Letter From Australia (About Truth Being Drowned)

Truth Founders in a Sea of Bias

Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
February 03, 2014

YOU'D think the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ("ABC") would cheer. In six weeks, not one boat of "asylum seekers" has turned up and not one boat person drowned. 
 
Not in six years - since Labor scrapped our tough border laws and lured more than 1000 boat people to their deaths - has there been such a pause. Think what this means. Lives have been saved. Hundreds of millions of dollars won't be wasted. Real refugees won't be pushed out of the queues here by fakes. 

Yet here is what's so damning of the ABC, which takes $1.2 billion a year from taxpayers under an agreement not to be biased.  Never has the ABC campaigned so furiously against our border policies as now, when the Abbott Government has shut the gate by turning back boats and sending every arrival to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Same with the Greens and many Fairfax commentators.

When the first scores of boat people drowned under Labor, most in the Left turned a blind eye. Later, they pretended Labor's weak laws weren't to blame.  "Tragedies happen, accidents happen," Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said.
  Finally, when the death toll grew too horrific to ignore, they argued the Coalition's plan to "turn back the boats" would never work anyway.  Said Hanson-Young: "Turning boats around ... will not deter desperate people from making dangerous journeys by boat. It never has and it never will."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, likewise, predicted those Coalition policies "can't and won't work".  In fact, many in the Left simply don't want them to work. Jack Waterford, of Fairfax's Canberra Times, wrote: "There are many people, including me, who want to see our shameful policies fail."  ABC host Jonathan Green even gloated last November they'd failed already: "Stop The Boats. Turn Them Back When Safe To Do So. Tossed aside now for the best and most practical of reasons."

How desperate the Left now is not to be proved wrong, which is why this Government gets no thanks.  Instead, now that Tony Abbott's policies are indeed working, the media Left invents horror stories about them, with one Guardian writer even suggesting our navy was "shooting at boats full of refugees".

Or take the ABC. Its campaign against these laws started with reports exaggerating how angry Indonesia was with them.  Its website also began a daily count of boat arrivals - something the ABC never did under Labor, even when three a day were turning up.  ABC presenters chose as their go-to Indonesian spokesman an MP who had a strident anti-Australian agenda, even though he was just a backbencher. Next, the ABC trumpeted secrets of our spying on Indonesia with apparent glee at the damage this would do to Indonesian co-operation.

For months, ABC presenters also demanded the Government reveal details of its interception operations, even though the head of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lt Gen. Angus Campbell, warned this would give "advantage to people smugglers".  On it went. The ABC painted the Government heartless by presenting as fact a falsehood that "an asylum seeker being held in detention on Nauru is expecting twins".

Most absurdly, it last week claimed it had a video which "appears to back up the claims" of boat people who said the navy had tortured them by forcing their hands against their boat's red-hot engines.  The men's story was always implausible, and two later admitted they'd actually fallen into the engines. Their chief spokesman concedes all but one of the alleged victims now say they "were not deliberately forced to touch the hot engine". Yet the ABC, rather than apologise, reported yet another preposterous allegation by one of the very same people: "that Australian sailors mistreated them" by briefly blinding one with a spray.  "Mistreated"? In fact, our sailors allegedly used pepper spray against one man during what another called a "fight" around their boats' engines.

No wonder Abbott accuses the ABC of appearing "to take everyone's side but our own". Indeed, such reporting seems driven by an ideological assumption that conservatives are brutal and our institutions racist, and neither should be trusted against the word of asylum seekers of another "race". 

This is just one strand in the weave of bias at the ABC, which has people of the Left hosting every one of its main current affairs shows, but it is almost certainly the bloodiest.  How many boat people drowned before the ABC would link Labor's policies to that disaster? How many more will drown if ABC activists now smash the policies which work?