The ABC’s union stoush is a culture clash between insider staff and outsider management

The ABC’s fresh news director Simon Robinson brought in reporter and journalism union head Michael Slezak for a “please explain” meeting earlier this month. The subject? An opinion piece Slezak had penned in The Australian Financial Review on press freedom, specifically regarding a proposal by ASIC to restrict journalists from accessing certain information, like company directors’ personal details.

The ABC is currently considering whether to discipline Slezak, who is head of the ABC house committee and federal president of media at the journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). In response, Aunty staff have been pushing back with protest meetings and petitions, while management is insisting that nothing — even dismissal of Slezak — is off the table, according to the MEAA.

It seems ABC management is in the “put the union in the box” stage of managing director Hugh Marks’ top-down culture shake-up of management and journalists alike. The proposed disciplining of Slezak follows abrupt personnel changes at the executive level and surprise departures from respected program-makers. It’s making ABC staff nervous as they wonder: just what is their future in the Marks’ ABC?

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At heart, it’s a culture clash between insider staff and outsider management, between people brought up in the differing commercial and public broadcast imperatives. Working in ad-driven media teaches you how to build one big audience through focused, play-it-safe positioning. Public broadcasters, on the other hand, are direct-to-audience, tempered risk-takers, informing and challenging multitudes, spread across hundreds of different audiences.

Commercial broadcasting needs fewer journalists to do their job. Its massness attracts a top-down management style that acts to limit journalistic autonomy. Public broadcasting needs a management that leans into the independence of its far larger number of creators. It’s a hard transition for managers to make — and not many succeed.

But the pettiness of this potential disciplinary trigger raises fears that there’s something bigger going on — something more like private-sector-style union-busting. The timing of management’s intervention is raising eyebrows: just six months ago, a strike — which Slezak was the face of — demonstrated staff’s renewed preparedness to stand up against employment abuses. That industrial action ended with a new enterprise agreement that, among other things, forced greater job security for large numbers of formerly temporary staff.

Slezak’s union insists he had standing recognition from ABC management that his union role would involve public commentary. Regardless, and despite his legal protections as a union representative, the ABC is considering disciplining Slezak under the corporation’s “external work” policy, which claims to restrict what staff do in their own time. All, of course, to “protect the reputation of the ABC”, according to a representative last week.

Questions, naturally, are being asked about just how legally enforceable this sort of restriction would be; it’s an attempt to restrict what people do when they’re not at work, after all. And about whether it can — and should — be applied to legitimate journalists’ union business, such as standing up for access to information.

The ABC already endured a self-imposed humiliation when it tried to rely on the fine points of employment law to end Antoinette Lattouf’s casual contract. In that case, the judge pointed out that those rules couldn’t override rights to express political opinions, among other “fairness” principles. Fighting Lattouf cost the ABC more than $2.5 million, so you’d think new managers would be cautious.

On its own, Slezak’s disciplining could be marked as a mere stumble by the 58-year-old Robinson, the former executive editor of Reuters and the first externally hired news director at the ABC since Chris Anderson crossed over from Fairfax in 1993. He was brought in to replace the 42-year-old Justin Stevens, who spent almost 20 years at the ABC before he was shocked into jumping in May. According to Sally Neighbour’s detailed countdown account in The Monthly, Stevens was told that Robinson had already been hired to replace him.

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Over the Slezak saga, management appears to be digging in behind Robinson out of a sense of class solidarity. But the continued managerial grumpiness about the March strike and unexpected staff turnover is encouraging a more sceptical look. It comes in the wake of a raft of changes at the executive level. 

The senior executive team Hugh Marks inherited when he joined the ABC in March last year has already seen two big “abrupt departures”. To replace them, he’s brought in suitably commercially marinated outsider men who look a lot like the 60-year-old, ex-Nine CEO Marks himself. Following Stevens departure, the most senior woman in the organisation, chief operating officer Melanie Kleyn, also departed late last month. From this week, she’s replaced by the COO from Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media, Trent Dickeson. 

There’s been unsettling turnover, too, within news and program-making, particularly with Jo Puccini, the head of investigations and current affairs, leaving after 26 years following Four Corners and Background Briefing episodes involving reporter Mahmood Fazal being pulled over accuracy concerns.

At the moment, it’s all just loose straws. But for staff committed to the principles of public broadcasting, it’s more than enough to make them wonder: what’s coming next?