It’s getting hard for satirists to keep ahead of the left.
Even the magnificent Titania McGrath, and The Babylon Bee, have barely managed to keep one step ahead of the left’s descent into barking madness. Indeed, their satire has been so frequently mistaken for the real thing that leftist gatekeepers like Snopes have repeatedly made fools of themselves, trying to “debunk” them.
Still, the left are nothing if not diligent in their lunacy. Every so often, they come up with something so unintentionally hilarious that it beats the best a satirist could invent.
Australia’s leftist looney-bin par excellence, the ABC, has long been derided for its inner-Sydney myopia. With good reason: the organisation’s headquarters are in the exclusive harbourside suburb of Ultimo and most of its presenters and journalists live within just a few kilometres.
But ABC management are determined to break the image of latte-sipping, inner-city elites. So, they’re dispersing staff to the darkest corners of the continent.
More than 300 ABC staff will wave goodbye to the public broadcaster’s inner-city newsroom and head to Parramatta in a bid, David Andersen says, will keep the national news giant “relevant”.
Whoa, keepin’ it real, Ando!
For the benefit of BFD readers, Paramatta is just 20 kilometres from Ultimo. A half-hour drive, even in Sydney traffic. It’s just the other side of the 2000 Olympics precinct.
To put it in scale, it’s as if TVNZ decided to get relevant to the real New Zealand by moving some of their staff all the way to deepest Papatoetoe.
The ABC Managing Director on Wednesday advised staff of the move over email, part of a five-year plan announced last year seeking to shift 75 per cent of its “content makers” away from Ultimo by 2025.
“It will help us to be more connected, relevant, and engaged with communities in the demographic heart of Sydney,” the email read.
Heart of Sydney, get that? Because Sydney is Australia, Australia is Sydney. Legend among ABC staffers tells of magical, faraway lands like “Melbourne” and “Adelaide”. But no-one in living ABC memory has ever visited such exotic locales.
The ABC’s announcement arrives on the back of it opening a smaller bureau in Parramatta in March last year, doubling its once three-staff newsroom, equipping it with the capacity to broadcast live radio programs and hiring two dedicated “local communities reporters” to cover Western Sydney.
In a statement later published online, ABC said it was trying to bring its operations closer to different areas, shifting its “content-makers closer to the communities they serve”.
“Increasing the ABC’s workforce based in western Sydney will provide it with greater visibility and connection to a growing community which is home to 1 in 11 Australians,” the statement read.
The Australian
It would be purely churlish of me to notice that Western Sydney is also Australia’s Muslim heartland (home to nearly half of all Muslim Australians). I mean, it’s not as if that demographic fact has had any effect on the politics of the Labor Party, whose powerbase is Western Sydney.
But the ABC’s latest outbreak of utter cluelessness rivals that of former PM Julia Gillard.
Back in 2013, Gillard fought the perception of the Labor party as being out-of-touch and elitist by going to Western Sydney for a whole week. Yes, indeed, she went all the way to deepest, darkest Rooty Hill (a whopping 40 minutes from the PM’s harbourside residence in Kirribilli). No sooner had she touched down at Rooty Hill Leagues club, than she and her entourage swanned past the pokies and the locals tucking into their parmies, and closeted themselves in a closed-door dinner with a gaggle of inner-Sydney mummy-bloggers.
These people are truly beyond satire.
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