Does Grandstand organise cricket matches? Does ABC News organise bus crashes or bombings in Gaza? Of course not!
In February Aunty took it into her collective head to organise – not just film and broadcast, but actually organise – a drag queen story time event.
Here’s Mon Schafter, head of ABCQueer, issuing the invitation for the event on Facebook.
And here’s ABC Communications admitting – almost inadvertently – that the ABC was planning to be the ‘host’ for the event.
And here’s the local mayor revealing that it was the ABC that made the booking for the event:
Not so much ABC mission creep as mission gallop!
The Rockdale Library incident took the ABC’s allegiance to gender-identity ideology quite a few leagues beyond its usual manifestations of membership of ACON’s AWEI scheme, allowing/encouraging its employees to moonlight at ACON events, having a drag queen in costume as a panellist on current affairs shows, suppressing news that might be disquieting for gender-identity zealots, and blatantly endorsing puberty blockers etc.
A little over a month before it branched out into the event management business, the ABC sacked Antoinette Lattouf from her fill-in position on ABC Radio Sydney’s Mornings for – allegedly – overstepping her brief by posting about Palestine on Instagram. This has given rise to renewed public debate about the ABC’s impartiality requirements, the ABC’s double standards in applying them, and the influence of powerful outside lobbyists.
All of which is relevant to the aborted Rockdale Library event.
Was this proposed event impartial? Certainly not. Drag queen story time events are massively controversial, and various eminent experts – Helen Joyce, Stella O’Malley, and Jo Bartosch, to name but three – opine that drag queen story time isn’t a suitable entertainment for children – not least because its role is to indoctrinate very young children in the tenets of gender-identity ideology.
So was Mon Schafter sacked or reprimanded for overreach in outside activities? On the contrary: the ABC doubled down, condemning criticism of the venture as ‘hateful and offensive’. And giving as the only reason for cancelling the event that the ABC couldn’t ‘safely host it’, rather than because it was a bloody inappropriate thing for the ABC to be doing in the first place.
‘Hateful and offensive’? Hardly! This is what a mate of ours wrote to the ABC on learning of the proposed event:
These are very pertinent considerations, in our opinion. Likewise the criticism offered by Kit Kowalski of Women’s Rights Network Australia, who rightly commented that the ABC was going beyond its remit to reflect the national character ‘by actively organising controversial events where males dressed in a sexualised caricature of women read books to children’.
Finally, does the Rockdale Library fiasco show that the ABC’s under the influence of powerful outside lobbyists? It sure does. And we mean ACON, whose extensive interference in the ABC’s workplace culture and content has been irrefutably demonstrated.
The new ABC Chair, Kim Williams, said on 24 March: ‘If you don’t want to reflect a view that aspires to impartiality, don’t work at the ABC’ and inveighed against an ‘addictive focus’ at the ABC that ‘enables small cohorts to … have an exaggerated influence over the process of decision-making’.
Honestly, Mr Willams, that sounds to us like pompous twaddle – to use a term you yourself once employed – as long as ABCQueer is permitted to rampage unchecked and the organisation dismisses wholesale the very valid criticisms brought to bear upon it by members of the public. Good luck dealing with the ‘small cohorts’, though!