For more than seven years, a bitter and unresolved dispute over the ABC’s decision to cancel The Checkout, its long-running consumer affairs program, has expanded into something more consequential: a test of how Australia’s national broadcaster accounts for itself, how it deals with internal dissent, and how far whistleblower protection laws can reach to protect those blowing the whistle.
What began as an internal challenge to how senior ABC executives justified the show’s cancellation later spilt into parliament, and then into the Federal Court, where a series of procedural rulings have repeatedly prevented judges from examining the substance of the allegations themselves.
At the centre of the saga is the ABC’s 2018 decision not to fund a seventh series of The Checkout, a program that regularly drew audiences of more than a million viewers.
In a letter sent to the ABC’s then managing director Michelle Guthrie in July 2018, one of The Checkout’s producers described the decision as “a failure of public broadcasting”. They warned the decision to cancel the ABC’s only consumer affairs program risked breaching the ABC Charter, a part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act that outlines the broadcaster’s ongoing functions and responsibilities.
According to the producer, known in court documents as BDR21, senior ABC managers made...
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