The ABC’s Marxists, by Anthony McAdam.
Incredibly, the main department in the ABC which concerns itself primarily with the role of ideas in our society, particularly the role of political ideas, has been, since its inception, a vehicle for Marxist and neo-Marxist propaganda clearly hostile to the values and institutions of liberal democracy. Over the years, the Marxist presence has spread throughout the ABC and is now a major force in many of the key areas of the ABC, including its union and management structures. …
The primary problem with [ABC programs about current affairs] is not their allegedly forthright and brave explorations of the world and the “frontiers of knowledge” but rather their persistent bias in favour of ideas, values and contributors whose primary function is to legitimise political values of the left to far left, while devaluing and discrediting ideas and values of a more moderate and conservative character. …
In order to understand how the Marxist infiltration of our national broadcasting service came about it is necessary to go back in time. The key figure in the whole story is Allan Ashbolt. He is mainly responsible for creating and nurturing what I interpret as the Marxist ethos in so many program-making departments of the ABC, especially in his own department, now known as the Department of Radio Talks and Documentaries. …
Allan Ashbolt first emerged as a controversial figure on the national stage after his return in 1961 from New York where he had spent three years as an ABC correspondent. A former actor, he joined the ABC in 1954 as a talks assistant. On his return from the United States he published, in 1966, An American Experience. The book is primarily a condemnation of the evils of American society. If nothing else, he clearly picked up in America, assuming he didn’t already have it, a profound disdain for American traditions and public values. …
What stands out in that book, besides its unrelenting denigration of “the American Way of Life”, is its bias in favour of the Soviet Union and Soviet leaders when compared with their American counterparts. …
Mr Ashbolt has a way with the press. From my researches for this article, I have no doubt that of all the 6000-odd individuals who work at the ABC, Ashbolt took up more column inches in the press then any other. Part of this is explained by the fact that he has been a most public and vocal “public servant”, greatly assisted by his habit of always having another “hat” other than his ABC one which he could use to justify his public outspokenness while employed as a “public servant”. His two most commonly used “hats” at public meetings were President of the ABC Senior Officers Association and President of the Returned Servicemen’s Human Rights Association. …
Ashbolt never let up on his outside political activities and was for several years in the 1970s an active member of the ALP’s Arts and Media Policy Committee. (According to Ashbolt, in the Age article quoted above, it was the intervention on his behalf of two members of that committee, Neville Wran and Senator James McClelland, which “settled” Ashbolt’s “conflict” with the ABC Commissioners in the early 1970s.) …
Allan Ashbolt is the lion of the ABC left. He was mauled in the bad old days before December 1972 [when Gough Whitlam became PM]. …
As Ashbolt put it in an interview, “I think I would call myself a Marxist” (Herald, October 8, 1976) …
The radicalisation of the ABC Staff Association started in the early 1970s. … Members of “Ashbolt’s kindergarten” first started moving into the Staff Association in 1971 and by the mid-1970s were in virtually complete control. We observe the steady politicisation of the Staff Association, from an industrial union primarily concerned with pay and conditions of its members, into a highly active vehicle for the radical left to push their schemes of “worker control”, total autonomy for producers over program content and a confrontationalist stance vis-à-vis management and the Commission. …
What ails the ABC, above all, is legalistic and bureaucratic strangulation. Staff are no longer effectively accountable to management, nor is management to the Commission. As much as the Commission might like to think it can impose its will on the organisation, the sad but inescapable truth is, it can’t. It hasn’t the means by which to give effect to its policies and, even when it tries, it is invariably subverted by the deathly inertia bred by a truly horrific maze of procedural and legal obstacles.
When lefty ideologues are hired by an institution, they will only hire other lefty ideologues. Once they are in control, the institution is captured by the left, forever. So it is irredeemable. The institution must be deleted and rebuilt.
