ABC Blues

I’ve been a rusted-on ABC listener since ‘The Children’s Hour’ of my childhood. In recent years I've even attended two street protests in Melbourne in favour of the ABC. But in recent months the ABC has steadily lost me as a fan.

ABC Melbourne

Aside from my other gripes about its declining standards of intellectual rigor, its Sydney-centric  ‘let’s get Dan’ campaign during the current COVID-19 pandemic has turned me right off. So has its constant focus on stories breeding community discontent. In the face of a unique global health crisis, both story angles make a mockery of the ABC’s supposed focus on improving our mental health.

Where does the ABC source its news in Victoria? Disgruntled talkback callers?  Who may or may not be doing the orchestrated bidding of the LNP? Consider my neighbours. My next door neighbour is well past thirty-five and he has just been retrenched from a Melbourne company providing technical services to an American company. The latter has failed during the out-of-control COVID situation in the US and has cancelled its Australian contract. My neighbour is sad to lose a good job but hopes to find another by Christmas. Next to him lives a senior Qantas pilot – the Federal government has closed our borders and international flights are not on his horizon for some years. Next door on my other side lives a kindergarten teacher and her partner, a tourism operator. They’ve mostly been surviving on Jobkeeper. Next door again lives a woman who’s been working from home for a legal firm and simultaneously home-schooling her two daughters. Across the road lives a restauranteur who’s held on for many months by the skin of his teeth, offering takeaway meals, but has sold his flash car and replaced it with secondhand basic transport. Melbourne has a huge population of international students, meaning that the income I rely on in retirement from the student accommodation unit I own may disappear next year. None of this diverse group of neighbours are critical of the current government’s approach. We are resigned but not rebellious. We live a short walk from the ABC's Melbourne offices but we never see an ABC reporter round here.

Apart from the 'let's get Dan' focus by the media, there has been virtually no media coverage of the fact that before this pandemic we were over-supplied with some forms of small business. Nor have we been told that the business model relying on continuous growth was always faulty and will now fail, given the expected reduction in Australia’s total population. The media should be encouraging small business operators to get smart and look around for creative opportunities beyond, for example, opening up yet another café. Too often this has been the strategy in the past, ending up turning a cluster of four or five successful cafés into six marginal cafés.

In my part of Melbourne in recent months I’ve noticed nothing but kindness and a determined sense of community spirit. The masked people who walk their dogs and children along our street say ‘hello, how are you going?’ as they pass by. On my own daily walks I don’t overhear snatches of bitchy complaints about the situation in Victoria. Frequently I pass someone tending a garden out on the street, pruning, planting or weeding a garden in the public domain, not their own garden. 

A Community-Minded Citizen during Melbourne's Lockdown

Perhaps we are noticing what has happened in the UK and practising gratitude, as all Australians should, for the sacrifices made by Victorians. In late July Victoria and the UK both recorded similar daily case numbers for COVID-19, in the mid-700s. Victoria went into strict lockdown, the UK didn’t. Today Victoria has recorded 5 new cases (zero yesterday) and the UK has 26,688 new cases.

On the Sydney-Melbourne 'divide', I have a foot in both camps, being a resident of Melbourne since 1987 but born and bred in Sydney. My daughter and only grandchildren live there. I spent ten weeks with them in Sydney a few months ago, listening to the ABC (of course) and noticing the regular digs at the situation unfolding in Melbourne. Sydney-siders too often display a complete lack of understanding about how different the two cities are, and why they are so different. 

Back in Melbourne, I for one have switched my radio’s preset button from ABC Melbourne to the witty commentary and soothing tones of ABC Classic FM. In front of the TV I’m just hanging on to watching ‘The Drum’ and the 7pm news, ever-ready with my remote button to switch off in despair. ‘Insiders’ has lost me completely, 7.30 nearly so, through their lack of balance and outright bias in programme coverage. Not watching TV is a much better approach to improving my mental health and lowering my blood pressure. 

So far, my bedside radio channel has not been reset and my old habits continue, so I wake up to SammyJ’s cheerful, heart-warming and amazing creativity and I go to sleep listening to the interesting variety of informative, apolitical guest interviews on ‘Nightlife’.

Yesterday I noticed a big change in the ABC’s approach. Suddenly the ABC was supportive of Victoria. Why? Instead of relentless criticism we had coverage of Lindsay Fox, a major business operator, praising the Victorian leader. ‘The Drum’ carried positive stories showing us how we’ve survived worse over human history and giving us all hope for our future. After the 7pm news I waited for Leigh Sales to introduce yet another negative story about Victoria. Hallelujah! Nothing! So I didn’t switch off straight away. At 10pm Philip Clark devoted an hour of his national ‘Nightlife’ programme to ‘let’s wrap our arms around Victoria’.

I’m proud of living through this pandemic and seeing the example set in Victoria of a genuine political leader encouraging and overseeing an overwhelming community effort to do what’s right for all Australians. Meanwhile the ABC has lost me as a dedicated follower of its news and current affairs offerings, although I continue to support some other aspects of its work. Australia needs a reliable, balanced, unbiased and trustworthy source of news and current affairs but, to my mind, the ABC is failing to deliver the required standards of an essential public broadcaster.