The Taxpayer-Funded Broadcaster Aired A Torture Fantasy About Australia's Most Successful Woman. The Cover-Up Is Even Uglier.

An apology is supposed to end a scandal. This one exposed it.

Yesterday, I wrote about the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the ABC (which is Australia's taxpayer-funded national broadcaster and has no relation to the American leftist ABC network owned by Disney).

I wrote about the segment it aired on Race Around the World depicting the sexual torture and death of mining magnate and leading philanthropist Gina Rinehart, how the network left that segment up on its platforms for 25 days, how its own “Ombudsman” shockingly declared the content met the ABC's editorial standards, and how an apology finally materialized only after Hancock Prospecting served legal notice on the broadcaster's leadership.

That column struck a nerve, and it traveled a lot further than I expected. But the more I've dug into what happened since, the clearer it's become that the apology wasn't the end of this story. If anything, it was the giveaway.

Look closely at who apologized, who didn't, and who built the machine that made this broadcast possible, and you start to understand that the Rinehart segment wasn't some freak accident. It came out of a culture and ingrained left-wing and far-left group think. And that culture is still sitting there, fully intact, apologizing for nothing.

Start with the apology itself.

When Managing Director Hugh Marks finally spoke, 25 days after the broadcast, his apology came from him and him alone. The ABC Board didn't sign it. Chair Kim Williams didn't put his name to it, and neither did Deputy Chair Lisa Caffery, or any other Director. As Hancock Prospecting pointed out in its August 8 statement, there's been ongoing silence from the Chair, the Deputy Chair and the Board, and still no accounting of who approved the segment or who approved the nearly month-long delay in pulling it down. The people at the very top of a billion dollar taxpayer-funded institution watched a firestorm engulf their network over a depiction of sexual violence against a real, successful and prominent woman, and as of the evening of August 8, they haven’t said a word.

Remember the sequence, too. Before the apology, the ABC’s media team reportedly defended the segment as “editorially justifiable” – whatever that means. Its “Ombudsman” formally cleared it. The broadcaster told Australia, in writing, that a fantasy about torturing a woman to death met its editorial standards. Then the lawyers showed up, and suddenly Marks discovered the content had fallen short of “community expectations”. You can't declare something acceptable, get threatened with litigation, then send one, relatively new, executive out to apologize while your Chair and Board hide behind him, and expect anyone to believe the remorse is real. That's damage control with a legal budget.

Which raises the question of what, exactly, they're trying to contain. The answer is a culture. And there's a paper trail.

THE RECEIPTS

Consider what this famously “impartial” national broadcaster has actually produced in recent years.

In 2023, the Federal Court ordered the ABC to pay $390,000 in damages, with total costs reported north of $400,000, to Heston Russell, a decorated former special forces commando the network had effectively branded a war criminal based on allegations it couldn't prove.

The judge found the ABC's reporting overstated the evidence in its possession and that the network never even sought a response from the veteran before smearing him. It later emerged that the ABC had doctored video footage by adding gunshot sounds to a clip of an Australian soldier. Fake gunshots, added by the national broadcaster, to make a soldier look like a killer. FAKE gunshots! For the record, an independent review commissioned by the ABC concluded the audio was added inadvertently, with no intent to mislead, and the network apologized for what it called deeply regrettable errors. Take that explanation for whatever you think it’s worth. The doctored audio only came to light after Australia’s Channel Seven’s Spotlight program (similar to 60 minutes) exposed it, just as the Rinehart apology only came after Hancock’s lawyers did. This is a network that admits fault on one schedule: after it gets caught. Judge the sincerity of its explanations accordingly.

I own the largest law enforcement news outlet in the world, and I can tell you our readers understand better than anyone what that kind of journalism does to the people who serve, because they live with the fallout every day.

In 2025, [JR1]the network’s former news director, Justin Stevens, resigned after a year in which the ABC racked up more than 65 corrections and admissions of fault, a number that would end careers at any private outlet, and that Marks himself later admitted the broadcaster had quietly been preparing to replace Stevens for months before his exit.

Then there's the commentary its most senior journalists feel entitled to broadcast. Laura Tingle, the ABC's global affairs editor and staff elected ABC Director, told the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2024 that Australia is a racist country and always has been. She has publicly accused a former Prime Minister of ideological bastardry, and more recently suggested the President of the United States was no more credible than the Iranian regime. Another senior ABC political reporter, Andrew Probyn, once described former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a straight news report as the most destructive politician of his generation. These aren't fringe voices. Tingle isn't even just a journalist. She sits on the ABC Board itself as the staff-elected director, the same board that has refused to apologize to Gina Rinehart.

Australians have noticed. Polling reported in June by News24 showed a majority of voters now support stripping the ABC of taxpayer funding entirely and moving it to a subscription model. When the public that pays for a broadcaster no longer wants to pay for it, the broadcaster's claim to be the trusted voice of the nation is dead on arrival.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

The ABC received roughly AUD $1.2 billion in Australian government funding in 2024-25, rising to about AUD $1.23 billion this financial year. The May 2026 federal budget lifts it again, to approximately AUD $1.29 billion for 2026-27, an increase of AUD $58.5 million in a single year. Government funding accounts for more than 95 percent of the ABC's income. Since taking office, the Albanese Labor left-wing government has committed an additional AUD $360 million to the ABC over seven years, moved the broadcaster onto a five-year funding plan running from 2023 to 2028, and pledged to legislate five-year funding terms permanently, which would insulate the ABC from the annual budget scrutiny nearly every other government expenditure has to survive.

