Originally published by Andrew Bolt of Herald Sun
09.08.2026
I’m a generous bloke, so I’ll say just two ABC bosses must be sacked after the national broadcaster’s farcical apology to billionaire Gina Rinehart.
But, really, I probably should add managing director Hugh Marks, and make it three, even though he finally admitted last Thursday “we got this wrong”.
No, that apology – 25 days after the ABC screened a film fantasising about sodomising Rinehart with a stick – does not end this scandal.
It just confirms the ABC’s incompetence, brutality and deceit.
First person to be fired, obviously, is the ABC’s editorial director, Gavin Fang, who last month described his job as “to make sure … our content meets those standards around impartiality, accuracy, fairness, and the like”.
He even claimed the ABC had “higher standards than public media is often held to”.
What nonsense. No public TV organisation I’ve worked for would dream of putting to air what the ABC’s Race Around the World did last month: a film by a “satirist” asking that “when the revolution comes … will you know exactly how to shove a stick right up Gina Rinehart’s butt hole, stirring it around, mixing her guts up nice and smooth, making her into one big sausage roll to make something out of nothing”.
But Fang had this obscenity go to air under his watch. He also failed to remove the film, apologise for it or demote the producer who put it to air. Instead, his ABC defended it as satire after I first reported it.
Yet it was so grossly offensive that even five Albanese government frontbenchers eventually denounced it last week, despite their hatred of the conservative Rinehart.
What’s more, 996 people submitted complaints to the ABC, which passed them on to its hand-picked Ombudsman, Fiona Cameron.
And she is the second ABC manager who must be fired.
Cameron, after a week of deep thinking, declared this depraved film was just a joke against a woman with “status within contemporary political and economic debates” – as in, yes, a conservative. And we know conservatives are approved targets of abuse from the “impartial” ABC.
What’s more, babbled Cameron: “A reasonable audience member would be unlikely to understand the comments as a genuine endorsement, encouragement or threat of violence.”
Maybe, maybe not. But Cameron completely misses the point. This ABC film sexually degraded, humiliated and intimidated a woman simply for being a hate-pinata of the Left.
Yet Cameron concluded there was “sufficient editorial justification” for this malice and bias, and the film therefore “did not breach the ABC Editorial Standards relating to harm and offence”. The only adjective she used to describe the call to sodomise Rinehart was “dramatic”.
Seriously? How can anyone now trust Cameron to keep the ABC honest, decent and unbiased?
It now seems even Hugh Marks does not.
He immediately overruled Cameron, apologised to Rinehart and said ABC rules would be changed to make clear what even an idiot shouldn’t need telling – that such obscene abuse should not be aired.
The attack on Rinehart was “not fair”, he admitted. Or so the ABC now realised from the reaction outside ABC offices: “Certainly if you watch it a second time and … when you hear about it and other people talking about it, doesn’t meet the pub test, right? So it didn’t meet community expectations.”
Well, not when Labor ministers last week finally started to complain about it, robbing the ABC of political cover.
But Marks’ response actually puts more heat on him, too.
Why did his ABC first defend this gross film? And why, when it then wobbled under the growing pressure, did it sent it to Cameron for a ruling, loftily announcing it “won’t be commenting further while the review is in progress”, as if employee Cameron was some judge sitting in court?
In the end, Marks showed that Cameron’s ruling was worthless, and tossed it into the bin.
The conclusion is irresistible: the ABC referred the complaints to Cameron just to buy time and sniff the wind.
Apologising to Rinehart now, which Cameron did not recommend, is not a matter of high principle but low politics.
Maybe I’ve been too soft on Marks, cutting him some slack for being the new boss treading warily around the blob which destroyed Jonathan Shier, the last managing director who tried to reform a national broadcaster captured and corrupted by a Leftist collective.
So make him the third man to be fired because of this scandal – if he doesn’t fire the other two first.
