COMMENT BY GERARD HENDERSON FOR THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN – SATURDAY

4 OCTOBER 2025

For evidence that the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster is out of touch and all but devoid of viewpoint diversity, look no further than the ABC’s senior management. The ABC Board is appointed by the government – with the exception of managing director and editor-in-chief (currently Hugh Marks) and staff-appointed director (currently Laura Tingle). The former is chosen by the ABC board; the latter by ABC staff.

Marks, as editor-in-chief, has the authority to make individual decisions with respect to the organisation’s journalism. In recent years no one in this position has done so with a successful outcome. It requires considerable intellectual courage to take on high-profile ABC presenters and producers.

However, it is the duty of the ABC Board, under Section 8 (i) of the Australian Broadcasting Act 1983, among other things, “to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the Corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”. It is not evident that ABC boards over the years have upheld this requirement.

The ABC board does not – and should not – determine what journalists put to air (on radio and television) or online (in print). Like all boards, the ABC board’s essential role is to oversee the operations of the organisation. This includes ensuring that the organisation is acting in accordance with the ABC Act on a long-term basis.

There is only one specific role given to the board with respect to the public broadcaster’s output. Namely, the choice of who will deliver the annual Boyer Lecture – which has been in existence since 1959. It is customary for the ABC chair (currently Kim Williams) to be the lead concerning the choice of an Australian speaker or, in this instance, speakers.

On September 9, the ABC put out a statement entitled “2025 Boyer Lecture series examines Australia as a Radical Experiment in Democracy”. It continued: “Academics, writers and policy experts will explore Australia: A Radical Experiment in Democracy across a series of five orations for the 2025 Boyer Lecture series, hosted by its creative director Julia Baird.”

In the body of the media statement, however, Williams describes her position as that of an “interlocutor”. It seems that it will be more like the latter than the former. At the end of the statement, before the 2025 speakers were identified, the following comment is made: “In another first for the Boyers, the ABC will partner with The Monthly to expand on the reach and impact of the lecture series.”

It is not clear whether Williams and his other Board members know (apart from Tingle) that The Monthly (editor-in-chief Erik Jensen; editor Michael Williams) is an avowedly left-wing magazine. How about that? Can anyone imagine the ABC partnering with, say, a conservative magazine like Quadrant? Not on your nelly, as the saying goes.

As creative director of the 2025 Boyer Lecture, it can only be assumed that Baird played a key role in choosing the five speakers for the 2025 series.

They are Justin Wolfers (the Australian-born professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan), John Anderson (the former leader of the Nationals and deputy prime minister in the John Howard-led Coalition government), Larissa Behrendt (an Indigenous professor at the University of Technology Sydney), Amelia Lester (deputy editor of Foreign Policy magazine in Washington DC) and James Curran (professor of modern history at the University of Sydney).

All five are well qualified for the task of assessing Australian democracy. But it’s fair to say that four are left-of-centre or “progressives” (as left-of-centre types like to be called these days). And then there is John Anderson, who seems to have been handed the role of the token conservative. How’s that for balance – of the ABC kind?

The Monthly describes Baird as an ABC reporter as well as an author. She also writes a column for Nine’s The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Curran, who criticises the foreign policy of the Coalition and Labor from the left, is a columnist for Nine’s Australian Financial Review. No other media organisation gets a gong.

In the ABC statement, Williams declared that the 2025 Boyer series “will not consist of one thinker” but rather five speakers “with closely argued divergent viewpoints which Julia will then explore in conversation”. How naïve can an ABC chair get? There is scant viewpoint diversity among this lot.

The October 2025 issue of The Monthly contains a 5000-word article by Baird titled “Watershed: How resilient is Australian democracy?” In it the author quotes primarily from left-of-centre academics and commentators along with the World Economic Forum – in addition to the five Boyer lecturers.

As far as I can work it out, all are inner-city, highly educated types who have scant connection with those of lesser means and formal education who live in the outer suburbs and regions. With the exception of the tertiary qualified, rural-based Anderson. In her article, Baird runs the line that President Donald J. Trump is in the process of building “an authoritarian state, or a military or parliamentary that answers only to him – that puts him in total control”.

From this, Baird argues that “Australian democracy is at a watershed”. What a load of tosh. As to the United States, Trump is a long, long way from attaining “total control” even if he wanted to do so. Moreover, democracy in Australia is functioning well.

Perhaps Williams might have broken with tradition this year and invited the British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer to deliver the Boyer Lecture. In his speech this week to the British Labour Party conference, Starmer appealed to voters outside of BBC viewers/listeners and Guardian readers.

Starmer indicated that he understood the problems faced by working people, supported those who were proudly flying the Union Jack, acknowledged that Britain had placed too much faith in globalisation, stated that those who want secure frontiers are not racist – and more besides. He also criticised Nigel Farage’s Reform party and, to a lesser extent, the Conservatives led by Kemi Badenoch.

Starmer’s patriotic sentiments are unlikely to be heard at the 2025 Boyer Lectures – beyond Anderson’s (token) contribution – as the ABC continues to be an essentially conservative free zone.

 

* * * *

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

* * * * *