The board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is required, according to the legislation, “to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognized standards of objective journalism”. 

I don’t want to be melodramatic but can a case be made that this tax-funded ABC is not just a cesspit of green-left activism but actually evil? I’m leaning to this conclusion after viewing grotesque climate misinformation that ABC Education promoted on Wednesday (7/10) for teachers to use against pupils aged 12-16. As Matthew Verse 18:6 says, 

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Kids trust the school authority figures. They have unformed brains and little ability to distinguish adults’ truth and lies, especially if lies are accompanied by powerful emotional stimuli which ABC Education’s film clips use to cunning effect. Abuse of children’s bodies is a heinous crime, so also is abuse of their untutored minds.

 So is the ABC actually evil? The broadcaster was bad enough last July airing and then defending its fantasies about murder of Gina Rinehart by sodomising her with a stick. 

[For non-Australian readers, iron-ore magnate Gina Rinehart is Australia’s richest person, worth some $US25b. She campaigns against green lawfare and climate alarmism, hence earning the ire of the green-left-woke ABC. Despite public uproar over broadcast  of the fantasy, ABC chiefs took a fortnight to take down the video and issue a half-baked apology].

Such treatment of its political opponents is an ABC tradition stretching back decades: here’s Chief Justice Paul de Jersey in 1998 commenting on how the ABC had traduced One Nation’s Pauline Hanson in 1997. 

[One Nation for several decades has been a fringe right-wing and anti-immigration party with 5% voter support, and essentially a one-woman band under Pauline Hanson. Since December’s massacre by  two Islamists of Jews at Bondi, One Nation has shot to about 30% support nationally, at the expense of the two main parties Labor and Liberal/Nationals which have operated as a uni-party for climate alarm and excessive immigration. For the first time in Australian history, we now have a three-way electoral contest with the winners to be dependent on our voter multi-preference system. Gina Rinehart backs One Nation].

Pauline’s lawsuit back a quarter-century was over the ABC repeatedly playing a gay “comedian’s” song about her, titled with obvious overtones “Backdoor Man”. 

The ABC spent taxpayer funds on silks to defend its calumnies through the courts, in the process acquiring a black eye from all the judges.

Justice Ambrose at the initial court case commented ,

There’s a political overtone to the whole exercise which seems to denigrate her personally by making assertions as to her sexual preference and her abnormal sexual attraction with respect to children and so on…I can’t imagine anybody listening to that production would not conclude that the assertion was that Pauline Hanson was a paedophile … or that she was a homosexual and rejoiced in the fact… I can’t imagine that one can avoid liability for injury to reputation by simply prefacing it by saying, `Well, this is satirical, don’t take this seriously,’ and then playing it over and over and over again.

The ABC appealed, its counsel arguing that to stop ABC broadcasting Back Door Man would infringe “free and general discussion of public matters fundamental to our democratic society.” Chief Justice de Jersey, a decade later Governor of Queensland, swatted the ABC,

These were grossly offensive imputations relating to the sexual orientation and preference of a Member of Parliament and her performance which the appellant [ABC] in no degree supports as accurate and which were paraded as part of an apparently fairly mindless effort at cheap denigration… 

He further explained,

Before the Chamber Judge, [Hanson’s counsel] contended that the broadcast material gave rise to imputations that she is a homosexual, a prostitute, involved in unnatural sexual practices, associated with the Ku Klux Klan, a man and/or a transvestite and involved in or party to sexual activities with children. The [ABC] essentially contended that the material amounted merely to vulgar abuse and was not defamatory. [My underlines]

Bottom line: the ABC condoned, defended and spent thousands of taxpayer dollars in a failed effort to continue its “vulgar abuse” of Hanson. Two decades later it was still calling her “Pauline Pantsdown” ,  an insult it would never apply to, say, Labor stalwarts like ex-PM Julia Gillard or Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong. The ABC complaints people told me it was perfectly OK by them. The ABC today, reeking virtue, rails against being banned from “Pantsdown’s” press conferences.

