T
This piece is not about climate but about the mindset of taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Commission, which has a legal charter for impartiality. This has not prevented the ABC from adopting woke/Green/Left positions on most controversies including Australia’s impending referendum to set up a new chamber of Aborigines to “make representations” to both Parliament and the executive. The ABC’s position on climate can be taken as read.
Guys, don’t cancel me, but in our household we’ve watched ABCTV 7pm News (Vic) for 40 years. It’s an addiction – like heroin, crystal meth, fentanyl. Close to 7pm we get twitchy for our fix – will the iView app work on our Smart TV (IQ just above 100)? Up to Tuesday (September 26), we accepted the assurances of the ABC Charter that ABC flagship TV would be impartial, professional and devoid of green-Left spin. But last night’s news (Tues) shattered my illusions.
I must now put in a complaint to the ABC Ombudsman (properly, Ombudswoman) Fiona Cameron. She will consider it carefully before, as I expect, rejecting it , her role being “to build on the credibility and trust Australian audiences have in the ABC.”
The same item was in the NSW 7pm news (21.30mins), and I assume around the nation. This item even wound up on the France 24 news channel, in English, albeit with some clips that didn’t make the ABC compilation. These dual versions enable me to do a compare and contrast exercise.
The item is about the Electoral Commission’s job of setting up polling stations in remote areas like Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands. The distances are formidable and the AEC ‘s efforts commendable. The ABC itself threw in substantial resources to get its reporters around.
So what’s my beef? Well, judging by the ABC footage, the Yes vote out there is 100 per cent. A Yes tally of 50 per cent, 60 per cent or 70 per cent might be remotely (pun) plausible. In some tiny communities (the ABC mentions one comprising ten people), even 90 per cent might be the go. But 100 per cent across the board?
This smacks of ABC desperation as polls show the Yes armies heading for their Waterloo.[1] A potent argument for No is that the Aboriginal community is thoroughly split, so why should we balandas deliver them a permanent pack of Aboriginal-Industry aristocrats?
I can imagine the conversation at Ultimo as the 7pm News piece is packaged into shape:
ABC Senior Editor: Remember we’re storytellers. Let’s go through all these grabs and vox pops and make them tell a story.
ABC Junior Editor: Good thinking! What story line do you have in mind?
ABC Senior Editor: [Guffaws] Well doh! Why are we here, you cretin?
So here’s the anatomy of the finished item. ABC Melbourne’s Tamara Oudyn, dressed all in white (is that a wrong note?), teleprompts how the AEC is encouraging vote-averse blacks to vote.
14.24 mins: Shot of shed for remote polling, with two and a half big VOTE YES! signs outside.
14.26: ABC reporter Roxanne Fitzgerald says, “Signs are up and teams are ready to go.” She must mean, “YES” signs are up and “YES” teams are ready to go.
14.29: An Aboriginal man in a white YES 23 shirt hands out a voting card.
14.32: An Aboriginal woman lodges her vote. She is holding a pamphlet which from the logo, colour and text I can identify as a YES pamphlet.
14.37: We’re now in the Tiwi Islands. ABC vox pops an Elder Bernard Tipoloura who says, “I strongly believe in people talking for us in Canberra.” Behind him are two VOTE YES! placards.
14.50: Another vox pop Aboriginal says, “Yeah, Vote YES! We need some changes!” He waves his VOTE YES! sign at the camera.
15.14: Remote Voter Service’s Aboriginal Ebony Williams Costa says, “And I’m also about getting out and informing people about Aboriginal rights.” This seems code for YES. I can’t imagine her pushing their “rights” not to have a permanent non-elected Voice assembly. Reporter Roxanne says a funeral and sorry-business is reducing voter turnout.
15.43: Marion Scrymgour, federal Labor MHR for Lingiari, is interviewed with three VOTE YES signs in the background.
