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None of these people could *possibly* have a reason to like Big-Government

It goes without saying that all of these folk could just as easily prefer a sensible, small spending government that was frugal with taxpayer funds. Right?

The Australian finally gets the information on the ABC salaries: “ABC spares no expense”

 

Mark Scott |
$678,940
Tony Jones |
$355,789
Juanita Phillips |
$316,454
Quentin Dempster |
$291,505
Richard Glover |
$290,000
Jon Faine |
$285,249
Leigh Sales |
$280,400
Barrie Cassidy |
$243,478
“The ABC received $1.03 billion of taxpayer funds last financial year, of which $465 million was spent on wages, superannuation and other entitlements.”

The culture is obvious. The ABC show their respect for the taxpayer… by fighting doggedly for years in court to hide the details of their taxpayer funded salaries from legitimate FOI’s. Now that they’ve been leaked, Mark Scott has apologized to the public his staff and promises an investigation into how it happened. (Imagine taxpayers finding out how their money was spent!)

Remember Richard Glover? He gets paid $290,000 for insight like this:

Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies”.June 6, 2011

It’s not like you can pick up that kind of ill-informed prejudice at any ol’ university refectory for free eh?

But seriously, it takes money to fund hatred on a mass scale. And where in the private sector could they find it?

So what happens when a single advertiser doesn’t just buy out all the ads, it buys the whole media outlet? Could it be that a culture of confirmation bias develops that’s invisible to those within because no one, literally no one of influence at the organisation has any interest in critical analysis of the fount of the funding? There is no one in-house to point out the Keynsian flaws, no one to remind them of the broken window fallacy. No one whose self-interest aligns with the taxpayer. It’s not about a political party per se, it’s about big-government versus small. (Though we all know which parties are more likely to deal out generous cash and conditions to the government media, and hobble the private competition.)

To say the bleeding obvious, the ABC is entirely dependent on government funding, and it very much serves their self-interest if voters also find big-government appealing. How handy then, that they also have the tools to try to influence voter opinions?  Likewise,  in the culture war against taxpayers who protest, other co-dependents make for useful compatriots. It’s in the ABC’s interest to promote groups who will themselves lobby ferociously for big-government, which will in turn be blindly generous to the ABC. Co-dependents that spring to mind are irrational academics (the more irrational the better), useless industrial firms (e,g. renewable generators) and fake free markets, all of which only exist thanks to government whim.

Andrew Bolt describes just how insidious the growth is — in May a private group set up Polifact, to fact check on politicians. At the same time Labor gave money to the ABC to do the same thing. Six months later, and the independent group is going out of business, but the government controlled group rolls on. How is the public served when their tax dollars are used to replace tasks that the private industry was happy to do? That’s a forced payment for a media “check” that is dependent on the government, versus a voluntary payment which the voter can retract at any time if they don’t think the media check is serving them?

To put a fine point on it — In the same week the ABC cry foul at having their salaries leaked,  the ABC promotes a politically hot (but obvious) story about our government doing what all governments do (which is spy on their neighbours).  The information has been available for six months yet somehow is released only at a time most inconvenient for the new slightly-smaller-government team in the midst of delicate negotiations. Who knows, perhaps it’s just a coincidence, and perhaps half those pictured above were delighted the Conservatives won?

H/t to David, Dave and AndyG: There is a petition to Privatize the ABC.

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