Having libellously accused Hanson of going after kids, the ABC itself runs a sideline grooming small children towards unorthodox sexual lifestyles. These include attempts by an ABCQueer leader to recruit toddlers aged 3-5 to Drag Queen Story Time performances. ^[1] Then there was the ABC Compass screening on Easter Sunday last year of a pagan “Special” featuring a cult of giant penises and children from about ten upwards; and next a reverential depiction of children from five upwards as they made preparations for and joined in the 2018 Sydney gays’ Mardi Gras.^[2] The response from ABC Complaints and toothless watchdog ACMA was “nothing to see here”.

I also have to mention reluctantly the adult use of ABC premises for sex acts and practices too depraved to describe, see here (not safe for work). If you click such links anyway, address your complaints to ABC Ultimo, Sodom 2007 or ABC Southbank, Gomorrah 3006.

Now let’s turn to the climate brainwashing exercise ABC Education promoted to teachers and parents for kids aged 12-16 on Wednesday. It’s touted in the ABC Education email newsletter and titled, ‘The Matter of Facts: Is a shared reality possible anymore?’

Ironically, the content (cobbled from recent ABC output) purports to warn the kids about the perils of misinformation. Presenter is Hamish MacDonald, best-forgotten leading ABC’s defunct Q&A quiz. The teachers, parents and kids are told:

ABC Education brings you high-quality educational content to use at home and in the classroom. All our resources are free and mapped to the Australian Curriculum.

In this case, the curriculum involves Civics and Citizenship, English, Media Literacy and Technologies.  

Hamish has morphed here into an ABC-style misinformation expert, pinning his lesson for kids on his own 2019-20 coverage of the big bushfires. The alleged mis- and dis-information that he attacks is that the bushfires strongly involved arson – as indeed they did. He claims to kids, instead, and without a scintilla of scientific evidence, that they were really caused by climate change. In other words, about 1degC of Australian warming in the past century^[3] is to blame for bushfires in 2019. Those fires, which the ABC clip calls “unprecedented”, burnt 7.5m hectares. 

This instantly raises the question: did global warming also cause the “Black Thursday” bushfires of 1851 which burnt a quarter of Victoria? You can view that horrific devastation as painted by William Strutt: his canvas hangs in Victoria’s State Library.

Did coal-fired power stations and gas-guzzling SUVs cause those fires in 1851? I doubt it.

Back in 1974-75 across five States, 117m hectares burnt, about 15% of the entire continent, when CO2 was only 330 parts per million and not 428ppm like today. There were big fires in 1951, with 4.5m hectares burnt around western NSW and 3m hectares burnt around Charleville, Qld. CO2 in the air was then only 312ppm. Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday was Australia’s deadliest and killed 173 people, but the burnt area was relatively small, below 0.5m hectares.

Drawing the big picture, fires’ annual extent globally is measured by satellite. This data shows that in the past two decades the extent has declined by 26%. The extent last calendar year was 16% below the long-term average, and the second-lowest since 2002.^[4]

So what’s Hamish’s evidence that global warming is to blame? Here it is: Because Tim Flannery’s [donor-funded] Climate Council spokesman Greg Mullins AO says so. 

Hamish to kids: (2:18mins)

People were traumatised. Communities were confused and angry. They demanded answers. How does this happen? How can we stop it? 

Greg Mullins, former NSW Fire Chief and Climate Councillor: 

The facts are that Australia is burning while we turn a blind eye to the driving force, which is climate change and a warming planet. 

It’s the Climate Council’s poobah Tim Flannery who predicted water-starved Perth becoming a ghost metropolis this century, adding his lamentations about endless drought – Even the rain that falls won’t fill the dams. His doom-crying panicked State governments into wasting billions on desalination plants along the east coast. 

The Climate Council’s avowed mission is to train the media to add the inanity “climate-fuelled” or similar to every mention of a fire, flood and storm. The ‘progressive’ media has lapped up the Council’s instruction.^[5] Council luminary Distinguished Professor Lesley Hughes has even trained hairdressers to preach climate alarm to lady customers held captive under salons’ hairdryers.

