The coming budget will reveal the Prime Minister as a barefaced liar.
Tony Abbott; Cartoon by Andrew Dolphin
“I trust everyone listened to what Joe Hockey said last week and again this week,” he told an SBS interviewer on election eve last September. “No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”
Of that lot, it’s likely only the GST will be untouched. The ABC will be hit ruthlessly, with tens of millions of dollars slashed in what the government’s weasel spinners will try to sell as an “efficiency dividend”.
When I wrote here last November that “the fight for the ABC is on”, I knew the Tories would be vindictive. I had no idea they would get so viciously personal; led by Mr Murdoch’s myrmidons, of course. Just recently, News Corpse writers have likened the ABC managing director, Mark Scott, to Joseph Goebbels and Vladimir Putin. Individual journalists are frequently targeted by name. The Australian spent an entire week monstering the Media Watch presenter, Paul Barry, for some perceived offence to its editor-in-chief’s delicate sensibilities. The madder ideologues, like the mouths for hire at Melbourne’s lunar Right Institute of Public Affairs, shrill that the place should be sold off altogether.
Watch this space. The battle for the ABC is just warming up.
Source: Mike Carlton; www.smh.com.au
Words, By George! 