There are unfortunate parallels between the UN Human Rights Council and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Both have lofty ambitions, the former to promote human rights and expose abuses, the latter to represent Australian voices and deliver quality news. Both suffer from an intractable culture of bias that works against them fulfilling their charter.
So it was with yawning predictability that ABC’s premier Sunday political show, Insiders, went “straight to the politics” as host Barrie Cassidy said during a panel chat to deride Australia’s decision to vote against a UNHRC resolution to launch an inquiry into the deaths of almost 60 Palestinians in Gaza last week. In fact, the resolution went much, much further than that, but more on that later.
Cassidy kicked off discussion with this: “There are 47 organisations on this Human Rights Commission. Two opposed the inquiry — two of them. Who are they, Karen?”
“The United States and Australia were the only two countries, Barrie, to oppose this resolution in the HRC,” said Karen Middleton, from The Saturday Paper. “Australia’s campaigned to get on to the HRC for a couple of years, and it seems in order to vote no.”
Then it was the turn of Fairfax’s David Crowe: “If Theresa May’s government can abstain, surely that would be an option for Australia to abstain. Britain, Germany and Japan all abstaining, that’s certainly a legitimate option.”
Read the article by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian.