It is now clear that none of our successive federal governments has the courage, willpower or intention to do anything about the ABC. The national broadcaster, as it likes to style itself (though it is national only in the sense that all taxpayers are forced to pay for it, not in the scope of its minority audience) will carry on as it has for years with its turgid leaden-scripted soaps, its vulgar and mirthless ‘comedy’, its portentous and mendacious excursions into world affairs (it still hasn’t admitted it was wrong over Trump and Russia) and its trivialised and cliché-laden News in which expensively maintained overseas ‘correspondents’, unnecessary in an age of instant telecommunications, tell you what you read in the paper yesterday. The strident shambles of its panel inquisitions with their barrages of asinine interpolations will continue unabated, as will the rest of the tendentious opinion-larded chatter the ABC emits on television and radio. It is clear that nothing will change except perhaps to get worse.

What has put this beyond doubt is that if ever the ABC was going to be taken to task by the supposedly conservative Morrison government it would have been over the notorious Q&A episode a week ago in which an American-Egyptian harridan got away with incitement to murder. This prompted a hail of criticism from individuals and even some from the media, which is generally pretty much onside with the ABC, but from our elected government and its guardians of the airwaves, only – after much waiting – a wishy-washy announcement that the ABC would ‘investigate’ itself. Well, good luck with that. The government, in other words, will do nothing that will dent the carapace of the corporation’s arrogance. And yet this panellist, Mona Eltahawy, one of a phalanx of foul-mouthed feminists on the programme airing their views on – what else? – ‘patriarchy’, stated categorially, with no intervention from the robotic ABC moderatrix, that women should ‘kill’ rapists. ‘I want patriarchy to fear feminism,’ she said. ‘How many rapists must we kill until men stop raping us?’ Leaving aside that anyone who saw the programme would not suppose la Eltahawy in much danger of exciting a potential rapist’s attentions, this was the most extreme expression of feminist viciousness towards men ever heard on air in Australia. If it wasn’t ‘hate speech’, to use the baby-talk term dreamed up by leftists, what is?

I’ll tell you what is. When some adolescent schoolboys on a tram in Melbourne starting chanting a coarse ditty about what they, and most normal schoolboys throughout history, supposedly would like to do with women, several other passengers, probably public transport-worshipping humourless Greens, were so shocked that they filmed the incident and sent it to the Melbourne Age, which, like a Victorian dowager glimpsing an inch of ankle, clutched its pearls with horror and gave itself over to outraged editorial verbiage about the ‘insidious, hyper-masculine’ culture responsible for this ‘sexist tram chant’. That is the Left’s idea of ‘hate speech’, or I suppose we should say ‘hate chant’.

Feminists, who feel entitled to say the crudest things about men, are not happy when it’s the other way round. Typical is the president of the Macquarie University Women’s Collective, one Lydia Jupp, whose notion of time well spent is ‘consuming as much queer media as possible’. She was shrill with rage in the ‘morning newsletter’ Grind, and managed somehow to connect the schoolboys with the entire leftist manual of grievances. ‘Universities and colleges,’ she fumed, ‘were built on the foundations of colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and ableism, and were created to benefit largely rich, white, able-bodied men. It’s these values that are instilled within our country and learnt through our education systems … It’s why we have at least one woman a week dying at the hands of violence, usually by domestic violence.’ Dear me, and the kids thought it was just a smutty song. Presumably, if they had struck up ‘We shall overcome’ in solidarity with Extinction Rebellion, like a choir of schoolboy Gretas, Lydia and the Age would have showered them with credit for their sense of social responsibility.

Actually, the truth is that in a curious way these boys do deserve credit. Not for their tasteless chant but for their resilience and independence of spirit. It is a brave and remarkable thing that after all the classroom bombardment they will have suffered about curbing their animal masculinity, they were still able to come out with a scurrilous song that thumbs its nose at ‘gender correctness’. Compare that with all those supine ‘school strikers’, their eyes popping with the brew of climate nonsense boiling away inside their uncomprehending heads where propagandising teachers have pumped it in daily doses.

They, not the boys on the tram, are the ones who make you fear for the future of the country. They will never be accused of ‘hate speech’ because they will never say anything disapproved of by the Left. In fact, that’s the key to ‘hate speech’: words the Left doesn’t like. And since the Left fawns on feminists and regards masculinity as toxic, exhortations to murder men are by leftist definition not hateful but a legitimate tactic of female defence.

The Q&A harpy’s rant is yet more evidence that the ABC doesn’t care who it offends (except of course Aborigines for whom it reserves an extravagant respect, witness all those ‘warnings’ that images of the dead are about to be shown, though there’s never a warning to Christians that a ‘comedian’ is about to spout torrents of blasphemy). So if the government won’t restrain the ABC, even when it broadcasts something as legally dubious as encouragement to murder, citizens in general, or the conservative majority, should think of taking the matter into their own hands.

There’s not much they can do, but those who still watch or listen to it should deny the ABC their eyes and their ears. They should never under circumstances turn on an ABC programme. Conservative politicians should refuse to be interviewed on the ABC and should make themselves exclusively available to the commercial media. They should stipulate that they will continue to do this until the ABC gives evidence of a serious effort to reform itself, to balance its programmes, clean itself up and weed out its leftist rancour and secularist contempt for other people’s consciences. Individual conservatives with news value should do the same. We might then see how long the ‘national broadcaster’ can still claim to be national, rather than being exposed for what it is, the voice of a narrow intolerant metropolitan ideological minority.