Mark Latham offers to unleash a reign of privatisation terror at the ABC
From Mark Latham’s column in the current issue The Spectator Australia:
The front cover of this week’s The Spectator Australia.The best way of injecting new blood into the ABC is privatisation. … Unlike the commercial world, the ABC operates as a club, allowing old favourites to linger well past their use-by date.
… This reminds me of one of the lingering puzzles of the Howard era. Given the appointment of a string of economic rationalists to the ABC board, why wasn’t the ABC rationalised? In Labor’s shadow cabinet at the time, we expected serious reform to purge the place of its gentrified, left-wing culture. Year after year we waited for the Liberal party’s revenge, but nothing happened.
… This is a festering problem for the Liberal party and an incoming Abbott government.
… For this reason, I am willing to make a significant sacrifice. For a limited 12-month term, I am prepared to chair the ABC and do the things McDonald didn’t do. My strategy will be to slice and dice: selling off the component parts of the organisation, starting with its bookshops, then the arty-farty stuff, before moving onto its radio and television assets. Australia’s last remaining mausoleum of socialist demagoguery will be dismantled.
Read the full column on the former Labor leader’s “Lathamesque reign of terror” in this week’s issue of The Spectator Australia – available from newsagents Friday.
