Three bills before parliament to change the ABC charter and to disclose the salaries of presenters are unnecessary and unjustified, Michelle Guthrie has told a parliamentary committee.



One bill will amend the ABC Act 1983 to add a “fair and balanced” requirement to its charter, one will force the broadcaster to reveal the more information about ABC salaries, and a third will add a recognition of rural and regional Australia.

The ABC managing director said it was the ABC’s “very strong view” that its salary disclosures were “completely consistent” with guidelines set by the public service. “We believe that imposing additional disclosure requirements on public broadcasters is unnecessary and unjustified,” Guthrie told Senate estimates on Wednesday.

The ABC’s regional audiences are already well served by the allocation of one-third of the budget and any changes to the ABC Act are unnecessary, she said.

“It is very clear to us that we have [a requirement to be fair and balanced] in our editorial policies and it is unnecessary,” Guthrie said.

The Labor senator Kristina Keneally pursued a line of questioning that the ABC was facing “more than the usual level of parliamentary scrutiny” as a result of the Coalition’s backroom deals with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson to ensure its media bill was passed last year.

The “fair and balanced” bill was payback by Hanson and part of her vendetta against the ABC in retaliation for its investigative journalism, Labor senators said.

Guthrie said she would “fully participate” in the upcoming inquiry into whether the ABC was complying with competitive neutrality laws.

Announcing the terms of reference last month, the communications minister, Mitch Fifield, said competitive neutrality principles provided that government business activities – including the ABC – should not enjoy net competitive advantages.

Guthrie said she was “very confident” the ABC was complying with all the policies and noted the corporation had been engaged in commercial activity since 1933 and only 4% of ABC funds came from commercial activities.

Fifield said he didn’t believe the ABC was a competitor with News Corp because it “didn’t take advertising”, but agreed the two media giants were competing for viewers and readers.

Fifield, who acknowledged he was a member of rightwing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs, said he did not share the IPA’s view that the ABC should be privatised.

After more questioning surrounding the Emma Alberici tax stories, Guthrie said her dramatic restructure of the content divisions in February was to blame for the failure in editorial policies.

The ABC is now organised along content rather than platform lines, abolishing the old divisions between TV, radio and online, and many old reporting lines have changed.

“As we made those changes I very much take responsibility that we did not put adequate resources in places to maintain the editorial quality we needed across all our platforms,” she said.

The editorial director, Alan Sunderland, said the Alberici stories were excellent and important journalism and everyone should read them and Guthrie expressed full confidence in the reporter, after appearing to dodge the same question at an earlier estimates.

Fifield admitted he had made his opinions known on various issues, including the ABC enterprise agreement, salary disclosures, the date of the Hottest 100, articles on corporate tax and a Tonightly with Tom Ballard skit, but denied he was interfering.

“I have never intervened on the independence of the national broadcaster,” Fifield said.

Guthrie said it was ultimately her decision to hand back the Cabinet Files to the government and she had spoken on the phone about the return of the documents with Michael Parkinson, the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Senior ABC staff and Labor have criticised the ABC for handing back the documents.

“You can do two things with these documents – you can take the WikiLeaks approach that it all just belongs on the public record regardless of whether there is any merit to it,” Sunderland said.

The other approach was to do nothing and hand them all back.

“Or you can take the journalistic path a responsible media organisation would take to assess those documents and report every single story that met our criteria,” he said.

“That is what we did.”