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Before the 2013 election, when Joe Hockey was asked about the ABC, he replied that the national broadcaster’s feet would be held to the fire if waste and profligacy were to be found. Now “waste” is a subjective term. One can imagine, for instance, that self-proclaimed “editor-in-chief” Mark Scott thinks himself worth every cent of the $800,000-plus he takes home each year, yet many would argue that while his singular talent for failing to notice underlings’ habitual and endemic bias is truly extraordinary, someone who cannot find efficiencies in a $1.2 billion budget falls well short of the executive ideal.
Were Scott to actually manage the ABC — a task the title of managing director seriously implies — he could save a pretty penny by disciplining hosts and producers who incur hefty defamation settlements. As it was settled out of court, we don’t know the size of the payout that went to Chris Kenny for having been depicted in the primetime, pants-down act of ravishing a dog, but it is a good bet that a hefty six-figure settlement changed hands.
Now, courtesy of Jon Faine, it is The Australian‘s Hedley Thomas who stands to pocket a very tidy sum for having his good name blackened via ABC Radio 774. It was broadcast as Faine was playing court eunuch to the queen of his heart, former PM Julia Gillard, and the following assertion went to air:
FAINE: That whole Bruce Wilson/Slater & Gordon ‘supposed scandal’ which dogged you for weeks and weeks and weeks to the point where every day there would be another so-called disclosure on the front page of The Australian, and Hedley Thomas was clearly told just do ‘whatever you need to do to see if you can get her’.”
So, according to Faine, the intrepid Thomas, acting at the alleged instruction of his Murdoch bosses, compromised his professional integrity by producing smears on demand. If Thomas consults a lawyer, that remark should be worth a very large settlement — not least because Faine was admonished in 2013 by ABC management for doing precisely what he now accuses Thomas of doing: serving as a shill for his favoured cause, in that instance Gillard’s pristine innocence.
As Faine’s earlier outburst was in Gillard’s defence, it is little wonder the ABC saw fit to administer no more than a slap on the wrist while allowing him to remain at the ABC’s Melbourne microphone. Had Managing Director Scott managed Faine into the nearest Centrelink office back then, not only would he have trimmed the compere’s $300,000-a-year salary from the ABC’s payroll, he also would have saved the likely future cost of making expensive amends to the slandered Thomas.
If Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull sees no reason to take action, perhaps Joe Hockey might like to remind him about that promise to target the national broadcaster’s waste of taxpayer dollars, a category which many would assume to include needless legal fees and settlements.
