Where ABC got it wrong was to allow a live question from Zaky Mallah coloured with an attack on the Libs most revered living icon, "As the first man in Australia to be charged with terrorism under the harsh Liberal Howard government in 2003, I was subject to solitary confinement, a 22 hour lockdown, dressed most times in an orange overall and treated like a convicted terrorist while under the presumption of innocence.
I had done and said some stupid things including threatening to kidnap and kill but in 2005 I was acquitted of the terrorism charges.
What would have happened if my case had been decided by the Minister and not the courts?"

Had he asked this question on tape, the ABC would have chopped the colourful bit, and things may not have escalated with Ciobo's ridiculous response in kind. We should expect better of our pollies IMO, rather than intemperate displays like his.

Mallah had every right to question the proposal of ministerial prerogative, given how it might have applied to him.

Whatever, the rest is history. Abbott did the bleeding Abbott-obvious, followed by the backing of his hysterical attack by the Team Australia front-bench, bound to solidarity over his every utterance since the recent bad look of cabinet dissent over the central matter. Then we had Tim Wilson bringing up the rear, getting all hot and bothered over Tony Jones just doing his job.

Kill the ABC. Kill the ABC. Kill the ABC. Kill the ABC. Kill the ABC........

Oh, and Paul Kelly last night intimating the ABC that it had better roll with the government or expect the unexpected. But then again, I guess, all he was saying was the bleeding obvious, that this government acts with extreme prejudice.

Aiden, the primary reason why most social regressives like yourself sprout your left wing views is because of a mistaken belief that it makes you look intelligent. It is a peer group thing. You identify with all those well off young university educated professionals living on their inherited wealth and parental trust funds in Balmain and Bondi, and you want to identify with them.

But if you stand up and say something completely stupid, like saying that the ABC is not biased, then most people know straight away that you are either intellectually challenged, or have some neuroses in which your ideology can completely short circuit self evident reality.

Claiming that the ABC is not biased, means that your opponents have won the debate before we even start. Most people will laugh at you. Some will feel sorry for you. Nobody will think you are intelligent. Not even the management of the ABC, who know that "their" ABC is a vehicle for left wing propaganda. They know perfectly well that that they are violating the ABC's founding charter, but they just want to keep their stranglehold on taxpayer funded media forever.

It is obvious that you do not read Murdoch's "The Australian" newspaper, because it is everything that the ABC will never be. It's editorials are usually right wing, although it supports gay "marriage" and Constitutional "recognition" of aborigines. It gives equal coverage to both sides on any contentious issue in it's widely read "opinions" page, and it even has notorious left wing journos like Mark Day, Phillip Adams and Graham Richardson on it's payroll.

One reason why Murdoch got rich was because he realised that all of the news media had become endemically left wing and that it was getting up the noses of the public. He made his media reflect largely the views of the public who were his customers. But he was a lot more concerned with impartiality than our ABC Soviet. That is why his media is successful and have credibility with the public, while the ABC infuriates the public and has the credibility of Pravda.

Is there an unbiased publicly-funded broadcasting agency anywhere in the world? I can't think of one. Unbiased public broadcasting is a lost cause, simply because jobs that are paid from government funding are going to attract people who regard government funding as a good thing; or if they don't, their self-esteem will demand that they soon do. There is tremendous psychological and social pressure on people who get their salaries from taxpayers' funds to maintain that public money should be distributed in this way, and not only to them, but to everyone.

The ABC may have small-scale disputes with this government or that, but -- like the universities and the remainder of the public service -- the way that they are recruited and paid virtually guarantees that their sympathies will be in favour of government interventionism and public welfare. Which in Australia means leaning towards the ALP.

Jon J, a good comment, but I'll make just one quibble.

In Australia the ALP has come to be regarded as a party of Government intervention only relatively recently and the LNP is a party of free-market "economic rationalism" only in concept, the reality is very different.

In other words, it's an artificial ideological dichotomy that has evolved mostly because of the changing industrial conditions that have lead both sides of politics to face a rapidly shifting set of voter demographics and voter concerns that has made more traditional (in the Australian context) political stances very difficult.

The National Party was and to some extent remains wedded to large Government interventions, which is only reasonable given its roots in an agrarian Bush, where seasons are variable, distances large and income very unevenly distributed with profits repatriated to the city.

The ALP was mostly driven by industrial policies that were formulated with an eye on the interests of both employers and workers and for a large part of its history that meant shorter working hours and maintaining employment in response to technological advances. It has had to shift to accommodate a largely Government work force which has made it lose focus on industry policy.

The Liberal Party was founded on the idea of the primacy of the individual over the collective and was always aimed at the prosperous bourgeois middle class, the middle management/foreman and artisanal tradesman who felt themselves deserving of recognition as a separate group from the proletarian worker, having proven themselves capable of making good. It appealled very strongly to women and that was part of the reason for the ALP adopting such a strong stance toward women's issues.

The ABC could span that divide because in reality there wasn't much of a divide at all. The divisions have been deliberately created by professional operatives within each party (including our own GY on this site) as a means of polarising votes.

LEGO,

1. Why do you regard me as a social regressive?
2. If my objective were to look intelligent, why would I resort to the tactic of sprouting views that so many here have prejudged to be stupid?
3. Why do you think I identify, and want to identify, with the rich people of eastern Sydney?
4. Why do you again resort to the "it's true because everyone knows it's true" fallacy that I've previously criticised, while still ignoring Ozbib's objective criticism?
5. What opposing views do you think the ABC do not give adequate coverage to?
6. The Australian used to be objective, but it lost its objectivity years ago. Remember this is the newspaper that had a front page report about Victoria's wind turbines having failed to reduce Victoria's CO2 emissions, but failing to mention that the reason for this was that they exported the extra electricity to NSW!