Most Australians like at least one branch of the ABC: retirees can’t live without Radio National, the quasi-educated adore Dr Who, singlet-wearing-ecstasy-ingesters are well accommodated by Triple J, and once a month I tune into the First Tuesday Book Club to be intensely stimulated by Marieke Hardy.

When the PM announced cuts to the ABC and SBS, large protests were attended not just by the sort of people who turn out to any anti-Abbott rally, but ordinary Australians who did not want to see their favourite programming disappear.

The protestor’s logic is straightforward: commercial media, in a blind hunt for ratings, simply cannot be trusted to provide high quality content – why, the bastards would broadcast live executions if they thought people would watch. Intellectually stimulating programming must, then, be created at the taxpayer’s expense. All the beloved programming that seems too esoteric for commercial radio and TV, it follows, would not exist without our enlightened benefactors at the public broadcaster.

It is not hard to attack commercial TV; top rating shows like Big Brother and Today Tonight pursue an audience with a level of sophistication roughly equivalent to the child who eats his glue-stick.

In Australia, if you want top notch telly, you have no alternative other than the ABC and SBS. Unless, that is, you can be bothered with Foxtel, or if you have an internet connection and a roguish disposition towards copyright law.

To make the case, however, that we wouldn’t have quality programming if it weren’t for the public broadcaster, is to put the cart before the horse. The ABC doesn’t exist because commercial networks are unwatchable by thinking people; rather, commercial networks have been systematically dumbed down because of the existence of the ABC.

For commercial content directors in radio and television, an insurmountable fact that must be considered when programming a network is that the vast majority of educated persons are going to watch the public broadcaster instead.

The ABC doesn’t need to win in the ratings to survive; they have no economic reason to appeal to broader Australia. They are free content which is so erudite, and politically careful, and embroiled with such trendy sensitivities, that it is no surprise our intellectual types are ensnared – not to mention the total absence of advertising, which may as well be heroin to them. They’re like the victims in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and cannot look away. For a commercial content director, the ABC devotees may as well not exist, and that is the spirit in which commercial content is programmed.

A phrase often bandied about when speaking of the networks is ‘Lowest Common Denominator’. This is far too generous. A ‘Lowest Common Denominator’, as well as being low, would commonly denominate to all; The Simpsons was a lowest common denominator show because the full gamut of society could take pleasure from the multi-layered humour that, nevertheless, was situated in the low tradition of conventional sitcom. A Current Affair does not even approach the lowest common denominator, because enjoyment of it is not common to anybody but the very common indeed. Commercial programming in Australia is base and crass because it’s pitched at the base and crass.

Aunty supporters make a song and dance about how the ABC has all the intellectual content and then mock the networks, who’ve had the highbrow audience stolen away from them, for pandering to the plebs. It’s the intellectual equivalent of grabbing somebody’s arm, whacking them with their own limb, and chanting ‘stop hitting yourself!’

Tony Abbott barely got away with trimming 5% off the ABC, so now is not an expedient time to advocate total privatisation. If, however, the feat were accomplished, the quality of commercial TV and radio content would skyrocket.

As Hayek points out in The Road to Serfdom, while you can’t predict the future, you can look to other nations who have pursued divergent policies, and note how societies differ as a result. Look, then, to the USA, whose PBS is so tiny as to scarcely warrant mention. The American news services are far more in depth and rigorous than ours, offering a wildly diverse range of views. Aunty’s supporters make the case that only their state funded news service is able to deliver fair and unbiased reporting, yet the big hubbub about journalistic integrity that rocked the UK, and briefly flared up here in Australia, did not scathe the USA.

Furthermore, you couldn’t make the case that the US media was dumbed down with the absence of a state broadcaster delivering high minded content; this is the nation that brought us Frasier, Community, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and so on all through free enterprise. When has the ABC, in all its independent pursuit of excellence, ever spawned a program as important as Seinfeld? The protestors are wrong. If we totally privatised the ABC, the vast majority of the varied and excellent programming you and I respectively hold dear would live on. Commercial TV would improve, as would our budget’s bottom line.

Perhaps, ultimately, none of this is important. The young turn to the internet for entertainment and as the older generation dies out, so too will the viability of television as a medium. Within the next decade we will see the rise of online distribution, and a new war for content will be fought by HBO, Netflix, and whomsoever else is brave enough to enter the fray.

But for however long it takes the Baby Boomers to return to ash, we shall have a debate about funding the ABC, and argue about online content long after that. Those of us who wouldn’t mourn the ABC’s loss must not allow the perceived dichotomy be a contest between ‘quality media’ and ‘budgetary necessity’, but rearrange the battle lines as a contest between ‘needless government expenditure’ and ‘improved content for all’.

Also, Marieke Hardy, if you’re reading this and not totally overcome with rage at my advocating the scuttling of your network, please know that I’m currently single, and that I’ll try to look past the fact that you didn’t love Infinite Jest when it was reviewed on First Tuesday Book Club – a show that I’m sure could go on to have a very happy life on Channel 9.