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“…The ten years of Mark Scott’s management, from 2006 until this year, can be seen as an extraordinary period in which the surgeon not only failed to attack the cancers eating away at the ABC’s credibility, but actively encouraged their malignancy. Grandiosely proclaiming himself “Editor in Chief”, he never once used his authority to enforce the organisation’s Charter, its Code of Practice or its Editorial Guidelines. At times this reluctance trapped the broadcaster in futile and costly legal battles.

In his obsession with digital technology – from the ill-starred ABC Island in the 3D virtual reality Second Life to the click-bait stories at The Drum, his attempt to create an online newspaper, Scott presided over a complete melting of standards and integrity. From Four Corners programmes produced in cahoots with Fairfax reporters or animal-rights activists, to the trivialisation of news bulletins with live reports by a horde of bimbos and beardless youths straight out of university, News and Current Affairs have destroyed the ABC’s reputation and its main reason for existence.

At a time when new challenges to the world and the nation make journalism more difficult — challenges such as Islam’s objectives, climate change and marriage — ABC staff have taken obvious positions of commitment and activism, accurately described as “groupthink”. As anyone who has raised a complaint found, they are the “untouchables”, more powerful than Eliot Ness and corrupt any thug packing an agenda in his violin case.

So I come to bury Andrew Olle, not to praise him. Were it not for his value as a martyr in the long march through the institutions, Olle would have been forgotten as just another hard-working employee. His importance, as Anronio Gramsci taught from prison on Ustica, was in activating Marxism’s potential for transforming society by spreading its ideology in a gradual, incremental, stealth manner by embedding it, largely without being noticed, in the popular mind…”   A better Andrew Olle lecture