I came across an article the other day that brought back memories of my years in Australia. There is quite a lot I miss about Australia – Vili’s pies, the warbling of the maggies, Christmas on the beach in shorts, dry summers, the vast land and the silence just outside the cities that stretches on forever – to name just a few things. Most of all, I miss my friends there. But there are two things I do not miss at all: the politics and the nanny state. And that brings us to the article. Auntie’s in trouble, you see. If you don’t know Auntie, you know nothing about Australia. Not really. ‘Auntie’, as we call her, is our national broadcaster, the ABC, or Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the name modeled off of that other ‘Auntie’ up North. And lately, she has been going through some rough times. Seems Auntie has lost her head, one Michelle Guthrie, who was summarily fired halfway into her five-year term. Why, we might ask? It turns out that the latter had refused to fire some journalists who had been less than salutary to certain conservative politicians in their coverage of politics in Oz. Horrors. But then, the man who fired her, one Justin Milne, ABC chairman, had to resign because of revelations that he had been the one pressuring Guthrie to fire the journalists and for other sundry reasons which are covered in the article. But before we get to the dynamics of the stoush, first, some background on dear Auntie and a quick look at her chart. Continue reading “The troubles with Auntie”
The troubles with Auntie
