The ABC has achieved platinum status from trans rights lobby group ACON, but critics say the national broadcaster has compromised its editorial independence by paying for ideological approval.
This year the ABC celebrated a sweet victory.
After years of dogged persistence, the national broadcaster achieved platinum status for its commitment to trans rights.
The media giant had patiently jumped through every hoop set for it by the organisation once known as the NSW Aids Council, now reborn as LGBTQ+ advocacy group ACON.
Hundreds of major public institutions and corporations have signed up to the lobby group’s radical trans agenda through its workplace benchmarking scheme.
Only one organisation could offer ACON the potential to reach millions of Australians every day, an audience relying on it for their news and information, trusting it would uphold its sworn pledge to be independent and impartial.
And far from being a reluctant bride, the ABC was paying ACON for the privilege.
For those concerned about what the media giant puts to air – and what it doesn’t – the real winner at this watershed moment was clear. It wasn’t the organisation receiving the trophy, it was the organisation handing it out.
Australia’s most powerful trans lobby group had well and truly captured the national broadcaster.
Kit Kowalski doesn’t work at the ABC but she knows more about its inner workings than many who do.
By day, Kowalski is an IT professional, by night an internet sleuth who runs ACON Exposed, a project aimed at revealing how the group uses its brands like its Pride in Diversity and LGBTQ+ Inclusion awards to embed its agenda in Australian life.
“The ABC is more enmeshed in ACON than ever before now that they’ve achieved platinum status,” she tells The Australian.
Like other Pride in Diversity members, the ABC has spent tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of staff time implementing ACON’s workplace demands, like changing computer systems to allow non-binary titles like Mx, building all-gender bathrooms and offering “gender affirmation leave”.
That’s for the 26 ABC employees who identify as gender diverse out of a workforce of more than 4000, only one of whom has applied for affirmation leave in the past three years.
Kowalski acknowledges that ACON does good work in protecting vulnerable trans employees from bullying and demanding they be treated with respect in the workplace but she argues that much of ACON’s top-down workplace agenda is a waste of public money and, more importantly, that the lobby group’s influence is seeping into newsrooms and programming.
“It’s a cultural change scheme that flows through to core business practices such as reporting on news and events around Australia,” she says. “The ABC has actually developed media channels to maintain compliance with that ACON agenda,” she says.
“They’ve created a Queer Content Lead role for somebody to manage this entire stream and it’s geared towards winning ACON points.”
In ACON’s Australian Workplace Equality Index program, employers compete against each other to win the maximum number of points out of 200, based on a similar scheme in Britain run by LGBTQ lobby group Stonewall.
The ABC wins points and awards for developing “positive programming” streams for trans issues, like the Instagram channel ABCQueer and the podcast Innies and Outies.
“What’s disturbing about ABC Queer isn’t just that it uncritically promotes transgender ideology, but that its target audience is young people,” says Stassja Frei, producer of the podcast Desexing Society.
“It’s really not a stretch to describe ABC Queer as the propaganda arm of ACON,” she says. “They post ‘LGBTQIA+ facts’ such as ‘some women have penises’ and ‘some men have periods’.”
Frei points to a story that ABCQueer ran celebrating a young woman who “discovered” that she was non binary and so had her breasts removed. A photo of the woman showing off her mastectomy scars, still on the site, is captioned: “My greatest act of self- love.”
“I’d argue that rejecting one’s female sex and cutting one’s breasts off is more likely a sign of self-hatred rather than self-love,” says Frei.
More worrying for critics is the failure of the ABC’s news and current affairs programs to report on the growing scientific and medical challenges to “gender-affirming care” for young people.
CEO of the Year
When Kowalski and other women’s rights activists obtained copies of the ABC’s submissions to ACON under Freedom of Information laws, the documents revealed that the broadcaster wins points from the lobby group for positive programming.
By 2022, the ABC already held gold status but needed to maintain it for another three years to win platinum.
The broadcaster inched closer to its goal every time it put trans-friendly content to air, for example scoring an extra three points with its series First Day, about a trans child starting high school.
In this self-perpetuating enterprise, the ABC picked up bonus points because it was a member of ACON’s Pride in Diversity brand and engaged regularly with ACON diversity relationship manager Chris Nelson.
The FOI documents included email exchanges with Nelson, including one in which the ACON staffer suggests that in future the ABC include a help number in televised LGBTQ content, adding “And there are AWEI points in it too”.
