@Martin,

Are you discussing secular versus religious beliefs or partisan political leanings?

Please provide evidence for "The voting behaviour of ABC employees has been measured it is overwhelmingly Green Party. This egregious bias isn't news, a person has to want to be deceived at some level to not recognise the state of the ABC and news media. "

I don't doubt that Piers Ackerman or Andrew Bolt or Gerard Henderson share/represent the beliefs of a large number of Australians.

The fact I find their views offensive does not negate their right to have their views...but I can find no evidence in your comments that they are repressed by the ABC. Rather they are often given more opportunities to extoll their opinion on Q and A than the opposition; usually results in my turning off the TV or at least screaming at Tony Jones for not challenging their statements.

if there was no ABC how would alternate views, shared by at least 48% of the population, be able to be heard? Certainly not via Murdoch press, certainly not on 2GB, nor on Sky News, Channel 7 or Nine.

We would then have curtailed democratic free speech.

Peter King, "if there was no ABC how would alternate views, shared by at least 48% of the population, be able to be heard?"

Even if what you allege is correct, that media corporations responsible to shareholders and Australian law censor and present a slanted view, where is it in the national broadcasters charter to do as you say, ie represent 'alternate' views?

Apart from that, having watched the most recent Q&A, those 'alternate' views you talk about are certainly in abundance on the ABC, if the treatment of Peter Hitchens is anything to go by. If the roles were reversed the Left would be up in arms claiming that the show was loaded against him from the start. Not to forget either how others were allowed by the compere to talk over him while he was speaking. The compere not helping either by interrupting or applying the guillotine if Hitchens managed to hold his head up while swimming against the tide.

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3868791.htm

onthebeach,

"Even if what you allege is correct, that media corporations responsible to shareholders and Australian law censor and present a slanted view, where is it in the national broadcasters charter to do as you say, ie represent 'alternate' views?"

I am not saying they should only present alternate views but should allow discourse from both sides of any issue that is in the public domain and of interest.

It is a bit rich to suggest that because Jones allows panelists to talk over each other he is unhelpful; watch Christopher Pyne in action on QanDA every couple of months. In respect of Hitchens, I would have to re watch it but I think he did his fair share of talking over the other panel members such as Don Savage and some "off camera" snide comments directed at Germaine Greer...but how does that demonstrate left wing bias? Is the topic of homosexuality really your bench mark for assigning the "leftist ABC" label?

Ah that is it isn't it? You are offended by frank discussion and you respond by passing it off as partisan commentary. Perhaps instead of on the beach you're actually below the high water mark.

Peter King,

You know that Christopher Pyne was not on the panel. He is an irrelevancy introduced by you to divert attention away from the obvious loading of the panel four to one against Peter Hitchens. The other four being Germaine Greer, Hanna Rosin, Dan Savage, and of course the very 'progressive' Tony Jones himself.

In the end, Dan Savage outed himself as the usual egocentric, bullying bigot that one is accustomed to encountering in political activists and the rest of that overblown side of the panel did not present much better and they chortled gleefully at his potty mouth excesses.

Your catty, dismissive post is a good example in microcosm of what happened with the Q&A panel. In the end it was freedom of speech that brought Savage et al undone, as their hubris encouraged by the permissiveness of Jones revealed their bigotry, supreme self-interest and half-baked ideas.

Perhaps Jones did a good job after all, even if the outcome was probably not what he had intended. After all, give them enough rope..

@Peter King. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/its-easy-being-green-at-the-abc-survey-finds/story-fn59niix-1226647246897 The ABC has a legislative duty, instead of fulfilling this, its culture of evangelical secularism, (the Green's Party has only marginal support in the Australian communiity) prompts anxious program stacking and exclusion/demonisation of the view it feels most threatened by. They are allergically anti-Christian and therefore anti-Western civilisation http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/print.aspx?article=5&loc=b&type=cbtp and anti-family 'Family Diversity and Political Freedom' (Family Research Council) http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF09H36.pdf it's clear the organisational culture is too far gone to reform itself. It needs outside intervention. A Royal Commission.

To not do this is extraordinarily dangerous, as this extent of group think always is. We can categorise them quite simply - 'The New Ruling Class' [Cater]. Turned in on itself and its own imperatives it is diminishing and dividing us - acting as counterfeit established church imposing its disciplines, authorising whatever expands temporal and spiritual domination of central/global late-stage liberal government they're umbilically connected to. Spectacularly critical of all concentrations of power they're in competition with, blind to the massive one proximate to them. Spectacularly observant of the hypocrisies of the past - 20/20 vision in hindsight - but utterly incapable of seeing its own hypocrisy. Taxpayer salaried self-interest tied to the prestige and power of this general revenue creating centralised national government. Every issue must needs be lifted up into national/global significance, everything turn on federal-national-global action - issues require a level of analysis that technocrats, gov. experts and graduates of gov. funded journalism schools claim unique competance in. Issues of justice receiving focus by spectacular coincidence are those uniquely favouring the interests of the ruling class http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print.

A reminder of our context, one that will never be provided by those spiritually buried in it. http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/05/20/3763423.htm or again Patrick Deneen http://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/patrick-j-deneen/

The ABC is gross and perilous weight on our public life, their culture warring divides us, and their ideological blindness obscures real internal and external threats. We have finite intellectual resources and they are being squandered attending to the idiocies of the well resourced ABC. Royal Commission time.

Free speech Bill, but gosh, I'm glad your lectures are confined to theological colleges, where the agenda is known. The sad thing is, the agenda is absorbed.