Neil Brown: I’d scrap ABC and start over

But, if it were up to him, former Liberal Party deputy leader Neil Brown QC would sell off what he describes as the overly commercial and unnecessarily expansive ABC and start the process of publicly funding a news organisation from scratch.

In an interview yesterday, Mr Brown, a former communications minister, said there was a significant waste of public money at the ABC and questioned why an organisation designed to deliver news was conducting opinion polls and ­expanding into magazines.

“I think it should be sold,” Mr Brown said. “The best thing to do might be to start again.

“In the meantime, I think the chance of the ABC being sold or privatised are very remote, so in that context, where it is unlikely, the next question is, Do you want to make it better? And that means you should have good people on the board to make sure it has good management and to make sure it fulfils its functions.

“My role is to contribute to seeing if we can produce really good people to be on the boards of those organisations.”

Mr Brown, a Liberal heavyweight who was deputy leader under John Howard from 1985 to 1987, said that, in his new role on the nominations panel, he would recruit directors keen to restore balance to the ABC.

While he enjoyed the content on both the ABC and SBS, and recognised that they were impor­tant organisations, Mr Brown said the ABC in particular had grown to have “more of a disposition to the Left rather than a balanced approach”.

“I certainly think there should be more balance,” he said. “I would be looking for directors who could contribute towards that balance being maintained.

“It gets a herd mentality about it and takes an official view about what you, the citizen, should believe in. I’m not saying it should be conservative or right-wing: I think it should give balance.

“There has been a tendency to pick up the accepted zeitgeist on issues of climate change without giving the other side the opportunity to present its views. That’s my concern.”

He said the ABC often did not give a “fair go” to views it did not agree with and there was sometimes an “underlying tone” in its news reports and coverage of controversial topics.

On Wednesday, Mr Brown and The Australian’s columnist Janet Albrechtsen were appointed to the nominations panel overseeing board appointments at the public broadcasters.

At SBS, Elleni Bereded-Samuel’s departure has left one vacancy while, at the ABC, Julianne Schultz’s position has still not been filled. There will be two further board positions at the ABC next year, when Cheryl Bart’s term expires on June 2 and when Steven Skala leaves on November 24.

The nominations panel will present the Communications Minister with a shortlist of at least three candidates for a board vacancy.

While Albrechtsen called for managing director Mark Scott’s resignation, in a column in November last year, Mr Brown said he had not formulated a view on the matter.

In his regular article in The Spectator, out today and written prior to the panel announcement, Mr Brown is critical of a Peter Lewis efficiency review recommendation that the public broadcasters find new revenue streams. He argues that, as the public broadcaster continues to expand, commercialisation will only give it “a good kick along”.

He writes that many of the proposals would only “strengthen the government broadcasting behemoths’’.