Climate Councillor Greg Mullins appears to kids to be credible because he’s a former NSW Fire Commissioner. I’m sure he was great at holding a hose, but his climate-science credentials are zero (Master of Management from Macquarie U, and various tickets for firefighting and disaster response). 

Can 12yo’s distinguish between a firefighter and a climate scientist? No way, especially when ABC Education has reduced their brains to jelly with its prior footage of blazing forests, burning houses, distraught screaming housewives, anxious horses and a pretty little wallaby in the middle of the road licking its burns.

Hot days or weeks might well be one of many factors behind a bushfire, though a significant factor these days is greenies curbing precautionary burns of fuel-laden forests. Eminent orthodox climate scientists (not of sceptic persuasion) have confessed to their myopic focus on “climate” and to deliberate downplaying of other major factors in wildfires: here’s America’s Dr Patrick T. Brown, 5/9/2023: “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” ^[6] . Summing up, global warming as a cause/driver of unprecedented wildfires is pure ABC b/s.

I’ll now take a look at Hamish’s message to kids that arson is insignificant in the recent upsurge of fires. It’s tricky because “arson” can cover both criminality and wilful or inadvertent negligence, like the butt thrown out the driver’s window.  As the Qld Audit Office said a decade ago, up to half of all Australian bushfires look arson-suspicious.

But here’s Hamish to kids, demonising as misinformers those citing arson causation, or Hamish even suggesting they’re agents of bot-creating hidden powers out to dispute the global warming/bushfire narrative:

Hamish ( 03:16): So, at this point in the season, 24 people had been arrested in New South Wales on charges of arson. But only 1% of the land burned across the state during that summer could be officially attributed to arson. Lightning sparked the vast majority of the fires. Now, researchers couldn’t identify the origins of the [“arson emergency”] hashtag, but they found arson emergency could be a disinformation campaign designed to undermine the link between fires and climate change.

ABC person (04.00): Dr Timothy Graham from Queensland University of Technology analyzed more than 300 accounts using the arson emergency hashtag, and a third of them could be from bots. 

Hamish: Not only individuals, but also media, as well as potentially malicious actors, are picking up on this content and spreading it. It spreads like wildfire…

Hamish probably picked up from an academic paper his “1%” of NSW bushfire area as arson-caused. The paper is in the so-called peer-reviewed international journal Fire, which is “open access” meaning   authors pay to get their work printed while readers read it free. The journal boasts that an article takes only a month from submission to publication, whereas blue-chip research papers typically take 6-12 months or literally years. Recognition of Reviewers: “Reviewers whose reports are timely and of high quality receive an APC discount voucher for a future publication in an MDPI journal. Become a reviewer.

 The first lines of this paper’s abstract on the NSW fire data say it all – it sounds more like crap from Flannery’s Climate Council than any scientific cogitation: 

“The 2019–20 Australian fire season was heralded as emblematic of the catastrophic harm wrought by climate change…We argue that the rate of change in fire risk delivered by climate change is outstripping the capacity of our ecological and social systems to adapt”. 

And the body copy includes,

The fires were widely viewed as emblematic of the catastrophic environmental and social harm caused by climate change.

Hamish’s factoids (probably) from such papers might be persuasive material for kids, but not for sentient adults. Arson is an inherently difficult crime to detect, prosecute and convict: culprits might be sighted by chance in action, or stupid enough to incriminate themselves. Police often catch kids and teenagers but merely give them cautions. 

Hamish cites 24 arrests in NSW during the Black Saturday fires, but that was, as he says, early in the season. He refrained from adding later police counts. 

Here is data via AI from NSW Police and RMIT-ABC ^[7] from 1 August 2019- 24 January 2020. At 6 January there were 24 people charged with alleged arson, shrunk from an original pool of 183 people with 205 alleged offences including negligence and breach of fire bans.^[8] By 24 January, police updated the tally to 55 people facing prosecution, within an overall total of 267 people and 328 alleged offences. This is a better guide than Hamish’s “24” arrests involving “only 1%” of burnt area. If people were running arson hashtags on social media, they were hardly misinforming.