15.54: Two young Aboriginal women are shown casting their votes. The one on the left holds a single flyer for YES.
16.00: Two Aboriginals with VOTE YES! shirts stand in front of no fewer than five VOTE YES! signs. Roxanne says, “Despite traditional low voter turnout, remote communities will see more voter service than ever before, with voting extended by a week to try to ensure everyone gets a say.” Everyone, that is, who votes YES, judging by the ABC item.
16.36: Ends.
To sum up, in the piece’s two minutes we see 13 “VOTE YES! ” signs, three “VOTE YES!” T-shirts, two “VOTE YES!” flyers, and the ABC finds three vox-poppers to deliver YES messaging. The ABC’s score for the “NO” camp: zero, zero, zero, and zero respectively.
Maybe Ombudswoman Cameron will tell me that the ABC crews trudged hill and spinifex looking for NO case material out there to balance the item and, sadly, none was to be found.
A friend of mine who knows how things work in such remote places, suggests this might even be true. The reason: each little settlement is controlled by a “big man” who well recognises that a Canberra Voice could operate to reinforce his power and patronage. Hence before the ABC’s visit, Big Man has patrolled to ensure no trace of NO material is seen and filmed. He might not even need to, because no-one out there wants to tangle with him.
Now let’s check out the France 24 TV version from stringer James Vasina.
He’s apparently taken a feed from the ABC as some shots are the same or similar.[2] But he runs other clips which the ABC perhaps left on its cutting-room floor.
He includes a scene (0.13mins) at Mowanjum on the mainland, showing a community store – and with a VOTE YES sign outside.
At 0.24 Vasina has an elderly man saying, “Our voice has to be heard somewhere, especially Parliament House and all that. It’s hard to understand what it really means. A few people voted NO, I’m not sure why, I just decided to go with this.”
So there we have it, remote NO voters do exist, but the ABC couldn’t find any or found them and ignored them.
Vasina (0.47) then abandons the backblocks in favor of high political theatre, saying,
The Prime Minister blames these No votes on misinformation campaigns, given that the Referendum aims to provide Australian’s indigenous people with a representative body to advise Parliament.
The PM doesn’t seem respectful of us NO voters, and Vasina omits that the Voice would also have the right to hector the executive. By omission, Vasina implies to Francophiles that Aborigines don’t already have advisory systems, let alone a peak $4.5-billion-a-year body, the NIAA, with 1300 staff, plus heaven knows how many other bureaucratic beasts.
Vasina at 1.00 wheels out Mr Albanese himself, but not Opposition Leader Dutton or an inconvenient Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, to spruik the YES case. The PM tells France 24 he is confident that remote Aborigines will “overwhelmingly” vote YES.
At 1.14 we see the AEC sign “Polling Place” on a remote-station fence. About 1.5 metres distant and tied to the same fence are two VOTE YES! signs (is that legal?). The cameraman (again, I’m assuming it’s an ABC person) pans into loving close-up of the upper VOTE YES! sign, then scrolls down and pans lovingly on the second VOTE YES! sign. Two more VOTE YES! signs are inside the yard. A fifth VOTE YES! is across the track. Some message here perhaps?
Unlike the ABC, France 24 then plugs in (1.35) stock footage of perhaps 200 people at a city rally. At first sight it’s a YES rally, with a chap in foreground wearing a T-shirt with “Stop the Genocide” on the back. It’s actually a NO rally and the TV crew (ABC?) are sneakily emphasising a lone anti-NO campaigner.
At 1.40 someone there holds up a sign (at last!), “VOTE NO – Fairaustralia.com.au”. At 1.48 we even get to see two more VOTE NO signs, one reading, VOTE NO – Do Not Comply”. The item then fades out with Vasina mentioning that conservatives don’t want Australia divided on racial lines.
If you ask me, Vasina is out of his depth in this coverage, and maybe allows in a smidgeon of NO material by accident or because it’s tough trying to explain complex things to a beret-wearing audience 17,000km away.
