WHY I DEFEND THE ABC.
For American readers, I will differentiate that I mean the Australian Broadcasting Corporation not the American Broadcasting Corporation.
I had cause recently to block someone on this platform who is a right-wing who referred to “Our ABC” as “Their ABC” after they shared with me an IPA memorandum about the ABC. For those who don’t know, the IPA (Institute of Public Affairs) is a right-wing policy institute (I won’t say think-tank) that claims to be the “party of freedom”. But freedom for whom?
We’ve all heard the saying, “The past is a different country” and while a country may not change its name, it will change its ethos, it may change its demographics and the same people will not be living in a country 100 years from now.
I listened to a segment on ABC’s The Drum about a Singaporean-raised Japanese female plastic surgeon, Yumiko Kadota, whose memoir Hysterical Woman has been published, about the toxic environment in the public health sector. I then had someone say that the ABC was engaging in bashing “white males”.
Then, we hear the right-wing claim that the white cis-het male is the most discriminated person in society, today. Well, what a load of nonsense!
Bob Hawke, whatever you think of him, and yes, he did engage in womanising, was interviewed by Andrew Denton in his series Elders, and he told the story of how his father was a minister and his mother, Edith (nee Lee) used to say to parishioners, “You educate your sons. Why don’t you educate your daughters?”
I remember seeing a segment, when I was 10, where the presenter said, “In 1929, the Depression hit. Many men lost their jobs.” I said to my mother, “What about women?” And she said, “Not a lot of women worked back then. Well, not married women.” Yes, women did domestic drudgery, and the conventional wisdom was that a woman didn’t have an education that equipped her for any career other than homemaking.
Yes, Australian (white) women have had the right to vote since Federation (First Nations Women gained it after 1967) and 1973 was a watershed year where Gough Whitlam introduced equal pay for women, but the fact of the matter is, women retire with less superannuation than men, typically, and the glass ceiling is still very real.
Regular readers of my stories know that I have no time for a ridiculous doctor who has produced the most preposterous contradiction available, namely a book about how women fell and rose and then claimed that men and women should not mix because women were becoming more like men and hence were less attractive! To which I say, “Evidently, he is afraid of strong women.”
100 years ago, as a cis-het white male, your potential was only limited by your parental income. University education was typically the preserve of the wealthy, so a boy from a poor family could not access it. If you were a cis-het white woman, however, you were expected to marry and have children. As a cis-het white male, you were not in danger of being killed and having your murderer plead the “gay panic defence”. You were not in danger of being imprisoned for your sexual orientation. Yes, in some states of Australia, if you raped a woman, you could be looking at either a prison sentence, or, if you murdered her, as well, you could be looking at life imprisonment or your final moments could be an appointment with a man who wore a hood and welder’s goggles who pulled a hood down over your head, pinioned your wrists behind your back and your ankles together, and tightened a noose around your neck that saw you drop so that your head was a short distance from where your feet had been.
Now that the cis-het white male has to share his rights with the LGBTIQA community, different ethnicities and women, we hear the cry, “Oh, but we’re being discriminated against!”
Dr Yumiko Kadota made the point about being woken up at 3AM, without much sleep, being on call, and being called an hysterical woman. To which I say, if we choose another example of an industry that has been dangerous (transport) truck drivers are SUPPOSED to only drive five and a half hours, have a half-hour minimum break, and drive for a maximum of another five and a half hours, and have an eleven hour break but unreasonable expectations are placed on them and many a family has been decimated because the hard-working truck driver has become a zombie behind the wheel and has fallen asleep and rather than resting is resting in peace because their truck has run off the road and collided with something, or killed an innocent victim as well. So, she, feeling the fatigue and speaking up about it, was branded hysterical and someone who commented on the YouTube channel claimed it was the ABC bashing white males! No, it’s not! The ABC is giving a voice to the marginalised, which I, as a marginalised person, appreciate.
While it’s true that the ABC does not speak for everybody and not every marginalised person is a left-wing voter, only those with a hard right-wing agenda will tune into the verbal diarrhoea that passes as opinion by Sky After Dark! For many glass-jawed right-wingers, a simple act of questioning a position is viewed as discrimination and has even seen them quit the interview. The real reason is, they don’t want to be held to account!
The verbal diarrhoea that is Sky After Dark professes to keep the left-wing in check, but fails. The right-wing doesn’t like the ABC. I, as an educated person, want to watch programs that are more in line with depth, than superficial or hyped up nonsense!
It is, in part, my ABC and while it gives a voice to minorities, it will always have my support.