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Here now is Point of View, an independent news commentary by Mr. Bob Santa Maria on behalf of the National Civic Council.
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How do you do? One of the more intractable problems to be handled by the Federal Government now that it has been returned to power is that of the ABC.
According to Mr. Hook some months ago, and I quote him, there is a pattern of bias in the ABC of which he added that its operations leave a great deal to be desired.
By definition, the ABC is a public statutory corporation which is financed exclusively by the taxpayer to the extent of nearly $400 million a year.
That's about two-thirds as much as Australia spends on the purely manpower requirements of its air or naval fighting forces if we exclude their civilian tail.
Since it is financed exclusively by public money, the ABC therefore ought not to belong to any political party, to any intellectual current, whether of the left or the right, feminist, homosexual, lesbian or traditionalist.
It should not serve as the propaganda voice for any school of opinion, but in fact it does.
It didn't require the ABC's fatuous decision to publicly finance the transfer not only of the de facto wives of its employees, but of their homosexual partners as well.
Subsidies for sodomy as 200 employees of the ABC's Tasmanian branch called it to show the true nature of the intellectual and moral bias of this organisation under the control which operates today.
With few exceptions, the public affairs programs of the ABC emerge as extreme left-wing in politics and as protagonists of aberrant sexual practices.
As to the former ABC programs are consistently and stridently anti-American.
The role of the ABC in envenoming Australia's relationships with Indonesia, particularly over the East Timor affair, is notorious.
As a result it no longer has any representation either in Indonesia or in Papua New Guinea.
The Democrat Senator for New South Wales, Senator Mason, publicly stated that the ABC gave free publicity valued at three-quarters of a million dollars to the nuclear disarmament party in the recent election.
The ABC almost universally favours radical feminist and pro-homosexual viewpoints. One characteristic session at prime listening time immediately after PM was presented soon after the death of the Queensland babies who had been infected with AIDS.
The whole of the half hour was devoted to protesting against possible victimisation of homosexuals over the spread of AIDS without a word of regret, let alone pity, for the babies who had died.
The reason for this situation was outlined in a review of ABC affairs given by one of its more outspoken critics, Anthony McAdam in the Melbourne Herald on the 14th of September and I quote him.
The real power in the ABC today, he said, resides not with Mr Whitehead, the managing director, and least of all with Mr Maier, the chairman of the board, but with a small group of highly motivated programme makers who were radicalised on the campuses during the Vietnam years.
These key individuals on the left, he continued, all emerged out of the ABC staff association and particularly its main branch, New South Wales, the forcing house of radical left-wing influence throughout the organisation.
A similar judgement has been given by Dame Leonie Kramer, former chairman of the ABC, obviously from her own experience as chairman.
Dame Leonie Kramer added, these staff association members have been pushing for a long time the line that all ABC management is slack, incompetent and ought to go and that view has of course prevailed.
The result of this campaign has been that some months ago 50 senior ABC officers received letters telling them that their positions no longer existed, thus effectively getting rid of nearly half the members of the ABC senior officers association.
At that point at least, none of these senior staff members knew whether or not he had a job.
Yet as Dame Leonie pointed out, and again I quote, all the members of the ABC's board are new to the ABC.
Now they have thrown out anybody who knew anything.
That would be like firing the university senate and the academic board simultaneously.
It is, she concluded, absolutely mad.
As far as public affairs are concerned, the situation is not likely to be improved by the appointment of a former National Times editor, David Ma, to Four Corners, which is now to run for an hour weekly.
He is described as possessing formidable talent, no doubt.
But anyone having observed his ABC performances in relation, for instance, to the Kuma affair and the publication of the Petrov papers must wonder whether his objectivity is as formidable as his ability.
The record of the past 10 years, I suggest, shows that there is no governmental solution to the problems the ABC presents.
Since every federal government, whatever its complexion, has found itself completely impotent to handle this problem, and since the ABC is transparently in chaos, perhaps it is time to consider a totally different solution.
That the ABC itself as a national broadcasting corporation should be abolished, and half a dozen state-financed corporations created in its place.
There is absolutely no reason why less than 50 radical leftists, or rightists for that matter, should be permitted to establish a cultural monopoly over the whole of the national television medium.
The left-wing faction would of course respond to such a decision.