In another email commending an ABC Classic presenter on interviewing a trans person about their “journey”, Nelson noted again: “I think this is AWEI worthy.” In yet another email, Nelson praised an interview with a listener who “affirmed his gender as a man on his 49th birthday”, noting this was “normalising trans experience” and therefore good for extra AWEI points.
The ABC failed to pick up the two points it hoped for “CEO Speaking at Events”, despite then managing director David Anderson leading the Mardi Gras parade. “Marching in MG is not evidence of speaking at events,” the ACON marker decided.
By the following year, it seems, someone at ACON had twigged that the ABC was an “allyship” worth cultivating.
To no one’s surprise, Anderson was announced as Pride in Diversity’s “CEO of the Year”.
Accepting the award, Anderson declared that the ABC’s role was “to make sure that we understand who we are as a society, certainly for the LGBTQIA+ community, tell those stories, elevate those issues … and do that with joy across the nation.”
Behind the scenes, the broadcaster’s pursuit of ACON points ramped up.
Redacted
FOI documents show the ABC scored extra points because its journalists and content makers would often reach out to the broadcaster’s ACON-required Pride Network advisory group.
The journalists wanted to “gain guidance on a piece of content they are working on and ensure they address any questions associated with language and their approach to matters associated with LGBTQIA+” the ABC submitted in its bid for extra points.
The Pride committee was there to “ensure that LGBTQIA+ Inclusion is achieved within our workforce but also in our content,” the ABC assured ACON.
A heavily redacted document recounted how the Pride Network “guided” journalists on content that “needed correcting”.
Several ABC journalists, including those who have reported favourably on gender-affirming medical care, have hosted ACON’s Pride events.
An FOI request by The Australian for documents and emails between ABC staff and ACON over the past three years was rejected due to “the substantial number of documents which may fall within the scope of the request” – 935 pages.
The Australian is still awaiting a decision from the ABC on the release of its pitch submission for platinum.
Frei says the ABC “has completely thrown impartiality out the window” and points directly to their involvement with ACON for repeated breaches of its editorial standards.
Over the past five years, a series of seismic events has shaken the comfortable notion that the gender-affirming approach to trans issues is working well, but anyone relying exclusively on the ABC for their news would barely be aware of them.
‘One-sided treatment’
In Britain, the Cass review led to the closure of the gender-affirming Tavistock Clinic and a UK ban on prescribing puberty blockers for children.
Yet a search of the ABC’s website reveals a single news story about the Cass review and a Radio National Health Report headlined “Australia is not the UK”, warning that “applying these findings to Australia misses important context”.
In September last year, a coalition of feminist and LGB groups from across the political spectrum wrote to ABC chair Kim Williams expressing their concerns about the ABC’s relationship with ACON.
“We believe that the ABC’s selective and biased coverage on key issues continues and is evident in its limited and one-sided treatment of the final Cass review of the Tavistock Clinic.
“The fact that the ABC remains a member of ACON’s Pride in Diversity and is committed to gaining ACON’s approval through its participation in ACON’s workplace equality index (AWEI) means Australians cannot trust the ABC’s impartiality on issues where ACON takes a stance.”
ABC editorial director Gavin Fang responded that there was “no connection” between the AWEI and ABC content commissioning.
“It is my view that these current corporate programs do not impact the ABC’s impartiality in its journalism,” said Fang, who has also been ABC’s head of diversity and inclusion and is the executive sponsor for ABC Inclusive. “I cannot see any evidence of self-censorship or conflicts of interests in the ABC’s reporting or for that matter any evidence of selective non-reporting”, he concluded.
‘Schtum on Strum’
While the growing worldwide doubts about gender-affirming care went untouched by the ABC, so did those in its own backyard.
In a shock ruling in the Family Court, one of Australia’s foremost child gender medicine experts was ruled to have misled the court while giving evidence to support a mother who wished to prescribe her child puberty blockers.
Andrew Strum’s judgment blew a hole in current treatment guidelines, but with the exception of a story on RN’s Law Report, the national broadcaster ignored it. Or as one bemused women’s group put it, “went schtum on Strum”.
Two months later, the gender medical expert was revealed to be Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne chief of medicine Michelle Telfer, whose gender-affirming medical treatment had been repeatedly and uncritically platformed by the broadcaster for a decade.
