On 5th September, the Citizen Electoral Council’s Western Australia State Secretary Jean Robinson and WA State Chairman Brian McCarthy issued a press release entitled “ABC Country Hour fears airing CEC’s agriculture solutions”, in which they reported that the ABC had revoked its previous decision to grant the CEC three minutes of air time before the 6th of September WA state election, in order to explain its agricultural policy.
The ABC said it had made the decision to withdraw its 3-minute offer and black out the CEC, because “its policies are very different from the other parties.”
In a subsequent conversation with Mrs. Robinson, ABC’s Country Hour producer Richard Hudson charged that, in its 5th September release, the CEC “had threatened the ABC”, and that “the ABC did not like that.” He then warned the CEC “to be very careful in the future not to threaten the media”, that “it would not be in your interest to pursue this tactic.”
Commenting on the ABC’s blackout and Hudson’s threat, Mrs. Robinson today said, “It is hard to tell which got up the ABC’s nose more—the CEC’s pro-family farmer agriculture policies, or our release in July on electoral reform. The latter, inclusively, called for the establishment of a Media Directorate to ensure fair coverage to all parties in an election. Apparently, the ABC, along with the Murdoch and other major media, feel they have the right to basically rig elections, by determining who gets coverage, and who doesn’t. Then, if you get a low vote total because they have blacked you out, they use that as a further excuse to keep blacking you out!”
As for the CEC’s agricultural policies, which the ABC refused to air, Mrs. Robinson queried, “Is the ABC, and its so-called ‘Country Hour’, just fronting for the grain cartels, in blacking out the CEC’s agricultural policies?”
Those policies, Mrs. Robinson continued, include the intensive national campaign the CEC carried out over the winter to expand food production in Australia, both for the sake of Australian farmers and for the sake of the world, which included ads in all the major rural press. Those “different” policies also include the following, among others.
The Government must:
- Immediately regulate domestically-manufactured fertilizer prices, subsidise imported fertilizers, and do the same for agricultural chemicals, especially weedicides and herbicides;
- establish our own national fertilizer industry, for which the CEC has drawn up initial specifications;
- slash the cost of all petroleum products for the agricultural sector by eliminating the fuel excise, and by suspending the hyperinflated international pricing for domestically-produced oil, which BHP Billiton itself admits only costs it $5 per barrel to produce in Australia;
- guarantee a minimum floor price for the resulting expanded harvests, both to keep Australian family farmers on the land and to help solve the international food crisis;
- cease buying up water for “environmental flows” in the Murray-Darling Basin, thus destroying one of the richest farm producing areas of the world; and
- re-institute the Single Wheat Desk, and take immediate steps to keep our pig, sheep and dairy industries alive and producing, by tariffs and related measures.
Are those policies “too difficult” for the ABC to understand? In fact, Mrs. Robinson said, “The rural situation is so bad that the Melbourne Age on 13th August ran an article headlined ‘The family farm appears to be headed for extinction.’ So it should be obvious that we need different policies!”
Finally, Mrs. Robinson concluded, “In its agricultural, as well as all its other policies, the CEC is committed to what old Labor called the ‘Common Good’ of all Australians. What about the ABC?”
For a full run-down of the CEC’s policies, including those relating to agriculture and electoral reform, click here to have the special WA-election edition of the Aug./Sept. New Citizen mailed to you. Click here to join the CEC.
