It seems quaint, in a context where journalism faces substantial threats and challenges – from commercial pressure to rising audience distrust – that a prominent Australian journalist can state the bleeding obvious and be pinged by a media regulator.



And yet the Australian Communications and Media Authority has ruled that a news report by the ABC’s political editor, Andrew Probyn, breached the ABC’s code for impartiality because he noted that Tony Abbott was “the most destructive politician of his generation”.

Abbott being observed to be destructive, particularly in the context of Probyn’s report, which was about climate change and energy policy, is just a fact.

ABC report calling Tony Abbott 'destructive' found to have breached code Read more

It isn’t Probyn’s feelings, or some quaint article of faith, or a reflection of secret communism. It’s about as controversial as noting that the sky is blue on a sunny day.

Let’s examine the record. Fact. Abbott, during a period of opposition, took the Liberal party leadership from Malcolm Turnbull when he was inclined to do a deal with Labor on an emissions trading scheme. Abbott then scuttled bipartisan cooperation on an important policy issue for a decade.

Fact. Labor managed to legislate a carbon price in a minority parliament. The policy had a couple of objectives: emissions reduction and and economic transformation. The policy was an attempt to drive an orderly transition in a carbon intensive economy.

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Fact. Abbott then launched a full frontal political campaign to dismantle it. The focal point of the 2013 election was axing Labor’s carbon tax (which wasn’t actually a tax but was widely reported as a tax without censure from the ACMA but let’s not sweat the small stuff, like f-a-c-t-s). After Abbott won the 2013 election, he repealed Labor’s scheme.

Fact. The ensuing policy vacuum has led to rising energy prices and created damaging policy uncertainty. You don’t have to take my word for this. You can ask every major stakeholder in the country, from major business groups to the greenest of the green environmentalists, who are now begging the parliament to fix the mess Abbott created. It’s a real problem, with real-world impacts, not some artefact of a rarefied political debating society.

Fact. Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have attempted to fix the mess, shadowed again by Abbott, who campaigned publicly first against a proposal from the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, (a clean energy target) and then against the national energy guarantee because it doesn’t facilitate new coal investment.

Probyn’s news report covered a speech Abbott made to a London-based climate sceptic group that was called Daring to Doubt. In the speech, Abbott suggested climate change was “probably doing good” and he likened policies to combat it to “primitive people once killing goats to appease the volcano gods”. This speech was delivered at a time when Turnbull and Frydenberg were attempting to finalise their energy policy.

None of this recitation of the record is speculative or tendentious or a feelpinion. Any light perusal of any news archive would bear this summary out.

We could pretend that the mess that Australia is in on climate and energy policy is just some accident visited on the populace, that we all just woke up one day in deep dysfunction and that is just one of those random things that happen for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – but we would be lying to our audiences if we did that, and lying to our audiences is intolerable, unconscionable and unprofessional.

Penny Wong says Labor will try and undo Abbott's legacy on climate policy Read more

Being impartial shouldn’t require a journalist to suspend judgment, and to pretend that all perspectives are inherently equal, it should require a reporter to apply professional judgment informed by a rigorous assessment of the facts, with the objective of informing readers and viewers.

The ABC’s impartiality code requires “a balance that follows the weight of evidence”. It also requires fair treatment, open-mindedness, opportunities over time for principal relevant perspectives on matters of contention to be expressed.

Balance that follows the weight of the evidence leads me, like Probyn, to an inexorable conclusion: when it comes to climate change and energy (again, the focus of his report), I’ve not, in my reporting lifetime at least, seen a more destructive politician than Abbott.

This is not an opinion, or a tantrum, or an abstraction, it’s a cool, rational, clinical assessment of the evidence, which is what I suspect audiences require of their national broadcaster.

Australia doesn’t need a publicly funded false balance factory. If that’s what the ABC has to be to be judged “impartial”, then we would all be better off if taxpayer support was directed towards different ventures rather than a purportedly venerable institution occupying media space for the sake of it.

Trust is the key to the survival of journalism in an era when just about everything is ranged against it.

Without trust we have nothing. And trust requires truth-telling without fear or favour.