The ABC saw no news value in reporting that development, or in providing any update on its 2014 Four Corners report about a landmark Family Court ruling by then chief justice Diana Bryant that eased the availability of puberty blockers – despite Ms Bryant revealing she would not find the same way now.
Two months ago, the Full Court of the Federal Court was asked to decide some of the most important questions ever to come before it: what is a woman? And do biological women have a right to their own spaces?
Giggle app founder Sall Grover was appealing against a finding she had discriminated against trans woman Roxanne Tickle by rejecting her from a female-only app. The ABC reported nothing about the appeal – even that one had occurred – and has never sought to interview Grover about the case.
“I don’t need a positive article from the ABC, just something based in fact,” says Grover, “and I have offered the ABC, told them I’m happy to give you a comment, and they’ve never taken me up on it – not once.”
Several ABC journalists who requested they not be identified told The Australian that while they had never been instructed to ignore a story that challenged gender affirming medical treatment or trans women playing in women’s sport, it would be almost impossible to do so without infringing the broadcaster’s inclusivity rules – or simply being accused of transphobia.“There are no instructions,” said one, “it’s just baked into the culture.”
Even a modest attempt by the ABC’s watchdog three years ago to raise the issue was howled down by the corporation’s own staff.
Aunty doubles down
In 2022, MediaWatch’s then-host Paul Barry suggested that having programs scored by a lobby group like ACON raised questions about the ABC’s impartiality.
“Imagine, for example, the ABC paying thousands of dollars to Greenpeace and winning prizes for running stories attacking the fossil fuel industry,” Barry said. “How would that be defensible or impartial?”
And what if the ABC also steered clear of debate on contentious matters, as it “arguably” did on transgender issues, he asked.
“The problem here is a media group partnering with and being rewarded by a lobby group – any lobby group – and how that can lead to perceptions of bias in coverage or to bias itself,” he said.
The next morning, ABC Pride held an extraordinary meeting to air their grievances with the segment. Outraged staff took to social media, one claiming that opinions critical of the transgender movement are “often intertwined with far-right entities and narratives”.
Prominent ABC journalist Patricia Karvelas pointed to other workplace indexes in which the ABC participates, questioning why “only scrutiny of one group”.
Barry had suggested the ABC might “review the arrangement” with ACON. Instead, the broadcaster doubled down, spending the next three years ramping up its efforts to achieve its coveted platinum status.
Long wait for a dance
Josh Szeps was an ABC radio broadcaster until he was, in his words, cancelled from his own talk show two years ago for being “too spicy”.
The beginning of the end for Szeps at the ABC came with bombshell reports of the Tavistock clinic scandal, which was going virtually unreported at the national broadcaster.
Szeps interviewed Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists who pointed out it was the first time anyone from the ABC had ever approached him.
“It’s like being at a dance hall and waiting for the ABC to offer to take us for a dance, so I’m hoping I can do a few twirls with you today,” Professor Morris told him.
There should be more caution about trans care for children, he said.
That view, three years ago, was one of the last times such a view was expressed on ABC airwaves.
There was never a memo from management telling him he shouldn’t have done the interview, Szeps told The Australian, and he never saw any direct influence from groups like ACON because he wasn’t at management level.
“What I did see as a journalist who’s working on the air is the reactions of my producers when I suggested doing a story about the closure of the Tavistock clinic, is that I have to waste half my day responding to complaints from supposedly impartial listeners who are obviously activists in disguise.”
The influence of ACON and other activist bodies occurs in the background, he says.
“What organisations like ACON do is a kind of a shakedown – ‘sure is a nice news organisation you’ve got here … wouldn’t want to see anything bad happen to it’.
“It’s like a new papacy; ‘we are the doorway through which you can absolve yourself of your transphobic guilt’ and it’s a way for corporations to wash their hands of it.”
Szeps now hosts his own podcast, Uncomfortable Conversations, in which he “explores dangerous ideas … with no tiptoeing around”.
In a recent episode, he tore apart the ABC’s coverage of Donald Trump’s policies on trans issues and biological sex as an “appalling piece of journalism” that “used the language of the activist gender community”.
The ABC was a cherished institution and did a lot of great work, he said, but “on this particular issue there is a really harmful capture of the news division by ideologues … A lot of these news organisations have transitioned – pardon the pun, they’ve been affirmed – in recent years into using activist language in order to get scored well by activist LGBT groups, which go around pronouncing whether or not particular organisations are sufficiently friendly to queer people.
