As it ticked over midnight and into my wife’s birthday, I crossed to Paul Murray Live on Sky News from the aftermath of Tony Abbott’s victory function. Asked about the prospect of culture wars, I urged a review of the ABC to reduce ideological bias, increase pluralism and trim its ever-expanding budget. Even in unlikely moments, Auntie is dear to me and worthy of a few words. In a way the public broadcaster binds the nation together, with its web of news, chatter and cricket coverage.

It was 25 years ago that I worked for the ABC’s 7.30 Report. We had entitlements. Heading off on a bush assignment north of Adelaide, we stopped in at RM Williams and I spent some of my pre-paid Travel Allowance on an Akubra — mandatory for dorky outback pieces to camera. We filmed a drought-stricken farmer branching into adventure tourism in the Gawler Ranges. The tour, tents, food and drink were laid on, so we pocketed our TA. But one night I suggested we get some shots chatting around the campfire. The camera crew baulked. They’d knocked off for the day. If the gear came out again, they warned, four hours would go on the time sheet. And they’d be on time and a half the next day because of ‘insufficient break’.

If there had been an explorers’ union, Europeans would never have discovered the Gawler Ranges. ABC stalwarts such as Dale Sinclair and the late Paul Lyneham, whom I’d admired on TV for years, taught me a great deal. My direct boss was actively involved in his local ALP branch but to his credit recruited a former Malcolm Fraser staffer as his deputy. I clashed with another executive who demanded we find a hint of scandal in South Australia’s Bannon Labor government. His interventions sparked conspiratorial meetings about insurrection. But I left. Ironically, in commercial television, I became an irritant for John Bannon when real financial and political scandals emerged.

At the ABC we were in a state of permanent, comfortable, middle-class revolution. Progressive advancement was our unquestioned credo. We had privileged access to unions, environmental groups and other activists. How we laughed at the conservatives. During one federal election campaign a Liberal candidate was confronted, live to air, with dredged up controversies from university politics. His embarrassment complete, our host then turned to the Labor incumbent and asked, ‘So, any skeletons in your closet?’ We saw a role for ourselves countering the reactionary forces of private media. It wasn’t immediately clear to me why Rupert Murdoch seemed despised. But I was given an education when assigned a piece on his local plans. My producer insisted we include a clip of Geoffrey Robertson describing Murdoch as ‘a great Australian in much the same way Attila was a great Hun’. How we laughed. Urged on by my journalists’ union contacts, my story dubbed the new Adelaide printing plant ‘Wapping South’.

A decade later, on commercial television, I broke the Hindmarsh Island story about anti-development activists combining with indigenous groups to fabricate ‘secret women’s business’ and block a proposed bridge. The ABC immediately locked in behind the activists, denigrated my reporting and ignored the indigenous ‘dissident’ women who provided my crucial evidence. The Keating government was embarrassed; indigenous politics were inflamed. Media Watch effectively accused me of being a racist political supplicant who had run drunken Aboriginal lies. Their diatribe was vicious and incorrect. It was an excoriating experience for many, including the dissident women, and taught me an inestimable lesson about progressive causes, media and truth. The journalist who reported secret women’s business at face value was awarded a Gold Walkley. A royal commission used the word vindication in relation to my reporting, endorsed the evidence of the dissident women and exposed the fabrication. The ABC never corrected the record or apologised.

Fast forward another decade, working for then foreign minister Alexander Downer, I dealt with the ABC over the Australia Network. The ABC built up a reasonable service, but it always troubled me that, through its current affairs programmes, a jaundiced view of Australia as intolerant and xenophobic was broadcast around the region. Back in media more recently, I welcomed an invitation for a regular spot on Insiders. During one programme, while a tape was playing, I suggested to Barrie Cassidy that Bob Brown’s aim of shutting down the coal industry — our second biggest export — was extreme. Cassidy quipped that it was pretty much a mainstream view these days. There is a gulf between ABC groupthink and the reality of border protection, ALP ructions, carbon policy and election results. Even Bob Carr reportedly refers to the Green-Left-ABC-Fairfax perspective. Taxpayers deserve better.

Four days after the election, we finally celebrated my wife’s birthday. We put the campaign frenzy behind us, focusing on preparations for the impending arrival of our next child. Dinner was interrupted by a barrage of messages. An ABC TV political lampoon had highlighted my election night comments and retaliated with a fabricated and offensive image of me, complete with a banner dubbing me a ‘dog f*!#er’. Question the ABC, it seems, and you will be held up to ridicule and contempt. It seems not so much Your ABC as Their ABC — a staff-run collective pursuing its own causes and amusement. To humiliate me fairly but tastefully, they needed only to raid their archives for footage of an awkward cub reporter in a taxpayer-funded Akubra.