My task now is to persuade my rusted-on ABC household to subscribe to Sky News, or at second-best, haul up France 24 on YouTube. Although head of the household, I still prefer consensus.
Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
[1] The Duke of Wellington is running the NO camp.
[2] I might be wrong and the shots might have come from some TV pool arrangement.
Climate Scepticism 
There’s a bit of a theory that this Voice referendum will be Australia’s ‘Brexit’ moment, where the wokeist metropolitan elite who claim moral and numerical supremacy are trounced by a larger no-nonsense nay vote. It would certainly be good not to have a vast new power base custom-built next to parliament house in Canberra especially for the unelected radical race-politics wing of that same elite. But as to bastions of ruling-class wokethink such as the ABC learning from defeat and broadening their views: write as many letters to their ombudsman as you like Tony, we both know it will never happen.
LikeLike
Hope it will be Oz ‘Brexit ‘Moment. In a multinational country like Oz, no preference
for country of origin, one citizen, one vote.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Please keep us posted as to any reply your complaint generates.
LikeLike
Tony Thomas
Your comment is awaiting moderation. This is a preview; your comment will be visible after it has been approved.
I’m pleased to see that with commendable speed, the ABC Ombudsman’s Office has responded to my complaint, as follows, Dear Tony Thomas, Thank you for contacting the ABC about ABC News. Your complaint has been received by the ABC’s Ombudsman’s Office. The office is separate to and independent of content making areas within the ABC. Our role is to review and, where appropriate, investigate complaints about ABC content concerning the ABC’s editorial standards. The standards require the ABC to present a diversity of perspectives over time, but do not require that every perspective receives equal time, nor that every facet of every argument is presented within a single discussion or program. The presentation of perspectives on contentious issues should include principal relevant perspectives and reflect a balance that follows the weight of evidence. I note that ‘yes’ imagery can be seen in the report you referred to, however the editorial focus of this report was about voting and voter turnout in remote communities, rather than arguments for or against the voice. In relation to your complaint, the relevant program area has explained: The ABC Darwin newsroom were invited to attend a remote polling station on the Tiwi Islands at Wurrumiyanga with the Australian Electoral Commission. Like most indigenous communities in the NT, the communities are guided by their Elders and we have found in travelling across the NT to cover The Voice, some communities are mostly on the NO side, where are other communities are mostly on the YES side. The Tiwi Islands, in speaking with those on the ground, are planning on voting yes. The camera operator filmed the remote setup and while there were ‘yes’ posters, there were no visible ‘no’ posters. If there were, the video editor would have included a mix of the posters to show the situation on the ground. The Darwin newsroom have covered both ‘no’ and ‘yes’ sides, and often not with equal time across each story. Only yesterday the newsroom ran a ‘no’ article which was almost 100% giving voice and weight to the No campaign. The ABC’s role in relation to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum is to provide fact-based, trustworthy, impartial information and, in doing so, foster engagement and strengthen Australia’s democracy. The ABC has committed to comprehensive reporting on matters relating to the Voice in the lead-up to the vote, representing a diversity of perspectives relevant to the focus and context of each individual story. This includes producing special programs which explore the Voice in detail and a broad range of content about the Voice posted on the ABC website. In addition to accurately explaining what the Voice is, the ABC will continue to ensure that substantive and significant perspectives in favour and against are heard in a respectful manner, and make efforts to include less prominent perspectives, especially those of Indigenous community members. This is in recognition of the fact that the Voice Referendum is an event of national significance, with particular relevance for Indigenous Australians. While we have decided not to investigate your complaint, please be assured that your concerns are noted. Thank you again for taking the time to write to us. Should you be dissatisfied with this response to your complaint, you may be able to pursue the matter with the Australian Communications and Media Authority: http://www.acma.gov.au Your sincerely, James Investigations Officer, ABC Ombudsman’s Office.
