who decides on this merit, are you suggesting the government apoint a committee to apoint the board? Then surely the committee would be stacked.

In anyevent, if we further removed elected representatives from running the ABC, what would remain of accountability? surely you are not suggesting we allow a group of un-elected individuals run wild with billions of dollars of tax payers money. That wouldn't very be democratic, would it?

This the great contradiction of independent public corporations, a contradiction that may only be remedied via way of privatisation. Once someone is lawfuly investing their own capital questions of democracy vanish.

It seemed to have worked fine for all these years (without privatization) until the current 'jobs for the boys', megalomaniacal, sell-off-everything-to-make-our-bottom-line-look-good government got into power.

The problem is this regime sees itself as all-powerful-ruler rather than caretaker. The worst thing Australia ever did was give John Howard a "mandate".

There is this constant view that the ABC should be the masters of their own destiny and that Governments should in no way interfere with their processes. But the Government should still pay all the bills via our taxes. In other words, give us your money and you don't have any say as to how it is spent.

The ABC is a Government run enterprise and as such, the Governemnt as elected by the people has the right to make what ever decisions it sees fit. If the ABC and their fellow travellers do not like this, then they should lobby the Government to privatise the organization. Then they can raise the funds and travel the path they desire. Quite frankly, there are much better things that we can spend $800 million on.

Or we could just lobby the Government to keep their grubby fingers off the ABC. Which is, uh, kinda what we were doing anyway...

If elected representatives don't have a say and the market does not get a say, who stands to account? The question remains unanswered. What would stop a wild band of silent cinema lovers, working their way into management and forcing all programs to mimed to a musical back track accompanied by the intermittent phrase flashing up on screen? In your perfect little utopia the public would ignore the channel and the government would sit idly by pumping money into it. An extreme example, yes, but an evolution of your argument.

Wow!! A lefty who doesn't want to see the ABC become biased. Whilst I agree that any political bias within the ABC is not desirable it amazes me that the last 30 or more years of the ABC being run and staffed by Marxists & "progressives" hasn't worried Mark tuppence. I think Mark's worry isn't bias so much as the wrong sort of bias, and the fact that a few conservatives on the board might really change the organization into "Our" ABC instead of "His" ABC.