Let me come back to this Zaki business one last time because it does worry me that either the government doesn’t get the point, or doesn’t want to. I don’t care that they gave Zaki air time. In fact, the more they let him talk, the more he demonstrates what a danger he and others like him are. That was not the problem. The problem was that he was brought onto Q&A by the ABC specifically to ambush a government minister. It was the ABC’s intent that is so vile, not the particular means they chose on this occasion. What the program demonstrated, far better than anything else in recent times, is that the ABC is out to harm the government because the ABC, contrary to its charter, is pursuing a green-left agenda of its own. The entire organisation is now a billion dollar version of the Green-Left Review. That is the problem. That is what you must deal with.
My worry is that no one seems to get it. All the quotes that follow are from The Australia today. Each is one more example of missing the point. Here first is Julie Bishop:
The ABC’s action in allowing a former terror suspect to air his views runs counter to the government’s work in attempting to protect Australians from terrorism, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says.
This is from Christopher Pyne discussing Mark Scott:
“He’s trying to pretend the government is trying to close free speech at the ABC. This is typical of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; rather than ’fessing up to their mistake, which was to bring a convicted terrorist on to the audience of Q&A and give them a platform … (and) put at risk the people in the audience,” Mr Pyne told the Nine Network.
Then Peter Reith:
Peter Reith, a former Liberal cabinet minister, accused Mr Scott of reducing the ABC’s blunder to a question of audience security and not the “shocking and offensive” decision to give Mallah a platform.
“The ABC head was basically saying the real problem is that ‘we didn’t manage the security side of it’ as if, you know, if they’d got that right then having this guy on would be OK,” Mr Reith told Sky News.
Even Malcolm got into the act:
“This guy on social media not so long ago nominated two female journalists and said that they should be publicly raped,” Mr Turnbull said. “What if he had said that again in the Q&A live audience? Why would you ever put a person (like that) in a live audience? It’s incredible.”
The issue is neither terrorism nor free speech. The issue is the ABC. Nothing else. The issue is whether the government is going to take on the the fanatical leftist bias of the ABC, or is instead going to leave it alone until it conspires with the Greens and ALP to see it defeated at the polls. I would have thought that an instinct for self-preservation would have driven the government towards some such conclusion already.
I am in no doubt how difficult this task is. But I am also in no doubt that unless you identify the problem for what it is and then deal with the problem itself, you and we will never be rid of this deformed monstrosity of the far left. This is what you must do if you are to survive. You must set down a strategy for dealing with the indelible green-left political biases of the ABC and then do what you can to counter this malignant publicly-funded cancer in our social midst.