Peter Marks, former ABC Technician and current ABC Alumni Board member, calls out the hypocrisy of some ABC haters.

Those of us who live in regional Australia have many advantages over our friends from the big smoke. While on the media side we miss out on some radio, we are well served with free to air commercial TV and with ABC stations. And there’s something we get that the cities don’t - Sky News Regional.

Sky New Regional is a strange beast. By day, it’s a professional looking news service reminiscent of CNN but more “shouty”. By night it changes to programs hosted by a string of right wing opinion hosts who loudly promise to bring us “The Truth” (the implication being that we don’t get that anywhere else). Chris Kenny, Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt, Sharri Markson and Paul Murray offer up an exhausting lineup of conservative skeptics who hint that they know all the ways we’re being lied to.

The ads are rather low rent and clearly targeted at an older viewer. Hot water dispensers, tiny vacuum cleaners and comfy chairs. At least we don’t have to pay a subscription fee to get to watch the ads.

There are common themes in the opinions held by these programs. Government is always too big, money is wasted on welfare, being tougher on crime is the answer, and the ABC is a hard left biased organisation that should be wound up or sold off. The message is that commercial media, like Rupert Murdoch’s Foxtel (which includes Sky News), is an honest competitive business that earns money, pays its taxes, giving customers what they want, but is forced to unfairly compete with the publicly funded ABC.

How much tax does Foxtel pay?

A recent investigation by Michael West media “Foxtel: transactions you can’t trust, tax evasion you can’t ignore” notes the recurring theme of bashing “Their ABC” as “Middle class welfare” and portrays the ABC as a taxpayer-funded hotbed of woke “leftists”. Perhaps if you are a hard right populist, mixing only with others of a similar bent, it makes sense that you’d see much of the world as biased left.

Read the article at Michael West Media

So are these free market purists fairly participating in the Australian commercial media environment? Michael West’s analysis explains that the corporate entity which holds Foxtel, and therefore Sky News, plus Foxtel Sports Australia (the valuable bit), is called NXE Australia Pty Ltd and was recently sold to British sports network DAZN for $3.4B. Nice! But, financial statements of NXE for fiscal 2024 disclose a loss after tax of $96.3M on cash flow of $248.7M. Oh dear!

West points out that Foxtel seems good at generating cash flow but no good at making any taxable profit in Australia.

“This may seem odd to the audiences of News Corporation in Australia, who are subject to daily haranguing as to the ‘taxpayer-funded ABC’ and assorted welfare bludging, as it is not the income taxes of Sky or other Murdoch properties which fund these apparent legions of welfare bludgers.”

The accounting scheme is impressively complex and has allowed Foxtel Cable Television to invoice millions of Australians $1.9B, and have them pay, but the company itself has no bank account and the money is nowhere to be seen, certainly not by the ATO. All of these rightwing “truth” tellers must be employed on generous salaries you’d think? It turns out that not only do they receive no cash, they have no employees either.

Hypocrisy

Here in regional Australia, we are served up a daily diet of calls for a pure free market, without government intervention or investment, from an organisation that broadcasts under the title of “News” and claims to uniquely reveal “Truth” while in fact elaborately avoiding tax and clearly pushing a political agenda.

Banging on about the spending of taxpayer funds on public broadcasting is blatantly hypocritical for an organisation that pays no tax.