She was absent. She was hostile. She didn’t understand public broadcasting. And she moved like a ghost through the foyer of the ABC on the odd occasion she was even there.
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Finally, Michelle Guthrie was gone. The former managing director of the ABC was sacked on Monday in brutal fashion, a victim of her own lack of understanding of the ABC’s purpose. She was just halfway through her five-year term so she lasted longer than Jonathan Shier, the one managing director loathed even more than Guthrie.
But could whatever – whoever – happens next be even worse? Staff are terrified - although that wasn’t entirely apparent from the hordes who congregated on the internal balconies on the Harris Street side of the Sydney headquarters on Monday. Mostly they were on their phones talking to the outside world about their own breaking news. Telling the odd gallows joke.
I am not sorry Guthrie’s gone. I love the ABC and have done my whole life. It’s my constant companion. Last week, when I said I would prefer to go to the gym in the morning rather than go for a walk with my beloved husband, he responded sullenly: “You love Fran Kelly more than you love me.”
Under her leadership, staff fumed, social media was flooded with complaints and funding was slashed. On top of that she had a terrible relationship with the government and a worse one with chairman of the board Justin Milne.
Perhaps I’m blaming the wrong person for some of the chaos. It cannot be easy to defend a public broadcaster against a government which opposes public broadcasting, if not by word, then certainly by deed. This year’s federal budget saw the government cut $84 million from the ABC's funding, to bring the sum of damage to the ABC to more than $330 million over an eight-year period.
Staff and loyal viewers need someone to be strong. That probably does not mean Milne, whose handiwork this sacking must be, and who was not strong enough to face 7.30’s Leigh Sales on Monday night. He chose instead to speak to the lovely Joe O’Brien. That’s not the leadership the ABC needs. Milne is utterly obsessed with Jetstream, a project to ensure the ABC has digital infrastructure ready for when we no longer have broadcast. I wish he could be as obsessed with the broader ABC project as he is with this. And it may not even mean David Anderson - the loyal ABC lieutenant who will now act in Guthrie’s job – although he is ABC to the core. He was the alternate candidate when Guthrie was appointed.
The ABC is a beacon in journalism. This year alone, its work on aged care forced the government to a royal commission; its stories about Saxon Mullins forced the NSW government to review consent laws; with Fairfax’s genius Adele Ferguson, the ABC forced the small business ombudsman into an inquiry on whether the ATO is targeting small businesses. Yet it’s more than the investigations, more than funny old ABC Life, more than its emergency broadcasting, more than its rural reporting and its classical music; and so much more when you put it all together. It’s a whole glorious messy entity which lives in the lives of all Australians, which is one reason it is the top-ranking trusted media brand in Australia.
The breaking news on Guthrie’s removal came to ABC staff in an email from Milne at 9.49am, accompanied by a press release which said: “The decision follows discussions over several months that concluded when directors resolved that it was not in the best interests of the ABC for Ms Guthrie to continue to lead the organisation.”
Which any staff member could have told the board a year ago. That’s when the results of an internal survey revealed exactly how unhappy staff were.
The biannual staff survey taken towards the end of last year made it clear. In just two years, staff engagement had plunged by just under 12 per cent to under 50 per cent – and more than 80 per cent of staff thought that changes made since the previous survey had not made the ABC a greater place to work. More than 80 per cent.
It wasn’t just a handful of people having a whinge – just under 3000 staff responded to the survey, conducted by Aon for the ABC.
“Your feedback tells us we haven’t been doing a good job at listening to you and making you feel valued,” Guthrie wrote. But instead of understanding what it was that made her staff so unhappy, she decided to deploy Larry, posterboy from the ABC’s Recognition Toolkit, a character clad in Bananas-in-Pyjamas yellow, designed to provide staff members with positive reinforcement.
The idea was that ‘leaders’ should write notes of encouragement to staff members, for example, “Thank you for demonstrating We Are ABC” on a postcard decorated with Larry.
Instead, those suggestions for improving staff morale provided staff with reinforcement of their belief that Guthrie – and indeed much of management - had no freaking idea how to manage a bunch of passionate cynics – deeply committed to their jobs but sceptical to the marrow. Postcards would not cut it.
“Larry was the last straw,” said one old timer.
As the ABC’s director of news Gaven Morris reminded us this year at the National Press Club, the ABC gets $1 billion in public funding a year – but since the mid-80s, that funding has declined by nearly 30 per cent while the number of platforms on which it shares content has increased six-fold.
Justin Milne can Jetstream all he likes but he needs to do the maths. There is only so much which can be done with so little money.
The viewers - and ABC staff - are watching and waiting for someone who can defend our ABC.
Jenna Price is a Sydney Morning Herald columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.
