The ABC is Already Dead
pour one out for Aunty, before you start pissin' on her grave.
Wonks, lolcows, Country Members (we remember!), I come to raze the ABC, not to bury it. Its long death march is finally at an end — its noose has been tied, its vest has been detonated, its second stands at the ready, katana held high, as its guts spool in the streets of Ultimo. Its epoch of embarrassment is peaking with one final shart of debasement. Once that’s over, we can finally take the ol’ girl out back and put her out of her misery.
Vale Aunty, we’ll say, ya blew it, big time.
With the Lattouf trial, and ABC lawyers’ foray into 19th century race science (seemingly designed to lure Edward Said in and trap him under a big net), we can see how a decade plus of self-flagellation, self-recrimination, and Government knife-licking has transformed the ABC into a mangy, rabid, stray dog with a wasting disease. The desperation is terminal, the cowardice is baked in, and the self-assuredness of the string of “best and brightest” who’ve run a train on Aunty these past 15-odd years is looking as comical as it does grim.
You could argue that the ABC has existed in a sorta dissociative state since the Abbot years, which began in the Gillard years, and are ongoing. Since then, the ABC has tottered between carefully curated centrism, toothless cultural content slop, and an identity crisis worthy of an Albert Brooks performance in an Albert Brooks movie.
Real-heads know that something shifted, imperceptible, perhaps, to anyone employed or sane, around the time Margaret and David retired — that that great thread, that continuity, that made the ABC THE ABC was beginning to fray, and that fraying was being hastened up by an ever revolving door of mercenary minders, who went at it with hacksaw, buzzsaw, tooth, and nail, until it snapped back and took out Tony Jones’ eye.
The ABC that intersected with October 7 was a beaten mule starving on a war-torn roadside. It was barely fit to perform basic functions: slowly alienating its audience, which it had successfully whittled down to a dwindling group of middle-brow geriatrics, stupol dweebs, and desperate Melbourne character-comics gone half-mad from crawling over the broken glass and razor blades disguised in the darkness of Shaun Michaelef’s intractable shadow. This was the ABC at its most irrelevant, both culturally and politically, stuck midway through a transition period it has been navigating since 2009.
By locking out almost two generations of talent — from both the ‘entertainment’ and ‘news’ sides of its operations — the ABC has been left flat-footed and flat-souled, stuck in the gluggy molasses of its managerial class’s focus-grouped imagineering, slowed, cripplingly, by said group’s unshakable mediocrity.
When an event like the genocide in Gaza rolled around, on top of the mounting avalanche of fascist shifts taking place both here and elsewhere, the ABC responded with the speed and confidence of a tortoise raised by a diet-pill addicted step-mother: with a prolonged series of temeritous flinching and stuttered sorries.
To see it from a distance, as most do, was akin to seeing an old school chum having a bath-salt-snorting freak out on Main Street — something to avert your gaze from, and awkwardly shuffle around, lowering your hat as they ask if you’ve caught up on the latest episodes of Gruen, or saw Morgan Begg’s appearance on Insiders. To see it up close, that is to stop, and ask, “hey man, are you alright?” was to gaze in the eyes of the dumpster lady from Mulholland Drive, right before she nut-taps you for daring to question the objectivity of Patrica Karvelas.
Hellish scenes, folks, hellish scenes and waking nightmares.
This creature is not equipped to deal with an issue with such obvious and immediate moral clarity as the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza. This creature is broken and bent, a castrated Reek, hunched and bowing to masters themselves pathetic in a way that’d make the average punter’s lunch flip in their gut. Unverifiable ghoulies, doomed to exist somewhere between Microsoft Teams and HR meetings, let loose on an unsuspecting populace paralysed by the question these people’s existence posits: how can one be so hollow, yet so full of shit?
Friends who work at the ABC — in television, radio, news, management, heck, as security and clean-up — talk about an atmosphere as bleak and panicky as a German pillbox on D-Day. Years of restructuring, censorship, and obsequiousness has left many too scared to do their job with anything approaching interest, passion, or imagination, and an overall culture of corpo-brained incuriousness has left the daring, diligent, and ‘dangerous’ with next to nothing to do, and nowhere to go but “elsewhere.” One friend, an editor at the Ultimo Office, describes this ABC as “a place where its own values come to die.”
Another, in radio, described it as a “fuckhole.”
What’s clear to anyone who has ever paid any attention to the cycle of abuse the ABC likes to insert itself into re: its relationship with successive, particularly conservative, governments, is that this era of rejiggering and regurgitation in hopes of reignition and rejuvenation have not paid off. And what this means is that when Peter Dutton becomes Prime Minister later this year, which is looking more and more likely, the ABC can expect another round of budget cuts that will likely require the sale of the Specks in Spicks & Specks to a cabal of wealthy Alan Brough fetishists if they are, as an entity, to survive.
Having been run by a succession of Howardite cronies and lickspittles since the Goblin King himself threw the first baby overboard all those years ago, the political lock-and-stepping with Dutton and his delirious gang of private-sector bagmen will be semi-seamless, with interchanging cronies being swapped in and out sans fuss, while their cronyism corrodes what’s left of the ABC’s rotting torso like an acid bath.
What this means for the taxpayer is a national broadcaster that now exists solely as a tribute to its former self: a Big Mouth Billy Bass which sings the theme to Summer Heights High and holds up an urn containing Kerry O’Brien’s (rip) ashes. What was a national institution is now a national novelty, kept afloat by nostalgia and what remains of its ‘necessity,’ allowed to live in a semi-comatose half-life, so that the odd scavenger can pass through and turn a profit by picking over its bones.
Like all desecreations, it is, or should be, a travesty of the first order. Instead, it's just something to pass on by while pinching your nose — a half eaten rat, rotting curbside in the midday sun.
The fixes are obvious and immediate, I believe. But one involves a lot of taxpayer money and creative/political courage, while the other involves something that, if I type it out, will end my career and any hopes I have of appearing on the upcoming Double the Fist reboot.
Until then, we have to accept that the ABC, as it was, is well and truly dead. What we replace it with is up to us. Or at least it should be.
