Recently I found myself in the unfamiliar position of agreeing with Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson.
Let me explain.
It’s no secret I’m not an admirer of the Liberal senator from Victoria and what I like to call her services to the “handbag brigade”. (For those unfamiliar with the concept, the “handbag brigade” is a pejorative term used in reference to female Coalition members who have been, more than once, wheeled out to defend the indefensible.)
There was a fairly typical example late last month when a number of Coalition women, including Henderson, gathered outside Parliament House (all looking very determined) to dubiously claim that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was a sexist bully.
More recently, the senator’s attack on ABC investigative journalist Louise Milligan at Senate estimates was equally embarrassing.
Henderson asked the ABC’s managing director David Anderson about a speech Milligan had given to the ACT Bar Association in Canberra last month that was the subject of several negative articles in The Australian. She insisted, despite the fact Milligan gave the speech in her private time and many of The Australian’s claims about the speech were disputed, that Anderson and the ABC should take responsibility for any “offence” caused.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Once the drama died down and Henderson’s laughable accusations of ABC journalists going “rogue” stopped echoing through the room, she tabled two letters she’d sent to Anderson requesting more specifics about the ABC’s pay structure — including details about employees earning $230,000 or more and a breakdown by gender, place of work and remuneration.
My ears perked up. Now that could be very useful information indeed. I know that for some time the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) members of the ABC have been trying to get hold of this information to “combat growing inequality” at the ABC, and that it was in part management’s refusal to disclose it that led union members to decide to campaign for a “no” vote on the ABC’s proposed new pay deal.
Thus, even though it pains me to say this, I found myself thinking: onya Henderson for asking these very important questions.
I was immediately reminded of the case of Carrie Gracie, the former China editor at the UK’s public broadcaster, the BBC. When the BBC was likewise forced in 1997 by Conservative politicians (yes, with their own agenda) to disclose the pay of all staff earning more than £150,000, it proved extremely embarrassing — and ultimately sparked a revolution. Two-thirds of the top-earning stars were men and the highest paid were all white.
Cue headlines such as “BBC’s gender pay gap revealed” and, my personal favourite, “Bloated blokes club”.
Within months, Gracie very publicly resigned on the grounds that she had been promised pay parity when she accepted the post. She was extremely disappointed to learn that her comparator, the North America editor, was earning at least 50% more than her. What’s more, another letter of protest was signed by dozens of well-known BBC names, women who would later band together in solidarity to combat pay discrimination and form a group called BBC Women.
Carrie would eventually succeed in taking a landmark equal pay case against the BBC, and her 2018 appearance at a parliamentary inquiry, in which she eviscerated the BBC’s “secretive and illegal” pay culture, became the stuff of legend. I confess that when I need a dose of fist-pumping feminist righteousness to put some gas in the old tank, I go back and watch it again.
But back to the recent exchange at Senate estimates. Knowing the story of the BBC’s “secretive” pay culture as I do and what happened when the lid was wrenched off — something Gracie said in her memoir, Equal, should serve as a “cautionary tale for employers everywhere” — I was quite shocked by Anderson’s response to Henderson’s request.
He indicated he intended to claim public interest immunity to resist disclosing any information about pay across the ABC, using the same tired arguments that BBC executives used years ago to resist publicly disclosing pay before they were finally forced to come clean: that the information was “commercially sensitive” and should be subject to privacy considerations.
The thing is, while it has been unlawful for the better part of 50 years in Australia and is clearly unfair, pay discrimination is still common. According to the Diversity Council of Australia, gender discrimination (of which pay discrimination is a key element) remains the leading driver of the gender pay gap, contributing 36%.
And women are powerless to correct it if they are operating in an information vacuum. In a recent column about pay transparency for The Sydney Morning Herald, columnist Jessica Irvine called this “information asymmetry”. That’s precisely why there is a growing movement towards greater pay transparency in Australia and around the world. Increasingly, sites like Glassdoor are making it easier for employees to compare their salaries. And as of November 1, it’s mandatory in New York City for employers to publish salary bands in all job ads.
Here in Australia, the industrial relations legislation working its way through Parliament will ban the use of “gagging clauses” that prohibit employees from discussing their pay. And the Workplace Gender Equality Agency will soon start reporting on the size of the gender pay gap at specific employers, rather than just as an industry composite.
Both will help individual women get one step closer to knowing what exactly is happening in their workplace and — pardon my French — ask, “What the fuck is going on here?”