“And you have to implement the changes that they want you to, and in my opinion contaminate journalistic integrity by following a particular script that may or may not be confusing in order to get a good score amongst the activist class,” Szeps said in the podcast.
The ABC’s charter to reflect the diversity of the Australian community has become interpreted to mean “that we will cherry-pick individuals from minority groups to articulate the most extreme activist positions on those issues and smuggle it in as if it was objective news”.
Szeps, who is gay, says gay activists won the battle for same-sex marriage by “debating every single person they could find to win over hearts and minds” from the 1970s onwards.
“And then along comes this new set of doing things, the ACON way of doing things, which is if you even want to have a conversation about paediatric gender care, we’re just going to hold up a banner saying trans women are women, and you’ve got the blood of trans children on your hands if you dispute our version of things, and we’re going to shame you and we’re going to fire you and we’re going to go at you on social media.”
BBC pulls the plug
Other media organisations have long since seen the writing on the wall. In 2021, the BBC pulled out of its deal with British charity Stonewall after concerns that its Diversity Champions program – the model for ACON’s AWEI scheme – had damaged its integrity.
Stonewall, like ACON, has sharply pivoted from gay and lesbian to trans rights in recent years.
The BBC said its withdrawal from Stonewall was necessary “to minimise the risk of perceived bias and avoid any perception that engagement with the program is influencing our own decision-making.”
The ABC rejects any comparison. A spokesperson told The Australian that the AWEI benchmarking framework “promotes inclusion” and that it was “entirely appropriate to take steps to ensure the ABC is an inclusive place to work”.
“There is no impact on our editorial decisions. We have a number of workplace agreements and partnerships. We regularly review and assess our relationships, ensuring due diligence and that our independence is not impinged.
“Gender and trans-related issues are highly personal issues for families and we recognise the need to cover these stories with great sensitivity. All of these stories are different and the ABC takes no position on these issues other than to report accurately and with care.
“Our audience also expects us to report in a way that doesn’t encourage or condone prejudice.”
The ABC did not answer specific questions by The Australian about whether it had been rewarded or earned points in the AWEI for positive coverage of LGBTQI issues or how much it paid ACON.
In a separate statement, ACON told The Australian: “We do not seek, nor do we have, any influence over the way media outlets report issues, including the ABC.”
Marks grilled
When ABC managing director Hugh Marks fronted the Press Club last month, he appeared unaware of the extent of the broadcaster’s engagement with ACON.
Women’s rights advocate Megan Poore asked Marks whether the ABC board would commission an independent audit into how the ACON relationship had shaped the ABC’s editorial culture.
Marks acknowledged concerns about the ABC’s coverage of transgender issues, conceding the organisation should consider “where we haven’t given the relevant amount of coverage that maybe we should have”.
But the ABC boss suggested the broadcaster’s involvement with ACON amounted to little more than backing an awards night. “I think we sponsor an event, and obviously, we’ve gone to ACON people from time to time in some of the editorial coverage that we’ve done,” he told Poore.
Last week when the ABC executive team appeared before budget estimates, Marks was grilled by Liberal senator Sarah Henderson – a Walkley Award-winning former ABC journalist – about the relationship with ACON.
Marks again claimed “there is no crossover between what might be a people and culture matter and what are editorial matters”.
“Why are you entering into any partnership with any organisation which rewards the ABC for its alignment with its ideological framework?” Henderson asked.
“Well, we should be free of any ties that do either have an impact on our editorial output or, perhaps, a strong perception that that could occur,” Marks responded.
The ABC would be reviewing “that and other relationships we have”, he said.
Captured
The question some critics are asking is not whether the ABC should withdraw from ACON, but whether it is too late.
In the UK, a leaked internal memo written in October 2024 by Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, claimed that despite the corporation’s withdrawal from Stonewall four years ago, editorial culture had been so corrupted by years of the relationship that coverage gaps and editorial decisions reflected institutional capture, not individual bias.
The LGBT desk – shared by all the corporation’s news programs – has been “captured by a small group of people” promoting a pro-trans agenda and “keeping other perspectives off air”, he found.
The Lesbian Action Group’s Sarah Morgan believes there’s still time for the ABC to change course, but the corrosive relationship with ACON must end now. “No public broadcaster can credibly maintain impartiality while being assessed and rewarded by a political lobby group whose positions it routinely amplifies,” she says.
Do you know more about ACON? [email protected]
by Stephen Rice
Source: The Australian
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