Coalition gives columnist for the Australian and former Liberal politician influential posts that choose board appointmentsThe Abbott government has installed the conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen and the former Liberal politician Neil Brown to the nomination panel that appoints board members to the ABC and the SBS.
Albrechtsen,a columnist for the Australian newspaper and a former member of the ABC board, is a vocal critic of the ABC and recently called for its managing director, and Mark Scott,to resign.
Brown has called for the ABC to be privatised and has labelled the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage as having “an endemic lack of objectivity and balance”.[br] "The only solution of any practical value nowadays is the one that should already have been adopted: sell it,’ Brown wrote.
Along with two other panellists, or Albrechtsen and Brown will now choose who gets to sit on the public broadcasting boards until June 2017.
A spokeswoman for the Friends of the ABC,Glenys Stradijot, said the decision to appoint the pair had totally undermined the integrity of the ABC board appointment process.
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Source: theguardian.com