Tony Thomas
Your comment is awaiting moderation. This is a preview; your comment will be visible after it has been approved.
I see that links in the ABC response have failed to transmit when I posted it. For example, the Ombudsman says, with a link, “Only yesterday the [Darwin] newsroom ran a ‘no’ article which was almost 100% giving voice and weight to the No campaign.” However, the link https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-28/lidia-thorpe-urges-remote-communities-vote-no-voice-referendum/102901124 is to a story involving Senator Lidia Thorpe, pictured with raised fist, attacking the Voice choice from the left as not radical enough. Moreover, it includes a two-minute video of PM Albanese, the ABC’s Fran Kelly and an Aboriginal woman all spruiking the Yes case. As if that is not enough, the ABC includes there a second short video with the Aboriginal woman, Fran Kelly and a lawyer Tony McAvoy SC continuing to spruik for Yes. Another link cited by the Ombudsman as indicating fair play by the ABC includes, https://about.abc.net.au/media-room/the-indigenous-voice-to-parliament-referendum-on-the-abc/ “Amid distrust, skepticism and misinformation, this series aims to bridge knowledge gaps with entertaining, engaging, and informative stories. From the team behind Planet America and China Tonight, in collaboration with the Indigenous Affairs team, this series will focus on communities to show how the Referendum campaign and result will ultimately redefine how Australia views itself in 2023. Four Corners – Monday 11 September at 8:30pm Dan Bourchier travels to North, West and Eastern Australia asking what sovereignty/ self-determination means and looks like to First Nations people and where a Voice to Parliament fits with those visions.” Another such link in the Ombudsman’s claim of fair treatment of the No case, starts with Maori urgings for Treaty https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-29/what-is-the-treaty-of-waitangi-and-how-does-it-work/102902482– “When asked what his thoughts were if Australia were to embark on a treaty, Minister Kelvin Davis responded by saying: ‘It’s a unifying moment. The amazing thing for Australia is that this is your moment … but I think you have to get it right because this is the foundation for your country, for years to come,” he said.” On the same supposedly even-handed page is a piece of misinformation “debunking misinformation” , eg that the Uluru statement is more than one page. Another piece reads, “Victorian Supreme Court judge uses retirement speech to call for constitutional recognition.” In this welter of Yes coverage, there are one or two subordinate pieces involving the No/Don’t Know case in a glancing way, and one piece supposedly setting out both Yes and No cases. This one is a shocker: An ABC woman sets out the Yes case, and another ABC woman, political reporter Claudia Long, purports to discuss the No case but does no such thing. https://www.abc.net.au/news/voice-to-parliament-referendum. By drawing attention to such ABC efforts reeking of bias, the Ombudsman has surely scored an own-goal.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Amazing!
It doesn’t sound like it. No explanation of why the version that appeared in France was so different? The fact that it was so different rather undermines some of the claims made in the response, I should have thought.
Will you appeal?
As for the speed of the response telling you that your complaint is unfounded – That’s very impressive. The BBC puts you on hold for months, and you often have to send numerous reminders before it gets round to telling you that your complaint is unjustified.
LikeLike
No I won’t appeal. A while back I ran an appeal to the broadcasting authority, got knocked back, and appealled even further to the Commonwealth Ombudsman, whose office, like the ABC, responded (negatively) in a remarkable 3-4 days.
In the ABC’s reply, the most remarkable part is them saying, more or less, that “Elders” in various communities control the vote of their community — never mind democracy
LikeLiked by 2 people
That’s how they operate – grind us down so that we can’t take making a huge effort for no result. It’s an effective policy. I can’t say I blame you though. Far more constructive use of your time to write an article for Cliscep and Quadrant instead!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Tony, thank you for your latest epistle about attempts seemingly to give Aborigines more political clout than other races in Australia. This is the first I have heard anything about it. I am especially interested because for many years I lived in Canada, another country with a large population of indigenous (=First Nation) peoples, many of whom feel themselves overwhelmed by the majority white population (even though that population is very diverse and commonly divided). My wife and I were especially interested in racial matters in Canada since we adopted a Chipewyan daughter, and as she grew up she suffered some racial prejudice in the 1970s (interestingly when we moved to the USA (California and Texas) this prejudice entirely disappeared, only for it to resurface when we moved back to Ontario).