In plain English, the ABC isn't a business that has to earn its audience. It's a government agency with a guaranteed billion dollar allowance, locked in for half a decade at a time, funded by taxpayers who by law have no choice in the matter. That includes the millions of Australians the polling says no longer trust it. It also includes the woman it depicted being tortured to death, whose companies have paid billions into the very treasury that funds the network.

THE MAN AT THE TOP

Which brings us to the Chairman, and the part of this story that turns it from a scandal about one segment into a question about the whole institution.

Kim Williams was appointed ABC Chair in March 2024 by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who gushed at the announcement that Williams was such a perfect fit for the role, it's almost as if he were made for it. Williams is married to Catherine Dovey, the daughter of Gough Whitlam, the Labor prime minister whose government remains the great romantic cause of the Australian left and Australia’s most left-wing Prime Minister And Williams sits, to this day, on the board of the Whitlam Institute, an organization publicly dedicated to advancing left and far-left ideas.

Let me be careful here, because the facts are strong enough on their own. None of this is illegal. Williams has a long resume across Australian media, including a few tumultuous years inside News Corp. Marrying into a political family isn't a crime, and serving a legacy institute isn't one either. But step back and look at the picture. The chairman of a national broadcaster that is required by its own charter to be impartial simultaneously serves on the board of an institute expressly devoted to advancing the legacy and ideas of a very left-wing Labor Prime Minister. He is married into that prime minister's family. He was handed the job by a Labor Prime Minister who declared him practically made for it. Defenders will argue that ABC chair appointments formally run through an independent nomination panel process, and that is indeed the official mechanism. But based on everything reported here, ask yourself whether you believe that independence is real. This is, after all, an institution that portrays itself as unbiased to begin with, and you’ve just seen what that self-portrait is worth. Every one of those facts is public record, and Australians are entitled to ask the obvious question: when the ABC is accused of left-wing bias, who inside that boardroom is positioned to push back?

On the evidence of the past month, nobody. When the test came, when the network he chairs broadcast the fantasized sexual torture of a conservative businesswoman, and Australia’s most successful at that,and defended it as meeting editorial standards, Kim Williams said nothing. As of the evening of August 8, he still hasn’t. The Chairman whose entire job is to guarantee the ABC's integrity couldn't muster a single public sentence about the most grotesque editorial failure in the network's recent history. His Managing Director was left to offer a lone, lawyer-prompted apology that conspicuously didn't speak for the chair or the board, and the institution moved on, hoping the rest of us would too.

THE BIGGER PROBLEM

That's why the apology matters so much more than it seems. It was engineered to be exactly big enough to make the legal threat go away and exactly small enough to protect everyone above Hugh Marks. It conceded nothing about the culture that produced the segment, nothing about the review process that approved it, nothing about the Ombudsman that blessed it or the leadership that hid from it. It bought silence. Or tried to.

But the culture is the story. A broadcaster whose senior journalists call their own country racist, whose flagship investigative unit manufactured gunshots onto footage of a soldier, and whose newsroom piled up 65 corrections in a year doesn't accidentally produce a comedy segment about torturing a conservative woman to death. Somewhere along the line, inside that building, the people who approve content stopped seeing certain Australians as fully human. Wrong politics, wrong industry, wrong bank account, and suddenly you're a legitimate target for things no decent person would broadcast about anyone.

Gina Rinehart has been gracious throughout this ordeal, far more gracious than the institution that wronged her deserves. Quite frankly, she’s EXPONENTIALLY more gracious than I’d be. If I were in her shoes, as a Christian I’d be struggling between wanting Old Testament retribution or just making a whip like Jesus and flipping some tables.

But Mrs. Rinehart is a class act above the rest. That’s because this was never only about her, and she knows that better than anyone. A broadcaster willing to normalize sexualized violence against one woman as entertainment has lowered the shield that protects every woman, in Australia and everywhere its content travels online, which is everywhere.

So here's what accountability actually looks like. It starts with Kim Williams and the ABC Board breaking their silence and apologizing themselves instead of hiding behind their managing director.

From there, the ABC needs to name everyone who commissioned the segment, who approved it, and who signed off on 25 days of inaction.

Parliament has its own job to do, starting with some hard questions about whether a broadcaster can credibly claim impartiality when its chair sits on the board of a partisan legacy institute.

And taxpayers, who are handing over $1.29 billion a year whether they like it or not, should demand standards worthy of the people forced to foot the bill.

Until those things happen, remember what the apology really was. It wasn't the ABC saying sorry. It was the ABC saying please stop looking. Which is exactly why none of us should.

Looks like it’s time for the ABC to be privatized. No more taxpayer funding, especially for its metropolitan services.