The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has finally ended its memberships with several diversity and inclusion organisations, including the Aids Council of NSW (ACON) Pride in Diversity program.
For a national broadcaster, these relationships raised obvious concerns from the outset, and they should not have been allowed to continue for as long as they did.
The ABC was paying to be part of organisations that also assessed and ranked it, in some cases linking that to its editorial output. This is a clear conflict and not acceptable for a publicly funded broadcaster.
And over time, these concerns had a real impact on how stories were, or weren’t, reported.
The ABC gave very little attention to the closure of the UK’s Tavistock gender clinic, despite how significant that story was globally. It didn’t report on the case of Keira Bell, a detransitioner who raised serious questions about the use of puberty blockers for children. The ABC also admitted to editorial lapses in its coverage of transgender athletes.
At the same time, the ABC was maintaining paid relationships with advocacy organisations working in these same areas.
These organisations were activist-led programs embedded in the same issues the ABC is meant to report on independently, dressed up as ‘harmless’ workplace initiatives.
Once activism is relabelled as a workplace initiative, it avoids the scrutiny it would otherwise receive.
The ABC will also exit partnerships with the Australian Disability Network and the Diversity Council of Australia, which operated in a similar way.
This is the right move from the ABC. It just shouldn’t have taken this long.
The question we now must ask is how many of these so-called ‘workplace initiatives’ across our business, media, politics, and healthcare are just activism in disguise?
