Holiday Reading

Belated Christmas Wishes!

The following one of the items of our Summer reading list....

Hot Stuff, Cold Logic by Richard Tol

Just as there is no logical or scientific basis for thinking that climate change is new, there is no self-evident reason to assume that the climate of the past is “better” than the climate of the future. With just as little logic, we might assume that women’s rights, health care, or education were necessarily better in the past. Any such judgment also contradicts Hume’s Law and, perhaps worse, is grounded in a fallacious appeal to nature understood in a very slanted way.  

closing...

In sum, while climate change is a problem that must be tackled, we should not lose our sense of proportion or advocate solutions that would do more harm than good. Unfortunately, common sense is sometimes hard to find in the climate debate. Desmond Tutu recently compared climate change to apartheid.¹ Climate experts Michael Mann and Daniel Kammen compared it to the “gathering storm” of Nazism in Europe before World War II.² That sort of nonsense just gets in the way of a rational discussion about what climate policy we should pursue, and how vigorously we should pursue it.

Fight for It?

Ex 7:30 host Quentin Dempster has a piece the Weekend Australian. The closing line reads...

Now is the time for all Australians who value a non-commercial, taxpayer-funded, mainstream, free, independent public broadcasting system to stand up and fight for it.

People would value it more if those that wanted it, paid for it! Rather than indiscriminately leeching off everyone ABC should be funded on a subscription basis. ABC is another form of middle class welfare. When will we get the same subsidy for our pay TV subscription?

Update...Some comments in today's letters page of the Oz..

ABC’s greatest threat

QUENTIN Dempster’s assertion the government has an ideological objection to public broadcasting is like saying cutting the fat off bacon demonstrates an ideological objection to bacon (“It’s time to fight for a free ABC”, 20/12).

Simplistic and transparent left-wing poseurism is the ABC’s greatest threat and the primary cause of its declining market share. Managing director Mark Scott’s media-mogul charade of buying up media real estate with other people’s money is doomed to failure if all he’s selling is a dishevelled slum.

Richard Duhig, Wavell Heights, Qld

QUENTIN Dempster asks readers of The Australian to stand up and fight for the ABC. Why on earth would I answer that call when, despite accepting my taxes with relish, the ABC treats my unremarkable conservative views with contempt in what has become little more than a left-green echo chamber?

H. Ronald, Jerrabomberra, NSW

FOI

Aging Journo Mike Steketee has a post on ABC's The Drum regarding FOI. Any mention of FOI on the ABC always causes much amusement here as the organization is largely exempt from it.
When these restrictions are finally lifted and ABC is exposed to the same FOI provisions as the rest of government perhaps it will be entitled to say a thing or two on the subject until then it's just more hypocrisy.

Vale Phillip Hughes 1988 - 2014

WEB

That time of the year again when ABC's "flagships" start their "well earned break". A joke as the rest of us battle on to Christmas and beyond.

Episode 3: The well-earned break. (From Quadrant)

The ABC is thrown into chaos yet again, this time by a clerical error that sees all but a handful of radio and TV hosts and journalists ordered to take their holidays at the same time. The most senior ABC staffer still on the job turns to her Twitter and Facebook friends to fill the reportorial void created by a depopulated newsroom.

That evening’s news broadcasts lead with the scoop that Tony Abbott cannot tell the difference between a burqa and a niqab and is therefore irredeemably opposed to every woman’s right to be oppressed in a liberated, post-modern sort of way.

A running gag in this episode features supremo Mark Scott, who learnt his journalism at Fairfax and bills himself as the ABC’s editor-in-chief. Eager to help out during the staffing crisis, he sets out to report a story on how the Navy is waylaying ships loaded with live cattle in order to torture their crews with hot engine parts. Sadly, just as he is about to start calling  favourite refugee advocates, the plumbers arrive to install a 14-carat executive toilet, obliging him to file countless Twitter updates on their progress.

The odd thing is that no viewer notices the slightest difference between normal ABC news coverage and the stream of undiluted social-media ranters that replaces it.

LOE apathetic board

Unedited version of a letter in today's Australian....


Rather than take the opportunity to restructure the ABC to get back to basics  it seems Mark Scott is intent on burning it to the ground and salting the earth behind him. In similar circumstances, in other institutions, an informed, competent board would step in and end the farce by sacking the CEO, but ABC's current crop of apathetic chair warmers lacks the balls to act. If Minister Turnbull wants to leave a lasting legacy then it's time he stepped in and reframed the ABC's enabling legislation to provide for the replacement of the board in cases of gross incompetence or indifference. One way to put an end to the lasting destruction now unfolding.

Rather than trim the fat Scott has taken the knife to the few remaining areas of the organisation that actually help meet the charter. This is one management team that should be sent packing before they do further damage.

ABC funding cuts

All we can say is Too little...too Late. There are better models of public broadcasting available rather than the current one that is still stuck in the 1930s.  A host of truly independent producers and production companies are available to produce Australian content. There are a myriad of delivery options.

ABC/SBS may be run on about a third of the current level, with no noticeable loss of service.