And why does Hamish in his homily to kids ignore the other States? Queensland: 109 alleged offenders – 36 adults and 73 juveniles. Of 1,068 reported bushfires, 114 or 11% were described as deliberately lit. A tally from fire authority QFES was 3% deliberately lit; 6% suspicious; 19% accidental/natural; and 72% undetermined.

SA: 12 people charged. 

WA: 10 charged. 

Tas: six charges but the Fire Service said 60% of burnt area generally was arson-related (contrasting with Hamish’s “1%” in NSW). 

NT: six charged. 

 General sentencing nationally was two to seven years for arsonists burning areas like 23,000 hectares or (pre-dating Black Summer 2019) lighting as many as seven fires, some costing $30m plus the firefighting expenses.

Data from the serious fires in Greece, Spain and France in recent years include more than 800 people investigated or arrested across two years in Spain, 1000+ in Greece and 50 in France including one man lighting 13 fires. The data include both arson and what gets called arson-by-negligence. France’s Le Monde reported that malicious acts represented 29% of identified French wildfire causes in 2025.

 ABC Education is determined to make kids absorb its global warming/bushfire narrative: 

Things to think about

1. What was the [arson] disinformation campaign in this clip designed to achieve?Can you think of any other disinformation campaigns that you have come across or heard about？ [I suggest the ABC’s employment of a Hamas fighter masquerading as its Gaza reporter – see Australian, 2 October last, p1]
2. Give some examples of who or what a “malicious actor” might be. [I nominate the ABC itself].

I’ve been a serial complainer to the ABC about ABC Education’s political-left training of kids in school. Not once has the ABC and/or its Ombudsman found anything to criticise. 

In federal Parliament Pauline Hanson in 2017 did a deal with Liberal-wet Prime Minister Turnbull designed to hold the ABC properly to account over bias. Turnbull acquiesced to ensure he got One Nation’s Senate votes on his so-called media ownership reforms. Hanson’s price was proposed amendments to require “fair and balanced” reporting by the ABC, and BBC-style salary transparency of ABC on-air bigshots like Leigh Sales and Sarah Ferguson and others who earn $200,000-plus.

Sadly, the amendment Bills   lapsed in 2019 after Turnbull had left office. At the rate One Nation is now polling (around 30% both State and Federally, as high or higher than the two main parties), there is some chance that real ABC reform will return as a possibility.

After this roundabout exploration, a suggested answer to the question of whether the ABC is evil is, “Not always but often. And for the safety of children, ABC Education should be disbanded immediately and all Working-With-Children passes of ABC staffers withdrawn for review.”

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^[1] ABCQueer caters to the 600 or so LGBTQIA+’s on the ABC payroll. I derive this figure from the ABC’s disclosure in July 2023 that it has 12.9% of staff identifying as LGBTQIA+ (page 6) and total staff  today of 4,600.

^[2] “Mardi Gras + Me follows a group of young people as they prepare to march in the 40th Sydney Mardi Gras Parade. They meet some famous LGBTQI faces, and create banners and costumes to celebrate this historic event in style!”

^[3] The BoM claims 1.5degC which I’ve discounted for its exaggerations and subjective manipulations

^[4][4] This data covers both wildfires and agricultural burning.

^[5] Climate Council annual report 2023-24 p22: “Over the summer, when media attention is focussed on unnatural disasters and extreme weather events but often fails to make the connection to climate pollution, our team secured:

› 693 pieces of media coverage about worsening

extreme weather

 › 89% of this coverage linked extreme weather to

climate change

› 68% of this coverage linked extreme weather to

climate change and fossil fuels”.

^[6] Brown argued that prestigious journals encourage researchers to emphasise climate change’s contribution while giving insufficient attention to human ignitions, fuel loads, forest management and other factors. He used his own Nature paper on California wildfires as the example. 

^[7] Sources: the reproduced NSW Police release of 6 January, NSW Police update of 24 January, and RMIT ABC’s February compilation of police responses. Mirage News

^[8] The Australian’s report of the data at the time was challenged but the Press Council found for the newspaper.