So what’s going on at Australia’s taxpayer-funded leftist propaganda outlet lately? What exactly are we Aussie taxpayers getting for our billion-plus dollars a year?
Aside from the usual cavalcade of wokeness – they’ve only stopped prattling about climate change for as long as it’s taken them to parrot the lying BLM narrative – the ABC is ramping up the useful idiocy on China’s behalf.
Two years ago, they refused to interview a famous critic of the Chinese regime. But now it’s running hit-pieces on Beijing’s bugaboo, the Falun Gong movement.
Australia’s publicly-funded broadcaster cancelled an interview[…]with China-born human rights activist and former Miss World Canada Anastasia Lin because of her unspecified “affiliations”.
Chinese-born Lin became a critic of the regime after moving to Canada and acquiring what is forbidden knowledge in China: the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the persecution of the Falun Gong. “It really shocked me,” she says. “I wanted to do something for them. I heard their stories and I wanted to portray the hopelessness they have that nobody is listening.”
In 2015, she won the Miss World Canada title, but, having publicly criticised China’s human rights record, was stopped from attending the international competition hosted in Hainan that year.
For her comments, Beijing deemed her persona non grata, a powerful diplomatic term that effectively banned her from the country. But her platform as an activist has continued to grow. She has written for the Washington Post and has been interviewed by the likes of The New York Times, CNN, and BBC.
But not Australia’s publicly-funded broadcaster.
Despite a range of preparations and a pre-interview earlier[…]a producer for ABC TV’s “The World” told Lin’s local contact her “affiliations” were the reason the segment was cancelled.
“It felt really scary for me because this is the first time in the free world that a supposedly-publicly funded TV station is doing this,” Lin said. “My affiliations would be my human rights causes. And… nobody ever had a problem with speaking with me. I never had problem with my credibility.”
The ABC confirmed the cancellation to Business Insider, but said the reasons were business-as-usual. The broadcaster questions if the word “affiliation” was used and, if it was, said its use would have been unintentional.
That was two years ago, and it came with an ominous warning:
Business Insider recently reported how individuals who advertise businesses in independent Chinese-language media in Australia have been called into consulates for hours-long “tea chats” about their advertisements in an effort to strip funding from critical media.
And it recently emerged that a secret inquiry commissioned by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull uncovered attempts by the CCP to influence all levels of politics.
That inquiry also investigated China’s influence attempts on the media and academia.
Before coming to Australia, Lin says she was warned that, on top of China’s influence in media and politics, Australia is “very red.”
Which raises serious questions about the ABC’s sudden rash of hit-pieces on Falun Gong: not just one, but seven stories in the past two days, full of dark whispers about its “power” and “secrets”, and damning it as “a powerful player in America’s conservative media landscape”. Falun Gong is alleged by the ABC stories to be “dangerous”, and worse, “Using social media they try to get Trump re-elected so he can continue his war of words with China”.
If that all sounds uncannily like something straight from Chinese state media, it shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s paid attention to China’s Silent Invasion of Australia.
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