As ABC chair, Ita Buttrose stood up for the broadcaster's independence. It's time others did the same

Ita Buttrose has announced she will not seek a second term as ABC chair, which means her term will expire in March 2024.

Buttrose’s appointment as chair of the ABC in February 2019 was tainted by being a “captain’s pick” on the part of then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, yet at crucial moments she was to prove a strong defender of the ABC’s independence against the predations of his government.

It was the issue that came to define her tenure. It had also brought down her predecessor, Justin Milne. The manner of her appointment continued the Coalition’s contemptuous disregard of the independent merit-based selection process for ABC board appointments, and she inherited a board stained by political patronage.

Four of the seven non-executive directors already there had been appointed outside the merit system by Mitch Fifield as minister for communication.

Buttrose herself put ABC independence at the centre of her commitments. In a sharp departure from Milne’s temporising approach to government pressure, Buttrose stated soon after her appointment:

I will fight any attempts to muzzle the national broadcaster or interfere with its obligations to the Australian public. Independence is not exercised by degrees. It is absolute.

Read more: Ita Buttrose's appointment as new ABC chair a promising step in the right direction

Within months, this declaration was put to the test when the Australian Federal Police raided the ABC headquarters in Sydney as part of an investigation into who had leaked information about alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. Buttrose attacked the police raid as a clear attempt to intimidate journalists.

In November 2020, it was put to the test again. Four Corners broadcast a program called Inside the Canberra Bubble. In it Rachelle Miller, a former staffer to acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge, said she had had an affair with him. She also alleged that Christian Porter, who was to become attorney-general, had been seen cuddling a staffer of another minister in a Canberra bar in 2017. Porter denied the claim.

On November 30, Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher wrote to Buttrose demanding answers within 14 days to 15 questions mostly about the program’s impartiality.

On the 14th day, December 14 2020, Buttrose sent him a reply, hitting back hard. She dismissed the 15 questions and accused the government of a pattern of behaviour that “smacks of political interference”.

The ABC’s managing director, David Anderson, subsequently told a Senate estimates committee hearing that Buttrose had seen the program before it went to air and had supported the decision to broadcast it.

Then in late February 2021, Four Corners broke a related story saying the Australian Federal Police had been notified of a letter sent to Scott Morrison detailing an alleged historical rape by a cabinet minister in the federal government.

In early March, Christian Porter outed himself as the cabinet minister referred to, and strongly denied the allegation.

He sued the ABC for defamation but the ABC defended it vigorously and he discontinued the action.

In late 2021, Buttrose went on the attack again, this time over an attempt by Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg to launch a Senate inquiry into the ABC’s complaints process, while an internal inquiry into the same issue was already on foot. She called it out as a “partisan political exercise” and Bragg’s effort foundered.

It is clear that far from behaving like a Liberal Party stooge, Buttrose has stood up courageously for the ABC’s independence, as she said she would. That will be an important part of her legacy.

Yet she has not been able to imbue the organisation’s editorial leadership with the same spirit. This was shown in two recent cases where editorial independence was again under attack.

The first concerned the coverage of King Charles III’s coronation in May. For about 45 minutes in the lead-up to the ceremony, the ABC ran a panel discussion about the contemporary relevance of the British monarchy to Australian lives. The nine guests on the program included Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri man and celebrated ABC journalist.

The panel discussion provoked a backlash and drew about 1,800 complaints to the ABC. After investigating these, the ABC ombudsman found the program had not breached the ABC’s editorial policies.

Much of the backlash focused on Grant, and in late May he stepped aside from his role as moderator of Q+A on ABC television, writing in his ABC column:

No one at the ABC — whose producers invited me onto their coronation coverage as a guest — has uttered one word of public support. Not one ABC executive has publicly refuted the lies written or spoken about me. I don’t hold any individual responsible; this is an institutional failure.

He has since left the ABC and taken up a position at Monash University.

Read more: Stan Grant's treatment is a failure of ABC's leadership, mass media, and debate in this country

It was not until Grant announced his decision to step back from Q+A that the head of the ABC’s news division, Justin Stevens, finally made a public statement in Grant’s defence, apologising for not having done so “ten days earlier”. Anderson’s apology to Grant in a staff email had come only one day sooner.

The second case concerns Nicole Chvastek, an experienced journalist who, until March, had presented ABC Radio Victoria’s Statewide Drive program for almost a decade.

Her career ended abruptly in July after a 17-month saga set in motion by a complaint from a National Party politician, Darren Chester, telephoned directly to a senior ABC executive in Sydney. It concerned the way Chvastek had covered the Morrison government’s handling of flood relief payments to victims in northern NSW: those who lived in the National seat of Page got more, initially, than those in the neighbouring Labor-held seat of Richmond.

The details of Chvastek’s case have been traversed elsewhere. It remains only for me to declare that for eight and a half years I was a guest on her program discussing media issues, and the charge of misconduct arising from Chester’s complaint was not upheld.

In both cases, at the most senior levels of ABC editorial leadership there was a failure of an editor’s first responsibility, which is to provide a safe environment within which staff can do good journalism.

There have been many analyses of how nine years of Coalition government attacks demoralised the ABC. But with Buttrose’s departure now on the horizon, it is time for others at the top to stand up.