Needed penalties

At Catallaxy, Sinclair Davidson on the ABC, its lack of adult supervision and how to remedy that:

…It is widely accepted that the ABC does not comply with the Charter. Why should it? The Charter is not self-enforcing. The ABC Act contains no mechanism to monitor compliance with the Charter and to punish deviation from the Charter. The Board is powerless to do so and the government unwilling to do so. It is not simply a case of when the cat’s away the mice will play – there are no cats. The ABC is not out of control, the ABC has no control.

So for Abbott and his front bench to boycott the ABC is very lazy policy and simply of continuance of the hands off policy that has allowed the ABC to degenerate to its current form. A far more sensible policy would be exert control over the organisation and insert enforcement mechanism into the charter.

Of course, the counter-argument is that government shouldn’t control the media. I agree – but then the government shouldn’t own the media either.