The Coalition’s capitulation to One Nation and their ABC paranoia is bad policy, and bad politics. But not as bad as it seems.

In his leather-jacket Q&A days Turnbull never hesitated to defend Aunty’s virtue and independence. Now, as the price of Hanson’s support in the Senate for the so-called “media reform” legislation, it stands as depressing evidence (as if we needed more) of our prime minister’s willingness to ditch any previously-held principle he may have had in the desperate cause of being seen to get something substantial — anything — through parliament and into law.

Changing ownership restrictions to please what’s left of the old media mogul class has long been a political objective of the Liberals. But, with key senator Nick Xenophon seeming unlikely to be convinced, that little bird of opportunity has largely flown.

Sucking up to proprietors won’t yield anywhere near the levels of political protection and preferment it once did. The popular media landscape is too fragmented and ownership of the major mastheads and networks much more diverse. So, with the notable exception of US citizen Murdoch, there’s little dividend left in pandering to the blokes who buy their ink by the barrel.

At another level the prime minister might kid himself that the appearance of acting tough with the ABC will endear him to the restive ultra-conservatives within the Coalition who see the national public broadcaster as akin to a terrorist organisation. But they are unlikely to be assuaged by a few bland words about balance and fairness, or vague directions that Aunty should be doing more for the bush. They want the ABC abolished, broken up, or sold off. Even tin-eared Turnbull knows that would be political poison.

In that context, allowing Hanson this “get square” with the public broadcaster as the condition of One Nation support for the media legislation must have appealed to the PM and Coalition strategists as a relatively low-cost option. What they would have us overlook, though, is the ugly precedent it sets.

Hanson has now learned from Xenophon the cynical Washington trick of making entirely unrelated legislative and budgetary demands as the ransom for their vote.  The tactic is as old as politics itself, but rarely has it surfaced in our parliamentary system at the brazen level as practiced daily by the congressmen and senators who govern The Land of The Free. We should brace for more of this blatant standover stuff in Canberra.

Meanwhile, should we be worried about what comrade Keane yesterday described as “the greatest assault on the ABC’s independence in decades”? Only if you think:

(a) it will come to pass,

(b) the legislation will have any real teeth, and

(c) the people who generate the ABC’s key content will take any notice.

Governments of all persuasions tend to move very carefully when contemplating significant changes to the ABC’s legislated existence and charter. These instruments have gradually become more prescriptive, but the new wordings always leave plenty of wriggle room for the defenders of Aunty’s independence.

Adding the Hanson requirement that news and current affairs coverage must be “fair and balanced” might seem like a major restriction, but in practice that phrase places no more obligation on ABC reporters and producers than they would already recognise as part of the corporation’s existing editorial policies.

The words would not, at least to my mind, make it mandatory that opposing viewpoints be balanced within the same item. (That’s often impossible in live programming anyway.) The current, implied understanding of “balance over time” would continue to apply.

As any seasoned current affairs executive knows there are many situations in which the search for balance will always be fruitless. The late This Day Tonight reporter Tony Joyce once memorably barked at a pusillanimous producer: “Fifty percent truth and fifty percent bullshit isn’t balance!”

In the late 1960s government ministers thought they could use the requirement for balance to stop critical ABC coverage. They refused to appear. TDT responded by showing an empty chair in the studio while explaining in voice-over that the minister had declined their invitation to take part in the debate.

The demand to publish the salaries of higher-paid ABC and SBS personalities grabs headlines but achieves little. As the old News Corp warhorse Mark Day correctly observes, this is no more than Hansonite “window dressing propelled by the politics of envy and retribution for the hard time her party has received at the end of investigations by programs such as Four Corners”.

In any case, there is a reasonable case to me made that we should all be able to know the salaries of public servants (and anything that might help narrow the pay gap between presenters and their unseen production staff is welcome).    

But the prospect of an inquiry into “competitive neutrality” is more concerning. That phrase, enthusiastically enlisted by Fairfax and News Corp, actually means “we’re getting hammered in the online market by the ABC so change their Act to handicap them somehow”.

Drafting legislation to hobble the ABC in a free market without compromising its independence is not easy. It has been an enduring principle underlying the relationship between government and the public broadcaster that while parliament decides the quantum of the ABC’s annual budget, the ABC decides how to spend it.

If it has been unobjectionable, for more the 80 years, for the ABC to buy advertising space in the commercial media to promote its radio and TV programming, why is it now objectionable for it to buy exposure for its online services on Google?

News Corp is particularly illogical in pressing its self-interested argument that the public broadcasters should be forced out of any digital platform where they compete with commercial services. Today’s lead editorial in The Australian (where else?) thunders that the ABC and SBS “have been given digital free rein and $1.5 billion in annual funding to expand into every media crevice to compete with or crowd out private media”.

The fact that, for this same $1.5 billion, the ABC and SBS also provide multiple TV and radio services — national, metro and regional — seems to have escaped the Murdoch mindset. Nor can they see the hypocrisy of attacking the ABC for its expansion into online news while themselves boasting that the News Corp papers have now introduced audio and video to their sites — in direct competition with TV and radio.  

In my view — and despite the predictable hand-wringing from all the usual suspects — it is doubtful that any of the provocative One Nation conditions on Senate support for the media ownership changes will come to pass into law. The Coalition might go through the motions, but without Nick Xenophon and his crucial block of votes, there’s no deal.

Meanwhile, Hanson and One Nation might do well to watch their steps. The combined news and current affairs troops of the ABC make a formidable army. They will redouble their scrutiny of the Oxleymoron and her rag-tag bunch of senators and staff. In a “fair and balanced” way, of course.