Point-scoring ABC embraces ACON to steer its coverage on trans issues | The Australian

After years of dogged persistence, the national broadcaster achieved platinum status for its commitment to trans rights.

The media giant had patiently jumped through every hoop set for it by the organisation once known as the NSW Aids Council, now reborn as LGBTQ+ advocacy group ACON.

Hundreds of major public institutions and corporations have signed up to the lobby group’s ­radical trans agenda through its workplace benchmarking scheme.

Only one organisation could offer ACON the potential to reach millions of Australians every day, an audience relying on it for their news and information, trusting it would uphold its sworn pledge to be independent and impartial.

And far from being a reluctant bride, the ABC was paying ACON for the privilege.

Kit Kowalski doesn’t work at the ABC but she knows more about its inner workings than many who do.

By day, Kowalski is an IT professional, by night an internet sleuth who runs ACON Exposed, a project aimed at revealing how the group uses its brands like its Pride in Diversity and LGBTQ+ Inclusion awards to embed its agenda in Australian life.

“The ABC is more enmeshed in ACON than ever before now that they’ve achieved platinum status,” she tells The Australian.

The ABC wins points and awards for developing “positive programming” streams for trans issues, like the Instagram channel ABCQueer and the podcast Innies and Outies.

“What’s disturbing about ABC Queer isn’t just that it uncritically promotes transgender ideology, but that its target audience is young people,” says Stassja Frei, producer of the podcast Desexing Society.

“It’s really not a stretch to describe ABC Queer as the propaganda arm of ACON,” she says. “They post ‘LGBTQIA+ facts’ such as ‘some women have penises’ and ‘some men have periods’.”

In Britain, the Cass review led to the closure of the gender-­affirming Tavistock Clinic and a UK ban on prescribing puberty blockers for children.

Yet a search of the ABC’s website reveals a single news story about the Cass review and a Radio National Health Report headlined “Australia is not the UK”, warning that “applying these findings to Australia misses important ­context”.

In September last year, a ­coalition of feminist and LGB groups from across the political spectrum wrote to ABC chair Kim Williams expressing their concerns about the ABC’s relationship with ACON.

ABC editorial director Gavin Fang responded that there was “no connection” between the AWEI and ABC content commissioning.

While the growing worldwide doubts about gender-affirming care went untouched by the ABC, so did those in its own backyard.

In a shock ruling in the Family Court, one of Australia’s foremost child gender medicine experts was ruled to have misled the court while giving evidence to support a mother who wished to prescribe her child puberty blockers.

Andrew Strum’s judgment blew a hole in current treatment guidelines, but with the exception of a story on RN’s Law Report, the national broadcaster ignored it. Or as one bemused women’s group put it, “went schtum on Strum”.

Two months later, the gender medical expert was revealed to be Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne chief of medicine Michelle Telfer, whose gender-affirming medical treatment had been repeatedly and uncritically plat­formed by the broadcaster for a decade.

The ABC saw no news value in reporting that development, or in providing any update on its 2014 Four Corners report about a landmark Family Court ruling by then chief justice Diana Bryant that eased the availability of puberty blockers – despite Ms Bryant revealing she would not find the same way now.

Two months ago, the Full Court of the Federal Court was asked to decide some of the most important questions ever to come before it: what is a woman? And do biological women have a right to their own spaces?

Giggle app founder Sall Grover was appealing against a finding she had discriminated against trans woman Roxanne Tickle by rejecting her from a female-only app. The ABC reported nothing about the appeal – even that one had occurred – and has never sought to interview Grover about the case.

Several ABC journalists who requested they not be identified told The Australian that while they had never been instructed to ignore a story that challenged gender affirming medical treatment or trans women playing in women’s sport, it would be almost impossible to do so without infringing the broadcaster’s inclusivity rules – or simply being accused of trans­phobia.“There are no instructions,” said one, “it’s just baked into the culture.”

In 2022, MediaWatch’s then-host Paul Barry suggested that having programs scored by a lobby group like ACON raised questions about the ABC’s impartiality.

The next morning, ABC Pride held an extraordinary meeting to air their grievances with the segment. Outraged staff took to social media, one claiming that opinions critical of the transgender movement are “often intertwined with far-right entities and narratives”.

Josh Szeps was an ABC radio broadcaster until he was, in his words, cancelled from his own talk show two years ago for being “too spicy”.

Szeps interviewed Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychia­trists who pointed out it was the first time anyone from the ABC had ever approached him.

That view, three years ago, was one of the last times such a view was expressed on ABC airwaves.

There was never a memo from management telling him he shouldn’t have done the interview, Szeps told The Australian, and he never saw any direct influence from groups like ACON because he wasn’t at management level.

“What I did see as a journalist who’s working on the air is the reactions of my producers when I suggested doing a story about the closure of the Tavistock clinic, is that I have to waste half my day responding to complaints from supposedly impartial listeners who are obviously activists in disguise.”

Other media organisations have long since seen the writing on the wall. In 2021, the BBC pulled out of its deal with British charity Stonewall after concerns that its Diversity Champions program – the model for ACON’s AWEI scheme – had damaged its integrity.

Stonewall, like ACON, has sharply pivoted from gay and lesbian to trans rights in recent years.

When ABC managing director Hugh Marks fronted the Press Club last month, he appeared unaware of the extent of the broadcaster’s engagement with ACON.

Women’s rights advocate Megan Poore asked Marks whether the ABC board would commission an independent audit into how the ACON relationship had shaped the ABC’s editorial culture.

Marks acknowledged concerns about the ABC’s coverage of transgender issues, conceding the organisation should consider “where we haven’t given the relevant amount of coverage that maybe we should have”.

The question some critics are asking is not whether the ABC should withdraw from ACON, but whether it is too late.

In the UK, a leaked internal memo written in October 2024 by Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee, claimed that despite the corporation’s withdrawal from Stonewall four years ago, editorial culture had been so corrupted by years of the relationship that coverage gaps and editorial decisions reflected institutional capture, not individual bias.

The Lesbian Action Group’s Sarah Morgan believes there’s still time for the ABC to change course, but the corrosive relationship with ACON must end now. “No public broadcaster can credibly maintain impartiality while being assessed and rewarded by a political lobby group whose positions it routinely amplifies,” she says.