Perhaps the government does have an eye on the women’s vote with its choice of Ita Buttrose as the new chairman of Their ABC, but to open her innings with a defence of the public broadcaster against charges of bias suggests that she doesn’t really understand how the left-wing political bias of the ABC, feeds into and supports so many so-called ‘progressive’ policies that currently undermine liberal democratic life in this nation while grooming our children to undermine the future.

The issue that she has to deal with is immediate. Implementation of the ABC charter among ABC staff will devolve to the managing director when that person is appointed. That issue challenges the wisdom of her appointment. Will she be the best person to interrogate CEO candidates to discover if they recognise bias in its many nuanced forms. Does a woman whose career has been spent discovering new ways every week to pander to women’s vanity have that degree of insight?

I am not the first to suggest that Their ABC’s news chipmunks live in an echo chamber, substantiating their own left wing opinions by collecting the nuts from like-minded chipmunks around the world: fake news from the fake news capital, CNN and the Washington Post; left wing bias from the BBC; Democratic Party socialist bias from National Public Radio in the States, European Union socialism from Deutsche Welle.

Then there is the practice of employing the partisan left-wing journalists who helped send Fairfax to the wall with their own brand of lunacy to cross-fertilise the ageing left-wing revolutionaries who continue to bellow from the retirement village at Ultimo.

Is there a potential Australian candidate for CEO who knows how to neuter chipmunks, how to deprive them of their nuts? If so, I repeat, would Ita be able to recognise this champion? Obviously, the rest of the board are not up to it.

It is all very well to appoint people who have worked in the media; even one who has spent a significant part of her life satiating women’s secret desires, but identifying bias, identifying its sources and acting quickly to change the collegiate culture from the end justifies fake news to one that provides a balanced view of events requires more than being able to move photographs of this week’s most fashionable (or scandalous) royals to page three from page five. It requires proper governance and that requires specific intellectual skills.

The very fact that Their ABC continues to rely so heavily on fake news, suggests that the board still should be looking for an MD with Trump-like qualities.

David Long is a retired solicitor, economist and PhD candidate at Griffith University, School of Law.

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