Panic entered the headlines earlier today when word leaked that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton might engage in a bit of therapeutic blood-letting at the ABC.
Long accused of being left-leaning and disinterested in its Charter, there isn’t much love for the ABC within the conservative voting base. Many Australians resent their yearly billion-dollar sacrifice, seeing it as being wasted on a news organisation they not only avoid, but despise.
Leaning on Elon Musk’s enormously popular Department of Government Efficiency, more commonly known as ‘DOGE’, Peter Dutton appointed Senator Jacinta Price to the role of Shadow Minister for Government Efficiency.
Without a plan to cut Net Zero, easily the most wasteful and parasitic growth on the public purse, questions have been raised about what, exactly, an incoming Coalition government would seek to streamline.
The ABC … maybe.
‘The approach we would take is to reward excellence and where we find waste is to cut that waste. There are a lot of regional services for the ABC, which I think are underdone. We were out in western Queensland just yesterday looking at the devastation of the flood, and the ABC could be a much more integral part of the community. But just having it based in Sydney … or Melbourne is not helping people in outer metro areas or regional areas.’
Let’s revise our expectations of Dutton for a moment. This does not sound as promising as the headline in the Daily Mail implied, nor do his words suggest that the taxpayer can expect to repurpose that billion dollars to pay down the nearly trillion-dollar debt the country finds itself in.
Instead, Dutton’s comments read more like a threat to torment and punish city-dwelling ABC staff, potentially forcing them to put down their soy lattes and wander off into regional Australia to do the legwork on stories unlikely to earn them click-bait praise.
If anything, such a move could end up costing the taxpayer even more because the ABC would naturally demand compensation and funds for the move – not to mention ‘danger money’ when navigating rural people who refuse to enquire after their pronouns.
When Sky News Australia writes that ‘Dutton signals potential cuts to ABC’, I believe the word ‘potential’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Re-structuring, maybe, but the chances of him achieving it are slim without a powerful, experienced, ruthless, and well-connected individual such as Elon Musk at the helm. The ghost of Kerry Packer is the closest Australia has on hand.
A politician could not do what Musk has done in DOGE. The Spring Cleaning of the American swamp required an uncommon skill set and bubble-wrap in the form of personal wealth to withstand the backlash from those being swept out of power. Elon Musk’s Tesla company, which has nothing to do with DOGE, has been firebombed, its customers attacked in the street, and Tesla cars vandalised as a mass act of criminal protest. How long could a politician survive this level of reprisal?
If Dutton had a firm plan for the demise of the ABC’s gratuitous operations, he would have named and shamed potential targets as shots over the bow.
What we have instead is a headline-grabbing thought-bubble that is unlikely to manifest anything real.
DOGE worked because it was a very serious and well-thought-out operation staffed by utterly ruthless individuals. If Dutton is to market himself after DOGE, which is a good idea, he will have to be far more specific about his intentions so that voters can have confidence that these are policy plans, not fleeting comments in the election news cycle that ultimately mean nothing.
As one comment read on the Sky News Australia website: ‘Hints and concerns, but there will be no action.’
Another warned that this may cause the ABC to ‘turn against the Coalition’, but that happened about 50 years ago, so Dutton should have no fear.
He would be better off using the ABC as a piñata, smacking it at every opportunity until all the goodies fall out.
Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
