Over the past few years, it’s been clear that despite all the public noise peace terms of a kind have been arranged at the ABC. Management has made semi-hysterical objections to funding reductions, token efforts to cut costs but decided to punish the government by letting the staff have their way — and punish commercial media by encroaching on their territory as much as possible.

In true student Trot style, the strategy is as sophisticated as a toddler’s tantrum and about as much thought has gone into it.

The ABC is entirely trashing whatever reputation it has left and is generating greater enmity as it tries to stifle already suffering private media.

It leads to the current situation of news broadcasts that are not even disguised propaganda against, say, the Carmichael coal project in Queensland or, this week, most of the country’s food production industries.

It also leads to humdingers — humdingers and a half — like today’s effort “Australians like me are ending up in jail and your tax cut won’t help“.

Now, we all know the libertarian line “Taxation is theft”. We lived through Wayne Swan’s attempts to describe tax increases as government savings. But tax cuts as theft, as a cause for crime. That’s a new one; something not ever Swanny would have tried in the direst days of the Gillard government.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Their ABC.

Tax cuts cause crime.

There’s no point in repeating the argument. Quite frankly, such public displays of idiocy shouldn’t be indulged in any way.

But let it be noted. The ABC went ahead and said it.

They put the case — or, at the very least — legitimised it by giving it space.

(Presumably, it was not only too deranged for The Guardian Australia but failed to measure up to the, ahem, standards of New Matilda or, God help us, even Crikey.)

It’s clearly time to cut even more from the batty bureaucratic juggernaut as it speeds on entirely out of control, smashing any and everything in its path.

It just won’t be a saving for the taxpayer.

It will be saving the ABC from itself.

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