Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I value the ABC. In my youth I valued Triple J, and I acknowledge its important role as our national broadcaster for youth. I understand the desire for balance and diversity of opinions and the need to be devil's advocate in interviews. But—and I really am amazed I have to say this—these principles do not apply to Nazis. Triple J Hack, on Monday, aired an interview that is both beyond the pale and unacceptable. It has been exposed by James Hennessy of Pedestrian TV, Junkee and many other decent Australians on Twitter.

The interview involved Mr Tom Tilley. He interviewed Eli Mosley, who is a Nazi, a white supremacist and American who has appeared many times on an anti-Semitic podcast called The Daily Holocaust. He allowed Mr Mosley, in the course of the interview, to insist that the weaponry held by the neo-Nazis, which included, I might add, assault rifles, was defensive. He did so without challenge. Mr Tilley allowed Mr Mosley to advance a self-defence theory for the driver who was involved in the death of Heather Heyer. He allowed Mr Mosley to deny links to the KKK and Nazis, and he allowed Mr Mosley to end the call with a reference to his 'Confederate brothers'.

Mr Tilley was later punked or fooled into taking a call from a 'Herschel', who was, as Pedestrian TV points out, in all likelihood an alt-Right troll masquerading as a Jewish man. Tilley then proceeded to play devil's advocate in response to this fake caller, saying that white supremacists had 'a right to stand up for their culture'. Afterwards, in conversation with another ABC commentator, he said that such views were complex and that 'there were so many narratives at play'. This is a dangerous moral equivalence, and it's an insult to the editorial standards, and an abuse of the charter, of the ABC.

I find it hard that we have to stand in this parliament and say this: Nazis should not be interviewed by the national broadcaster or, indeed, any of our Australian media outlets. It is an insult to all those who fought against fascism, who were at Tobruk, El Alamein, bomber command—anybody who fought under the flag of the then United Nations, the free French, the Polish, and those from the UK and its dominions. So many lost their lives or were wounded in the fight against Nazism. We did not fight for democratic values to see this horror and hate being broadcast on our national broadcaster. The ABC needs to have a close look at this issue.