As a member of the Champions of Change Coalition, which claims to encourage its members to take leading action to promote gender equality, I would respectfully ask Anderson if he risks being on the wrong side of history by swimming against the growing tide of pay transparency. And I would also humbly suggest that the public broadcaster should lead by example and caution that resisting pay transparency raises the question: what are you trying to hide?
Should the ABC hand over the pay details of its employees? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Correction: This article originally stated MEAA union members had already voted “no” on the ABC’s proposed new pay deal. It has been changed to reflect that members are campaigning for a “no” vote.
Very good.
ABC’s managing director David Anderson
Yes: claim he is immune to the public interest. Instead he is going to perpetuate the privileges of those who benefit from this blatant and illegal unfairness, while hiding behind disingenuous, illogical and illegitimate obfuscations about privacy and commercial-in-confidence (which would be recognised as the last refuge of a scoundrel if only patriotism had not got in first).
Call me naive but I don’t think Henderson gives a toss about gender pay equity at the ABC. Her strategy is simply to get the personal details of employees pay rates to continue her assault on particular journalists. I applaud the GM,s refusal to accede to her request. There are other ways of providing such information to Henderson without disclosing specific employees rates of pay.
I don’t believe the author of the article is under any illusions about Henderson’s motives, but whatever they are does not change the value of the information her questions should reveal.
Interesting tid bit from Fran Kellys new show Frankly. In an interview with Sandi Toksvig it was revealed that Sandi is recieving only 40% of what Stephen Fry was earning for the same job of presenting the tv show QI.
Takes a fair bit to shift these things.
Sarah Henderson demands. If she has the right to demand anything then I also have the right to demand toadies like her should check in her own camp before wandering into others.
I disagree with Ziwica regarding the reasons but have for at least two decades also championed transparency in remuneration arrangements – not just total package amounts, but also in the terms of conditions surrounding things like extra-curricular earning, private leveraging of taxpayer-underwritten ‘marketable brand’, and so on. It may prove that, as at the BBC, full disclosure will reveal legitimate gender inequities. (Though a bit of caution is needed where subjective matters of talent and ‘pulling power’ often apply. Someone compared Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig. Both great to watch, doing the same gig…but should they automaticaly be paid the same? I like Rachel McAdams and I like Noah Taylor, but I’d expect a movie with that pair as co-leads to spend 9/10th of its budget on the woman actor.) But heartily agreem, let the cards fall and let’s have a look.
Being honest though I’d be as interested in just the amounts, and the mechanics of who’s earning what, for doing what, and what it’s costing the salary budget elsewhere. I struggle with the case that’s routinely made these days about a public broadcaster needing to somehow be ‘competitive’ in ‘attracting talent’. Says who? I know a hundred out-of-work journalists – excellent, experienced – who would work for scale at the ABC. I think that the whole ‘commercial sensitivity/competitiveness’ line is a great big insiders’ featherbedding con, the same one trotted out by back-scratching Boards since neoliberalism’s lies took hold. The ABC is one of the few gigs around where you actually get to do journalism at all. Everyone knows it’s a sweet little gig…once you’re in, and if you can avoid the redundancies. Let’s stop pretending the ABC can legitimately benchmark its remuneration conditions against the high-risk commercial world. It’s a Baby Boomer grift. Probably, yes, mostly a blokey white one; many of them recent opportunistic hijackers/escapees from Murdoch/Packer, who’ve sniffed out the ABC as The Meeja’s last great rort. Thank you taxpayer!
But I’m also interested in the employment limitations, obligations, restrictions and exclusivities an ABC gig demands. Or, as it were…doesn’t. I’m interested not only in what Sarah Ferguson gets for hosting 7.30 Report – and how it stacks up to what Kerry O’Brien got – but also what she got paid for Revelations by In Films – where she (and husband Tony Jones) is listed as ‘Our People’. I’m interested in who commissioned the film, and how much we as taxpayers paid to air it? I’m interested in how much of the ABC budget goes to commercial production companies, and who makes those choices, and how. I’m interested in the whole relationship between ABC tenured staff, their non-ABC commercial projects, and the ABC cross-marketing opportunities they subsequently are granted? Who makes the decision that Milligan’s books Cardinal and Witness get widespread, free ABC defacto advertising and cross-promotion, while Frank Brennan’s contribution to that ‘same public’ interest issue – Notes on the Pell Trial – gets none? I’m intersted in asking David Anderson and the Board if, when Leigh Sales hires her publically-nurtured Media Brand out to a commercial organisation as an MC for $15,000, or Richard Glover writes a column for the SMH, we taxpayers (who have invested to create their saleable media branda) get to recoup a percentage of the payments? And if not, does this then mean that, say, a First Secretary at an Australian embassy can moonlight as a paid foreign affairs consultant for a commercial think tank, and a federal police officer can work as a mercenary?
