Tag Archives: Gerard Henderson

How the ABC became Marxist

With the general election just announced, the Australian public should prepare themselves for an onslaught of leftist commentary pouring from most mainstream media, from the kindergarten-level Guardian, through the Age and Sydney Morning Herald to a cluster of upstarts like Crikey, the Saturday Paper and other such forgettable aspirants. But above all, one must prepare for that great billion-dollar Monolith, the ABC, whose Marxist mentality will emerge, despite desperate efforts (by some, at least) to hide their incorrigible political bias. But is it just abuse to call the ABC political hacks Marxist?

Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute continually mocks the ABC as a ‘conservative free zone’. Not only is there not one producer or program presenter conservative in a meaningful sense, but there is not a single utterance of conservative thought to be heard anywhere. How did this appalling state of affairs come about when the ABC was once known for its maintenance of Australia’s conservative culture?

Henderson tells us in a comment piece in 2016 that it all started with the ascendance of Allan Ashbolt, long-time producer at the ABC. Ashbolt was Marxist and once a Marxist gets a toe-hold in any organization, steady subversion is the result which only stops when the organization is fully Marxist. So it happened at the ABC.

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Allan Ashbolt’s ghost still haunts conservative-free ABC

8 January 2016|Categories: Gerard Henderson’s Weekly Column

Not surprisingly, the appointment of Australian-born, Singapore-based Google executive Michelle Guthrie as the new ABC managing director and editor-in-chief created considerable media interest. Guthrie is the first woman to head the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster and her $900,000 annual salary means she is one of the most highly paid public officials in the land.

For all that, if precedent is any guide, it does not matter much who succeeds the current managing director Mark Scott. The truth is that no one really runs the ABC. Not chairman James Spigelman and his board, which meets just once a month. And, judging by the performance of Scott and his predecessor Russell Balding, not the managing director.

Rather, for decades the ABC has been controlled by various cliques that dominate areas such as television news and current affairs, metropolitan radio, Radio National and, in contemporary times, online publications such as The Drum.

Key national news and current affairs programs such as 7.30Lateline, Q&A, Media WatchThe Drum (the TV production), RN Breakfast and Late Night Live are run by cabals that essentially re-employ or appoint like-minded people.

As Ken Inglis acknowledged in his sympathetic history This is the ABC, the leftist takeover of the public broadcaster began in the late 1960s when self-proclaimed Marxist Allan Ashbolt began stacking the organisation with young leftists. This coterie was affectionately labelled “Ashbolt’s kindergarten”.

It is this culture that has led to the reality that the ABC is a conservative-free zone without a conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its prominent TV, radio or online products.

This is a sensitive point at the public broadcaster.

Read the rest here …

THE PELL LYNCH MOB – UNDETERRED AND UNBOWED

 GCWEDIT

The main point that emerges from Ross Fitzgerald’s review of Gerard Henderson’s book, Cardinal Pell, the Media Pile-on and Collective Guilt, is that the cardinal’s antagonists remain immovable in their belief that he is guilty as charged. It does not matter what has been said, how detailed and coherent the analysis of the ‘choirboy’s’ absurd story, the 7-0 verdict of the High Court, and the international consternation at the failure of Australia’s legal system, they remain impervious. You only have to follow Louise Milligan’s twitter account to witness the mob’s delusion and unrestrained hatred of Cardinal Pell. Indeed, I have described Milligan as delusional, but I wonder. Is it delusion or is it pure malice? Is she mad or bad? Gerard Henderson’s highly recommended book provides evidence for one or the other – or perhaps both.

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Cardinal George Pell: a man of sorrows

Ross Fitzgerald, The Australian, 8 December 2021

The case of George Pell revealed deep fault lines in Australian society. Some people were convinced of his innocence, but many others wanted him to be guilty.

The trial, retrial, and conviction in December 2018 of Cardinal Pell for historical child sexual abuse of two choirboys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral that allegedly occurred in the mid-1990s, gained international attention.

Sensationally, in April 2020, all seven judges of the High Court of Australia quashed Pell’s conviction.

On April 7, 2020 at 10am, Chief Justice Susan Kiefel quoted from the unanimous judgment: “It is evident that there is a possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof.” That Tuesday morning, as a high-profile convicted pedophile, Cardinal Pell was in solitary confinement at the maximum security Barwon Prison, near Geelong. He had been incarcerated in various prisons for 405 days.

As Gerard Henderson documents in this scrupulously researched book, the High Court’s decision had huge reverberations. Even though the evidence against him was weak, most of Pell’s opponents, in Australia and overseas, retain their unambiguously entrenched positions.

Henderson argues, convincingly, that the Cardinal’s many antagonists continue to deny him the presumption of innocence.

Read the rest here …

Gerard Henderson: The media, the Commission and the Church

Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute, author, historian and media commentator has been one of the few to offer a sustained response to the shameful bias of the leftist media on the subject of child sexual abuse. In the following article he brings together his recent criticisms of the media’s persecution of Cardinal George Pell and their manipulation of the findings of The Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

My research in the early 1970s on Catholics and politics in Australia led me to what remained of the Central Catholic Library in Melbourne, which had been established by the Irish-born Jesuit Fr William Hackett. The Central Catholic Library was frequented in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s by the men – and they were all men – who established the Campion Society in Melbourne. It was there that Bob Santamaria met his future wife Helen Power who worked at the library.

B A Santamaria was a pragmatic person. Contrary to what some have claimed, I never believed that he was much influenced by the views of the English distributists such as G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc – but others in the Campion Society, like Frank Maher and Denys Jackson, were. Nor do I believe that Santamaria spent much time reading the historical and cultural studies written by such English Catholic intellectuals as Christopher Hollis, Fr C C Martindale SJ and Christopher Dawson. But, again, others did. Read on…