The Coalition government ignored an independent panel’s recommendations for two women to join the ABC’s board and instead selected a friend of Communications Minister Paul Fletcher with no media experience.
A document obtained by Crikey through freedom of information reveals the list of recommended candidates for the public broadcaster’s non-executive director vacancies.
The panel, comprising Dr Sally Pitkin, Helen Williams and Mark Kenny, selected Lisa Chung AM, Mario D’Orazio, Anita Jacoby AM and Peter Tonagh.
On May 17 Fletcher announced that D’Orazio, Tonagh and Fiona Balfour, a captain’s pick, had been appointed.
Balfour is a business executive who has worked in the aviation and IT sectors. She’s also known to be close to Fletcher. In 2017 he appointed her to the board of the Western Sydney Airport project. In 2013 she was one of four guests reported to have been invited by Fletcher to his budget-in-reply dinner in Parliament House.
It is at least the second time that Jacoby has been passed over for a public broadcaster board role. In 2020 Fletcher picked political ally Warren Mundine over Jacoby and three other candidates selected by an independent panel. Jacoby is a career broadcast executive and journalist who serves as a member of the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Chung is non-executive director on several corporate boards including insurance company Australian Voice and the Art Gallery of NSW Foundation’s board. Chung, a fourth-generation Chinese-Australian, would have been the only non-white member of the ABC board.
Neither Chung nor Jacoby could be reached for comment.
Non-executive directors must have experience in media, business, corporate governance or the arts. It is a five-year term and pays $56,380 a year.
Fletcher’s decision to choose an allied candidate over suggested qualified candidates is further evidence of the government’s willingness to shape the supposedly independent public broadcasters. Fletcher’s office did not respond to Crikey questions by deadline.
In addition to the selection of Mundine for the SBS, the decision to pick Ita Buttrose as the ABC’s chair in 2019 was also a captain’s pick. Buttrose was selected by the government over the three recommended candidates.
Buttrose has taken issue with the government’s total control over who is appointed to the ABC board.
“I don’t know chairs of other companies who have no input into the composition of their board,” she said just before the appointees were announced. “Although we are a Commonwealth entity, I do think the chair of all Commonwealth entities should have some input into who the directors are.”
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Just more blatant board stacking and “jobs for mates” from another incompetent, corrupt LNP government member. Why are we not surprised. If Labor tried that, the MSM would be screaming up and down the land about ” corruption”! If the LNP do it – nary a peep. Just shows how corrupt and biased the MSM are!
This is nothing new.
Michelle Guthrie x google, x Murdoch and Vanessa Guthrie , no relation, while still with the minerals council of Australia and I believe she is still on the board of the minerals council, were both appointed by the Coalition not so long ago.
This follows John Howard’s appointments of Murdoch media hacks.
Keith Murdoch was outraged by the ABCs existence and he and his evil spawn have tried to dismember it via the political party they own , the Coalition
The IPA in a list of demands handed to the Coalitions that was increased to 100 want the ABC sold off.
IPA Coalition objectives
Privatisation
48 Privatise Australia Post
49 Privatise Medibank
50 Privatise and Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function
51 Privatise SBS
63 Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport
72 Privatise the CSIRO
75 Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme
The NBN was the biggest threat to Foxtel and Telstra.
But there’s no worries now since Murdoch won the election via his propaganda machine modelled on Goebbel’s Hitler.
And don’t fall for the idea that little Aussie families own Telstra.
The largest institutional Telstra shareholders are Investors Mutual, 452 Capital, BT, Lazard, Maple Brown Abbott, Orion, Tyndall and Cannae. Lazard Ltd is the parent company of Lazard Group LLC, a global, independent investment bank with approximately 2,300 employees in 42 cities across 27 countries throughout Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, Central and South America.
The major shareholders have been raping Telstra of profits that should have been poured back into the national network and provide a great service (not only network but personal).
This is what privitisation does to our country, it impoverishes us and increases prices, while profits go overseas, and taxpayers’ assets are sold off.
Yes, like much of the profits from mining companies, the tax is minimal and the money goes overseas.
The CBA and CSL, both of which were publicly owned, were supposedly sold off to “mum and dad” investors but are now majority owned by foreign interests. Thanks Bob, Paul and Johnny, with more than a passing nod to Milton.
Morrison’s response to Buttrose will be “If she doesn’t like it, she knows where she can go.”
Indeed. In 2003 Howard’s appointments to the ABC Board included noted Liberal apologists such as Janet Albrechtsen, opinion writer to the Australian and certainly openly pro Liberal Ron Brunton long time conservative, Keith Windschuttle well known for his belief that the Stolen Generations is a myth. Donald Mc Donald chairman from 1996 to 2006, was appointed by Howard and known to be a close friend of Howard.
The Coalition’s assault on the ABC and that of Runpert Goebbels Murdoch will never cease; it’s been in progress for 85 years.
For three years, Keith Murdoch and other newspaper owners insisted that the ABC be restricted to no more than 200 words a day of overseas news, and limited its presentation of news bulletins to five minutes in the evening – but not before 7.50pm, by which time it was thought people would have finished reading their newspapers.
When, by 1936, the ABC had begun to develop an independent news service, Murdoch was greatly displeased.
His newspapers demanded a reduction in the ABC’s income from licence fees so that it would, in Inglis’ summary, ”stop competing improperly with private enterprise”.
In an early show of defiance, the vice-chairman of the ABC, Herbert Brookes – a leading conservative and son-in-law of Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister – attacked Murdoch for his self-interest and his attempts to cripple the ABC’s news service, as well as his ”conspiracy of silence” about the success of the ABC.
Private commercial interests were not the only enemies. At its inception and for many years later, the ABC was the responsibility of the Postmaster-General’s department.
The politician to hold the office of Postmaster-General in 1938 was a South Australian Country Party man with a military background, A.G.Cameron. When the chairman of the [ABC] commission and two of its members first met him, Cameron did not mince his words:
”’I know nothing about broadcasting. I’m not interested in it. If I had my way I would stop all broadcasting. No time for these mechanical things. Don’t know anything about music. As for people who give talks and commentaries over the air, if I had my way I would poison the blank blanks – would bring them under the Vermin Act.”
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/auntys-enemies-abc-still-under-attack-after-80-years-20140207-3278b.html
Sounds like not much has changed over the years. In fact it is arguably worse.
Indeed we have via a circuitous route of fornication inhaling and imbibing an ex
Murdoch hack advising a resurrected slime ball DPM