We live in the Information Age. There’s not a single post-Boomer Knowledge Class wannabe alive who doesn’t understand that the visibility, platforming, exposure, access, pitching, brand-expansion and commissioning opportunities that a public broadcaster media job affords can be the difference between a) kicking off a career as a media worker, and b) just never get viable traction at all. What I want to know is: why are so many already well-paid, well-known, privileged ABC Brands apparently being allowed to double-dip, while the rest of the media’s workforce, including lower level coalface ABC staff, are being shafted? For get questions of politics, bias, even gender inequity. To me…the more urgent pay issue is what seems from the outside like a colossal insiders’ rort.
Thanks Mods – too long I know. I’ll start trying to be more succinct. It doesn’t come naturally.
Wow!! So much better without the SPP vitriolic woe is me. I was just about to stop reading your comments but if you keep this up, I’ll be happy to read regardless of the length. Thanks JR.
Still wayyy too bloody long though – it could have been equaly robust at a third the length.
But at least he seems to be trying and is.
Very.
But no danger of reading about SPPs being shape shifting Crikey reading lizard people as I was beginning to expect.
Thanks, ElCee, I know we rarely see eye to eye. It’s a generous nod.
In reciprocation, FWIW: I tend to write long and often use vitriol (tho’ never woe-is-me!?) on SPP thinking because a) it’s fun (I try to target what I think is the patronising, lazy, uncritically-orthodox, complacent and/or smug thinking, not the people doing it); b) it’s time-consuming (for me at least) to write short; c) it’s insufferably dull (for me at least) to write polite; but mostly d) BION, it’s a mark of respect for, and a measure of the seriousness of my engagement with, the Other. I’m never gratutiously vitriolic (or where on reflection I recognise that I have been, I apologise), and I’m never vitriolic from behind a balaclava. (Actually, that’s not quite true: I once dissed the sh*t out of Clive James from behind an inadvertent e-mask on Teh (godawful!) Grauniad website. I’m still kicking myself over that (purely accidental) balaclava. It was certainly fun, and I would rather have liked credit for what it provoked. I basically told him to stop hogging space like an old attention-seeking diva who’d run out of any idea beyond deathly (and deathly dull) navel-gazing, and let some younger gunslinger have the same opportunity he got given by his elders as a total nobody, at the Observer. To my delight it spawned a deeply-dishonest, deeply-sooky – clearly deeply-stung – bespoke Op Ed in reply.
https://www.theguardianDOTcom/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/29/clive-james-reader-complained-about-my-still-being-alive
Being dissed for having ‘no rhetorical gifts’ and ‘unhinged verbal disparagement’ by Australia’s clunkiest published anti-poet (and much worse, our most cravenly-equivocating CC-denier) is something I shall cherish to the grave, ElCee. And that’s the thing: vitriol often unearths something about the recipient of it – and their ideas – that you won’t ever see during ‘civil discourse’. Often it’s a revealingly bad aspect, useful in itself…but sometimes the opposite, too. Rudeness towards me (that hits home) always makes me think better, anyway. Possibly I’m just an a*sehole, but I do think that’s why my instinct would default to unpleasantries even if I weren’t. My gut says that in this relentless sanitised, professionalised, monetised Info Age of scrupulously-scripted words, coarse improv is the only way to get any meaningful argument out of someone – in every sense. We’re all I reckon kidding ourselves when we witter that the lifeblood of ‘democratic civilisation’ is ‘rational, civil intellectual discourse’. (It’s not: material world political action is; the walk, not the talk.) Whether it’s conducted safely within the like-minded echo-chambers of the left, the right, or the loopy outer space lizard orthodoxies, any ‘non-confrontational’ model of the exchange of ideas is just self-flattering narcissism. And the ‘polite discourse of the civilised classes’ invariably only endures up to the point where you threaten their material privileges, right. ‘Civil discourse’ is, at core, a rich person’s hobby, one they’ll only indulge in so long as it won’t cost them anything.
Thanks again, ElCee.
Oh great letter from jack Robertson. Not too long at all. Where have you been jack, your contributions are often the best part?
Brett, that’s super kind, ta. I tend to harass Crickerians in waves, according to the state of my bank balance and the availability of work in the several different gig economies I, like most others nowadays, flounder about in. Though I’ve been a bit ubiquitous the last week or so. Will be at the Crikey Sydney panel tonight, if you’re going, let’s try to meet up. Not-with-standing the above to ElCee, +ive feedback is always secretly welcome 🙂