Marcus May, our regular correspondent, continues his series on Who’s Who in the Anti-ABC Zoo. He has covered Atlas, Advance, and the IPA. Now it is the turn of the Menzies Centre.

First of all, it should be recognised that the Menzies Research Centre (MRC) is a Liberal Party-conceived and backed think-tank. It was first established in 1994, apparently by Liberal Party apparatchiks such as Brian Loughnane who is still a director.

In 2021, Independent Australia reported:

In terms of funding, the MRC gives large amounts of cash to the Liberal Party in donations but receives considerably more back from the Australian Government. From limited information, it appears the centre was primarily set up to act as a front organisation on behalf of Parakeelia Pty Ltd, a major fund-raiser for the Liberal Party.

In this role, the MRC has donated over $1 million dollars to the Liberal Party over the last 20 years. But, from the Australian Government – incredibly while both the Liberal/National Party and the Labor Party (ALP) have held power – the MRC has received in total some $2.636 million over the last ten years from the Department of Finance. This money transfer is all done under the AEC classification of ‘other receipts’, a catch-all category generally believed to cover blatant rorting.

After describing itself in glowing terms on its website, as “committed to a just and humane society”, “advocating for a free, just and prosperous Australia”, and various other marvellous objectives, the MRC gets down to tintacks:

  • The Menzies Research Centre advocates for effective, efficient and democratic government.
  • The Centre supports freedom, human dignity, personal responsibility, and private enterprise as the mainstays of modern Australian Liberalism.
  • The Centre is affiliated with the Liberal Party of Australia.

And its core objective becomes clearer when discussing the MRC’s emphasis on developing Australia’s youth:

Educating and recruiting young people to Menzies’ vision for Australia is not an abstract intellectual exercise - it is critical to prevent entrenched, wall-to-wall Labor Governments.

Like the IPA and its focus on producing a cadre of young, right-wing advocates on university campuses, the far-right has placed great importance on gaining legitimacy and influence through the university system — an approach best emulated by the Koch Bros in the U.S.

So, OK, the MRC is an arm of the Liberal Party in Australia, dedicated to preventing Labor governments.

But, more relevant to this series of articles, what is the MRC attitude to the ABC, to public broadcasting? After all there are many conservatively aligned Australians, including Liberal and National party supporters, who value the ABC and want it to succeed.

Apart from the on-going allusions to a perceived alignment between public broadcasting and the political left, the MRC seems to prefer to push for an (yet another) inquiry into the ABC rather than directly advocating destruction of it.

In 2021, the MRC website featured an article by Liberal Senator Antic, who, whilst trying very hard to be impartial and accurate (just kidding), stated that:

The Australian taxpayer contributes $1.1 billion per annum to our national broadcaster and in the main, receives a diatribe of inner-city leftist politics vomited at us through our TV screens and smartphones.

To support his views, including a strong push for an inquiry into Aunty, Antic then produced a swag of disinformation to show how “out of touch” the national broadcaster had become, quoting an unnamed “survey this week” that showed: “Just 37 per cent of Australians believe the ABC to be accurate and impartial”.

Antic based that claim upon the MRC commissioned True North Strategy opinion poll, in which people were asked, following an ABC apology for showing vision which suggested, wrongly, the Governor-General had been present at a dance display at a naval dockyard: “In light of this and other controversies, do you think the ABC is always accurate and impartial?”

Clearly this question in the opinion poll was designed to obtain the response it did receive, given the ABC already acknowledged that on this one occasion it was inaccurate.

These sort of pre-ordained, flawed survey results are similar to the totally discredited IPA survey published around the same time, claiming only 30% of Australians thought the ABC was accurate and impartial, a survey that you may remember was torn to pieces live by Media Watch and subsequently, emphatically exposed by the ABC Friends commissioned Morgan Research paper, which revealed 77% of Australians relied on the ABC for accurate information, a figure that has barely moved since and has been supported by further respected research from Reuters, Per Capita and others.

Ignoring the fact that the ABC is by far the most scrutinised media operation in Australia, Antic claimed: “The ABC can do as it pleases, when it pleases and expect little scrutiny from anywhere outside an occasional run on Sky News Outsiders.”

In the 2019 federal election campaign, MRC noted that:

The Friends of the ABC were out at selected polling booths last month, peeping from beneath unfeasibly large sun-hats, toggles drawn close to their chins, handing out bits of paper drawn from hessian bags bearing the words ‘I said no to plastic’.​ One can forgive the occasional election night indiscretions of ABC presenters who use the personal pronoun ‘we’ when referring to Labor. For most of the time, however, ABC staff and their friends are united by what they are against, rather than what they’re for.

You get the idea, in the MRC view of life, the ABC, and it’s woke Friends, are pro-Labor and Greens, anti-Coalition. As such, the ABC is an enemy to MRC’s core objective of preventing Labor electoral wins.

On the assumption that the Menzies Research Centre is not going away, ABC Friends is considering placing a new order of sunhats and hessian bags.