There would have been absolutely no way, in the 1970s, for Canada to attempt anything like that being proposed in Australia. I wonder if things have changed sufficiently there by now? Somehow I doubt it.
LikeLike
I’ve had some to-and-fro about the referendum in the comments section of a regional news website here in Australia. What I’ve found is that the “yes” side discount most of the “no” case as “misinformation”. It goes along with “yes” proponents also believing their own views aren’t merely the other side of the debate, but transcendentally elevated above the fray, adorned with a golden halo of neutrality. From their sincere perspective, it’s about higher beings (them) who hold the transcendent truth against vulgar oafs irrationally riddled with brainwashed misinformation. Most readers here, I think, would have come across that attitude.
So as regards Tony’s dealings with the ABC: the ABC, in their minds anyway, share in this golden halo of neutrality. They would sincerely like to — nay, really believe they actually do — report the “no” case as part of their chartered commitment to unbiased reporting. But they also sincerely believe most of the “no” case is misinformation, which they feel they can’t propagate, especially now that polite society regards it as a criminal offence. So they end up reporting very little of the “no” case, but at the same time have the self-satisfaction that they’re completely unbiased. That seems to be the dynamic.
LikeLike
“‘Aboriginal people do not want to be permanent victims’
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price on why an ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament’ would tear Australia apart.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/02/aboriginal-people-do-not-want-to-be-permanent-victims/
LikeLiked by 1 person
This article in the Saturday Paper “Anatomy of a ‘No’: The people voting against the Voice” sets out to find out who is voting No. There is not much doubt where Saturday’s allegiance lies, and it sets about describing “No” voters like a Victorian scientist describing a rotifer. But I thought there might be some parallels with the Net Zero factions:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2023/09/30/anatomy-no-the-people-voting-against-the-voice
Despite skirting around the issue, Saturday seems incapable of mentioning what I would call the obvious reason for voting No, which is that every individual should have exactly the same rights and that there should be no privileged groups.
[The article is followed by another about Australia’s forthcoming summer, which I haven’t read yet, but I’m sure it will be an entertainment of sorts.]
LikeLiked by 1 person
Spiked did well by interviewing Jacinta Price. She is the leading proponent of the “no” case, and has very much risen to the occasion.
As JIT points out, the primary reason to vote “no” is that constitutional power for extra political representation based on race is inherently racially divisive. Only those metropolitan university graduates mentioned by the pollster have trouble accepting that point, which is probably why “no” is polling almost 2:1 stronger than “yes”.
But there’s another widely made comment, which is that the Voice could be legislated without requiring constitutional entrenchment. “Yes” activists really don’t like that to be pointed out, and do their best to conflate the two.
Look, it’ll probably be defeated. But as with covid and climate change, activists won’t interpret that as a signal there’s something amiss with their policies, but rather that a majority of the population is immoral, ignorant and bigoted; and will conclude it just proves that they themselves are superior beings who need to consolidate their own class power, because only they have the right qualities. In Australia, that will be dangerous, because the race activists cling to the ideology of “frontier wars”, and will interpret defeat as indicating the wars are ongoing; and that in turn, they will need to become even more militant, angry and uncompromising. And because they’re really just a wing of the ruling elite, who are already prone to believing in their own class superiority, they’ll intensify the elite’s contempt for the rest of the country, in a distinctly vicious and embittered way. So either way, “yes” or “no”, Australia’s in for a hard time.
LikeLiked by 2 people