Australia has an unpleasant culture of trying to prevent critics from being taken seriously by fostering prejudice against them. The Hawke government excelled at it, in particular attacking academics and public intellectuals. (Think of comments about Balmain basketweavers. The ALP paid the price of this when those voices could not cut through the media babel when the Howard government was elected.) The Howard government also fostered prejudice against its critics--attacking lawyers, supporters of asylum seekers, United Nations authorities and committees--indeed, anyone from outside Australia. ('We will decide who comes to this country' for instance. All very juvenile, but it seems to have worked.) The process goes on in the columns of newspapers, and in OLO. (Think of comments about Balmain Chardonnay drinkers, liberals ((absurdly described as leftists)), the commentariat, civil libertarians ((also absurdly described as leftists)).)

Like most of the writers on this topic, I think the Chaser skit, while targeting the Make a Wish Foundation, was wrong to also attack dying children. It is clear, though, that some of the commentators are trying to have the Chaser group starved of outlets.

It is time we changed this culture

I don't think the Chaser guys themselves knew exactly what they wanted to say but they reacted to an intuition that something about the Make a Wish Foundation lacks integrity.

Dying children make many adults feel very uncomfortable and powerless. In order to appease their feelings they try and "do" things to avoid those feelings. They are not acting to make the kids feel better. They often put pressure on kids to come up with a wish that they can fulfill even though as the doctor said their only real wish is to get better and go home. If adults find it difficult to deal with dying children they should admit that rather than use the kids to alleviate their own pain.

I think the skit was a criticism of dishonest adults rather than sick kids and as such it was very good satire of the type we really need.

The Chaser guys have been bullied into apologising by people who do not want their own behaviour exposed for what it really is. Child abuse can take many forms!

phanto:"I think the skit was a criticism of dishonest adults rather than sick kids"
SM:"In fact, the sketch was targeting the Make a Wish charity".
Fractelle:"There are charities who use guilt and bullying tactics to extract a donation."
Antiseptic:"The Make-a-Wish foundation had been in the news talking about having to cut services through a lack of funding in the weeks before the Chasers' show aired .... often a large group of people who draw their living through taking funding that could have otherwise been used to service the group they claim to represent"
RobP:"..point out the hooks that charity groups use to tear-jerk money out of the public. The deeper question is whether or not the income the charities attract is used for the purposes as understood by the donating public or whether it is just smart advertising to prop up the charity industry for its own ends."
pelican: "While the Make A Wish skit endeavoured to make fun of the Foundation rather than the kids themselves"
Nora:"think about WHY we don't express the same rage and disgust at the fact that EVERYDAY according to the World Health Organisation, tens of thousands of kids suffer and die in many countries around the world."
Spikyone:"Whether or not it was intended, the phone call made me feel very guilty, almost as if I were personally responsible for upsetting a very ill child. Maybe the Chasers recieved a call similar to this one prior to writing the sketch"
Most bloggers thought the target of the skit was "Make a Wish charity" or similar charities due to their offensive fund raising techniques,dispersal of funds, etc; Phanto thought it was "an attack on dishonest adults"; Nora thought it was an attack on people who aren't upset by the suffering of tens of thousands of kids in poorer countries"
Well all we know from the Chasers themselves is "we don’t think the Make a Wish Foundation deserves anything other than praise". So either the Chasers are telling porkies or most of the bloggers got it wrong.

blairbar:"all we know from the Chasers themselves is "we don’t think the Make a Wish Foundation deserves anything other than praise""

My suspicion is that the Chasers were attempting to make a sarcastic point about the money drying up for the Male-aWish Foundation and possibly encourage greater funding. It is from that intent that the greater issue of whether these victim-based charities are worthy of support at all has arisen.

Leaving aside the M-a-W mob for a moment, we've recently seen the NSW Rape Crisis Centre trying to get their representatives into football clubs, where there are pots of money, on the basis of the "Claire"/Johns incident, where no rape occurred. We hear a lot from "single mother" groups, all of whom are constantly reducing the range of activities that fall outside their interests as they choose to promote them. We hear a lot from "disadvantaged children's advocated" or "child abuse experts", and always there is the claim that the problem would be fixed if only we spent more money on the group making the claims.
We have "pink ribbon days" and "white ribbon days" and "yellow ribbon days", all of which cost lots of money to run and seem to do nothing whatever to reduce the number of victims of whatever it is they claim to be fixing. Breast cancer should be a solved problem by now with the number of "Foundations" and charities devoted to it and Bob Hawke's "no child in poverty" promise should be a reality.

In the meantime, managers and staff of these NGOs are drawing high salaries, volunteers are working for nothing and the victims continue to exist.

What has happened over the past 20 years of Laboral Government is that our society has been trained to be recipients, not creators of benefits. We have been conditioned to expect someone else to have responsibility for fixing our own problems, or at least for accepting the burden of trying. It's time we reevaluated our way of doing help it seems to me.

I agree, the last line of the skit was an unfortunate choice of words. But The Chaser has always taken the line that no sacred cow is too sacred for them, and it's this fearless irreverence that helps make it the great show it is. The Chaser's style of satire is sorely needed in Australian media. There is very little produced these days that holds the mirror up to ourselves, warts and all, in the way The Chaser boys do. We need them and the current moral outrage won't do them any harm. This little storm in a teacup has raised their profile in a way that all the best ABC promos could never achieve.

My disappointment here lies more in the fact that the material in question was most probably not entirely original, but I guess everyone has to get their inspiration somewhere. With Kevin Rudd's government replacing John Howard's, a large source of ready made material has definitely dried up and the boys quite understandably have to dig a bit deeper. The Chaser's Make a Realistic Wish Foundation appears fairly obviously to draw on the same theme that inspired the Mansion's fictitious Reasonable Request Foundation, which ran on the Comedy Channel last year. So, while a bit of the gloss has rubbed off for me, they still ride pretty high!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC3ktLHpr8E&feature=related

david f

With respect, David, your Marxist-Leninist rant is as relevant to the Green Left Weekly as it is to this debate. The Weekly has no association with the atrocities carried out under Marx and Lenin and it was an uncharacteristically cheap shot from you to attempt to make that link. The GLW has its finger on the pulse on so many issues that just don't get an in-depth run at all in the mainstream media. It adds enormously to the range of opinion out there and doesn't deserve the ignorant maligning you've dished up here.

Bronwyn

Thanks for the link - The Mansion skit definitely hits the mark that Chaser failed to do. Loved the line about wishing for Pamela Anderson and getting Angry instead.

I really believe that the ABC gets over-scrutinised - I thought with a change of government we'd see a bit less of the jackboot brigade. Didn't they get rid of the likes of Janet Albrechtsen et al?