The War on the ABC: Whose Side Are You on?

"Whose side are you on?" Tony Abbott asked the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this week.

It's a sentiment he's voiced before. In January 2014, Abbott said the ABC was taking "everyone's side but Australia's".

It's not clear what Abbott is referring to exactly when he talks about sides. Democracy vs terror? Truth vs fiction? Labor vs Liberal? Alien vs Predator? He seemed pretty happy with the ABC last week, as the broadcaster aired The Killing Season, a three-part documentary dissecting the catastrophic implosion of the Rudd-Gillard governments. It's certainly provided him with a lot of material during Parliament Question Time, most of which have gone something like this:

Bill Shorten: "Can the Prime Minister explain the contents of this report?"

Tony Abbott: "Well, this report, unlike you, did not stab two Prime Ministers in the back…"

And so on.

The Prime Minister even did the unthinkable and thanked the ABC in the Parliament, making a big show of it and garnering big laughs from his front bench. "I don't normally say thank you to the ABC, but I have to say Australia is indebted to you on this instance." Clearly, whichever side he thinks the ABC is supposed to be on, they were on the right side with that series.

What a difference a few days makes.

"I think many, many millions of Australians would feel betrayed by our national broadcaster right now, and I think that the ABC does have to have a long, hard look at itself," he said at a press conference on Tuesday.

This was, not surprisingly, echoed by Wednesday's News Corp papers, which featured some not-at-all-suspiciously-coordinated headlines. "ABC OF JIHAD" intoned the Herald Sun. "How dare the taxpayer funded ABC allow this man to spout his bile on national TV," said the Daily Telegraph. "IT'S YOUR ABC" was the less-inflammatory headline on the Courier Mail, although it was placed over an image of a gun-toting ISIS-type holding a flag with the ABC logo on it. (When did they take this photo? Have they been sitting on it this whole time waiting for an opportunity to run it? What a scoop!)

The reason for all this ire came down a moment on the most recent episode of Q&A, Zaky Mallah, a man who had been acquitted of terrorism charges in an Australian court, applied to be in the audience of the show. His application and the question he wanted to ask were both approved.

His question was to Coalition MP Steve Ciobo, and focused on the government's planned scheme to strip the citizenship of dual nationals suspected to be engaged in terrorism either overseas or at home. The original proposal by the government (which appears to have been scaled back in the time since that Q&A went to air) would give the Immigration Minister the power to revoke citizenship without judicial oversight.

If this debate was abstract, then Mallah's question put a very real face on it. "As the first man in Australia to be charged with terrorism under the harsh Liberal Howard government in 2003," he asked, "what would have happened if my case had been decided by the minister and not the courts?"

Ciobo replied that he would be very proud to be part of a government that would kick Mallah out of the country.

Mallah, clearly upset at this, then ad-libbed: "The Liberals have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the community tonight to leave and go to Syria and join ISIS because of ministers like him."

"I think that's a comment we're just going to rule totally out of order," said Tony Jones, presumably hoping that ruling it out of order would stem the tide of criticism he could instantly foresee.

Regardless of what you think of Mallah himself, the question itself was a valid one, and interrogated the government's planned overruling of the judicial system. Ciobo's response was full of bluster and devoid of substance, thus fulfilling the Q&A remit perfectly.

Mallah's reaction to Ciobo's answer—the thing that's got everyone angry—was either not anticipated by the ABC (which would make them profoundly stupid given Mallah's history) or totally anticipated by them in the hopes that it would get lots of headline-grabbing controversy (which is why Q&A is an anti-intellectual garbage program).

If Mallah's point was that draconian policies run the risk of disenfranchising moderate Muslims and driving them into the waiting arms of terror groups, he utterly failed, wording the argument in such a way as to suggest he thought Muslims should in fact go out and join ISIS. Or perhaps I'm giving him too much credit, given he stood by his words in an interview with Waleed Aly on Channel Ten's The Project the following night. Look, Mallah's a pretty awful communicator, which is making this whole debate incredibly difficult given it is centered around things he said.

But let's look at what's really going on here.

The outrage directed at the ABC and Q&A is, to put it mildly, transparently false. As Crikey pointed out, Mallah has been regularly interviewed in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Mail, and even the Courier Mail. (Maybe when the Courier Mail gave Mallah a platform to air his views, that was when he supplied them with that photo of the jihadist carrying the ABC flag. Just a thought.)

There's also a fair bit of fury over revelations that the ABC essentially paid for Mallah's transport costs from the far-off land of Paramatta to the Q&A studios in Sydney, an epic 35km away. (The ABC confirmed that it provides a free shuttle bus to allow audience members from Western Sydney to attend the show, and Mallah happened to be a passenger on that bus.) Again, all this bluster would be more credible if these outlets were similarly bothered by the time News Corp's The Australian, according to The Guardian, paid Mallah $500 for an interview.

So if most of the major media publications in the country have provided a platform for Mallah and some have themselves paid him, what exactly does all this righteous indignation come down to? The fact that live TV is so much more explosive than black-and-white text? What is this really about?

Most of the country does not watch the ABC or Q&A, but they do see headlines, even if they don't read on. A pervasive message of "the ABC gives voice to terrorism" is going to have a palpable impact on the public's view of the broadcaster, adding fuel to the demonstrably incorrect myth that the ABC is a left-leaning organisation that uses taxpayer money to give voice to fringe views.

That manufactured public mood will arm the government with that oft-sought, immeasurable, intangible quantity known as a "mandate", which will allow them to do what they've been wanting to since the beginning: get rid of the public broadcaster.

Whether that happens or not depends on how much of that other intangible quality—political capital—the government wants to use up as it fights many different battles on numerous fronts.

So for now, let's simply leave the last word to Prime Minister Tony Abbott: "Sometimes, free speech will be speech which upsets people, which offends people."

Good point.

Follow Lee on Twitter: @leezachariah

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