One Nation’s odd flirtation with big government

When NSW One Nation Senator Brian Burston called for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to be defunded and replaced instead by the Patriotic Broadcasting Corporation, he revealed much more than his poor skill with names.

The Patriotic Broadcasting Corporation sounds like the sinister propaganda arm of the oppressive North Korean government. You can see the job interviews now: if you can’t sing the second verse of the national anthem and the third verse of Waltzing Matilda, you best not set your tuckerbag down — because you won’t be staying long.

On One Nation’s PBC, Foreign Correspondent surely gets canned, while Q&A would be shortened to just A: 30 minutes of Malcolm Roberts delivering speeches straight to camera on climate change and industrial relations. Landline would be extended to three hours and shown every day and, as a former fish and chip shop owner, surely Pauline Hanson is well placed to take over Kitchen Cabinet?

Not that the ABC is perfect: it needs to be conscious of balance. In the years I have watched and appeared on ABC TV and radio, panels where right-of-centre views were in the majority have been vanishingly rare, while there have been many instances of right being outnumbered by the left.

But if the right is in the minority at the ABC, in my experience the broadcaster genuinely works hard to ensure other perspectives are heard.

Burston doesn’t appear to have a problem with using billions of taxpayer dollars to spruik a particular world view. In reality his chief complaint is not bias — it’s the direction of that bias.

Even if you were to accept Burston’s claims of a ‘cultural Marxist takeover’ at face value, why would the tyranny of the PBC over contrasting views be any better? Why is his claim to speak for the ‘majority’ — with less than 5% of the national vote — any more compelling than the green left (who got nearly 9%)?

Australia doesn’t need a taxpayer funded, government controlled broadcaster telling the public what to think. The public should be telling the government what to think.

In any case, perfect balance is impossible in public broadcasting. The real problem is not completely eliminating bias in the views being presented, it’s that the certainty and magnitude of public funding crowds out a plurality of views from being heard in the first place.

There is little doubt that the ABC’s move into fact checking significantly impeded the viability of Politifact Australia, while the ABC online platforms Unleashed and The Drum impacted opinion websites like The Punch. In both cases, the ABC has since vacated the field.

As the ABC moves further into online and digital formats, there is a real risk that providers in those spaces currently trying to find viable business models will be left behind.

Instead of the democratic process of consumers deciding what they will pay to support and what they will not, government funding will obliterate competition. Burston merely wants to control the content that is left, when he should be worried about the content that would be lost.

This is the danger of trying to use the power of government to control outcomes, rather than to ensure opportunities exist — a failing that both One Nation and their nemeses on the left have in common.

In fact, government intervention and control is the one consistent theme of Burston’s speech. He goes on to state that his ideal would be the reimposition of a modified Australian settlement, with restrictive immigration and industry protection as its cornerstones.

It would be worth remembering why we moved away from that system in the first place. Burston disparages a 7% GDP gain from immigration, but that amount is in excess of $110 billion in today’s dollars. There are good reasons to think the benefits of trade liberalisation are even greater.

The PBC is another iteration of the old idea of big government. Having discovered through painful trial and error that central government control is no way to run an economy, why should we ignore those lessons in broadcasting?

Simon Cowan is Research Manager at the Centre for Independent Studies