Quote – “Targets for 2024 include having 50 per cent of executive roles filled by women, 30 per cent of content makers being culturally and linguistically diverse with eight per cent of staff having a disability.” To make the ABC a better place why not simply employ the best candidate for the position without consideration to gender or race.
Mike O’Connor says in this awesome article;
ABC in an email to all staff last week, backed up by a streamed debate from its Ultimo headquarters in Sydney titled “Change takes action – how do we drive change?”, chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor sounded the alarm, warning of the need to ensure that diversity and inclusion were made a priority.
Targets for 2024 include having 50 per cent of executive roles filled by women, 30 per cent of content makers being culturally and linguistically diverse with eight per cent of staff having a disability.
Whether genetic males identifying as women count towards this target has not been made clear.
Oliver-Taylor said “the reality is, we don’t have enough colleagues that come from a diverse background joining the ABC, and we need to deliberately make that happen”.
Put another way, the ABC doesn’t hire the best person for the job.
If there’s one position vacant and two applicants, the culturally and linguistically diverse candidate gets the nod and the one who has the misfortune to be born into an Anglo-Saxon culture and who professes English to be his first language gets shown the door.
Almost two-thirds of the adult population of the nation has been accused of racism in recent months, but surely any policy that discriminates on cultural and linguistic grounds is racist even if it is labelled as diversity.
If the best candidate for the job doesn’t get it then it follows that you are hiring the second or third or fourth best and the result is a second-rate workforce producing a second-rate product.
If you want to talk about diversity, how about starting with a diversity of views, for when it comes to presenters and commentators, the ABC is a conservative-free zone and nor do you have to venture too far to find comment posing as news.
If you were wondering why, in spite of consuming $1bn annually in taxpayer funds, the ABC continues its seemingly inexorable slide into irrelevance, then look no further than the focus of its highly remunerated executives.
Managing director David Anderson has said that over the next three years, the public broadcaster would focus on inclusion in practice, a diverse workforce, inclusive content, products and services, connection with Indigenous and diverse communities and accountability and transparency.
Let’s take transparency.
The ABC is notoriously averse to questioning and has a history of investigating itself when a complaint is made and finding to no one’s surprise that there is no case to answer and only recently succumbed to pressure and moved to establish an ombudsman to look into complaints made against it.
Anderson says “our teams help drive the national conversation on inclusion, for example through innovative content for International Day of People with Disability, Harmony Week, and Mardi Gras”.
In listing its recent achievements, it pointed to its decision to feature acknowledgements of country and Indigenous location names across ABC screens.
I rest my case.
