from May speaks to how much things have changed, to the mission creep that would see Bellbird, if it were to re-made today, devoted to Joe Turner’s wind generator, Olive’s hunza pie and the local rag’s crusade for carbon justice. Can anyone doubt that John Quinney would be a big polluter, not to mention a cross-burning foe of the sweet family of Muslim refugees modern scriptwriters would feel obliged to introduce and extol?

Back in 1981, apart from an afternoon news broadcast at one o’clock, the daytime schedule was devoted entirely to kiddie fare and educational programming. By 7pm, it was the nightly news, followed by Big Country, then documentaries and imported drama, with another 40 minutes of current affairs before the evening tailed off with the lightweight laughs of Three’s Company.

Now look at the today’s ABC. Having been awarded a dedicated cable channel to mind Australia’s children, it has stacked the early mornings with japanimation -- second-rate superheroes smacking each other around without pause or plot. Again, what is it about such shows that does not replicate the commercials’ offerrings?  After that, lots of stuff like this.

On the web, for semi-grownups there is the Drum, where the ABC feels obliged to replicate the piffle that Eric Beecher serves up at Crikey. Again, where is the market failure? Beecher mines a profit from morons, and good luck to him, for that is the way markets work. But at the Drum, there is not the excuse of profit, only green left ideology leavened with the odd quisling entry by a token writer from the right. As the late Alene Composta demonstrated, no opinion is too ridiculous for the Drum, so long as it appears to originate on the left.

You could on and on about the ABC – not least the the way in which, say, the Q&A guest roster  reads like a list of those invited to a family gathering. The whining Anna Rose, of the Children’s Climate Crusade, gets a seat on the panel; she is the lovemate of Simon “Shakedown” Sheikh, who also gets his frequent dollop of government-guaranteed exposure. An Australian convert to Islam, Susan Carland (on last week’s Q&A), is introduced as a sociologist; more relevant, one suspects, is that she is the spouse of the ABC’s (and SBS) favourite tame Muslim Waleed Aly. Those unofficial networks of friends and mates and lovers, you get the impression they carry an awesome weight with ABC bookers.

It would be nice to shrug off the ABC’s advocacy of its employees’ personal views. As the web demonstrates, there are more alternative sources of information and opinion than in 1981, so if you can stomach the ABC’s pushing one side of the political divide while largely ignoring the other, it is, or should be, no big deal.

But then, chillingly, you hear Christine Milne’s vow to bring dissident opinions to heel, even when they represent bodies of opinion far larger and much stronger than that of the other-worldly 15-odd percent who supported her party at the last poll.  And she will, too. Make no mistake about the shamelessness of your typical crypto-fascist.

It would be nice if the ABC could be restored to the wholesome inoffensiveness of entertainments like Blue Hills and the Argonauts, but that can never happen. As an institution it has been colonized by the tawdry, the vulgar and the true believer, often all at the same time.

There is only one way to fix the ABC and that is to defund it. As Tony Abbott and his handlers count the days until this staggering government falls at the next election, whenever that might be, he should keep a running tally of Aunty’s outrages. John Howard had the spine only for fiddling at the edges. Abbott needs to punch out the ABC’s lights. And then he must drive a stake through its irredeemable heart.

Slow Blows The Don

YOU ALMOST had to feel a little sorry for Tony Jones on Lateline last night. There he was, set up by his producer to discuss the sudden end of Osama bin Laden with Tariq Ramadan, the Oxford professor and grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder. A nice, predictable ABC set piece was to be expected – the pro forma denunciation of American vigilantism, a line or two about the tragedy of the terrorist chieftain having been rendered permanently unavailable for court appearances and, to wrap things up, the inevitable prattle about Muslim alienation and why it is so very understandable. That is what Jones must have been anticipating. Instead, he found himself with a full-blown loon on the other end of the ABC’s satellite link.

Asked if he believes bin Laden responsible for the 9/11 massacre, Ramadan agreed – but then not so much.

TARIQ RAMADAN: Yes. I accept that. I don't have a - you know, between the conspiracy theory on one side and everything it should be clear on the other side, in between still there are lots of questions. There was no independent, you know, inquiry about what happened, and still now there are questions to be raised (ed: no independent investgation? huh!). And the first questions that we have is about what happened two days ago. So I think that ...

TONY JONES: No, can I just interrupt you there. We'll just stick with September 11 for the moment because are you saying there are still questions about what happened there? Because you were quite equivocal about this 10 years ago when you were first asked about it. You said, "Perhaps bin Laden is a useful bugbear, like Saddam Hussein." What did you mean by that?

TARIQ RAMADAN: No, the first reaction that you are talking about is the week after, when we, for example, heard that with all what happened, we find two passports almost completely clean and with nothing, and I think, "OK, what's that?" I had questions, yes, with silly people leaving a car in a car park with things in Arabic when we all know that the pilots are reading things in English.

I think that these are questions that have to be asked, and it doesn't mean that we are saying that bin Laden is not behind and Al Qaeda is not behind. And if you are a serious citizen, you have the right to ask, and this is what I did also in the UK after 7/7, asking: we need an independent inquiry, we need to know what happened, we need transparency on all these things, because the way afterward it was used by the Bush administration is to go to kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan who were not supporting bin Laden and not supporting the Taliban and they paid a price. And this innocent people would ...

TONY JONES: Well, but you would have to admit that that was where Al Qaeda - but you know that Al Qaeda, the name Al Qaeda means "the base". The base was in Afghanistan. That's where they were, that's where the September 11 attacks were plotted and it was done so in ...

TARIQ RAMADAN: We don't know. Who knows about that? Who knows about that? Who knows about that?

TONY JONES: You don't know about that; is that what you're saying?

TARIQ RAMADAN: We were told -- no, nobody knows -- even the Americans. And I met people from the State Department and I met people from security services and intelligence, even in Europe. They said they were and we don't know where they are. So, after this, it's just you can't kill Afghani civilians because you think that someone is hiding in Afghanistan. You can't do that.

Mysteriously parked cars? Enigmatic documents in Arabic "when we all know that the pilots are reading things in English"? Nobody knowing where to find Osama, even though a SEAL team found his address without, aparently, even having to consult the Melways. What a mountain of garbage!

Still, there is reason to take heart. When next inclined to criticise the peddlers of cant and po-mo mysticism who infest Australia’s universities, stay that tongue. If Ramadan can hold down a job beneath the dreaming spires, our own institutes of higher learning really are, as vice-chancellors are always saying, absolutely “world class”.