Almost all my friends with daughters, have convinced me that girls need never go to drama college, as acting is already deeply embedded in their DNA.

So it came as no surprise to see an ABC female reporter, telling the millions of television viewers with a totally straight face, that the ship aground behind her on a Newcastle beach, the Pasha Bulker, was indeed a tanker. She was dramatising the possibility of oil pollution on the beaches for hundreds of miles. I was yelling at my TV, ‘It’s a bulk carrier you dizzy dope, look at the ship’s name!’ Of course, my TV (pardon the pun) flatly refused to respond.

Wouldn’t it be nice if ‘Our ABC’ copied the mission statement of the Scotsman Newspaper? The current tag line … repeating what appeared in the Prospectus of the Scotsman from 1816 … and currently the only statement on editorial intention is:

The Conductors pledge themselves for impartiality, firmness and independence … their first desire is to be honest, the second is to be useful … the great requisites for the task are only good sense, courage and industry.’

When the ABC Four Corners program in 2009 decided to focus on the 2005 drowning tragedy of the Malu Sara and the abysmal state of transport in the Torres Strait, the Queensland marine industry applauded this initiative. After all, the drownings of locals, including those from PNG-Torres traffic going inter-island in small tinnies, had already been going on for many years.

We had expected the ABC, with its investigative and unbiased reporting, to highlight the plight of the locals who had been screaming for decades to get a safe ferry system. I was involved in two of the studies into passenger-cargo vessels through the Strait in the 80s and 90s. The locals were fearful of planes, given the high number of small plane accidents and they felt that the sea was a safer option, but there was no ferry service.

Whitmont’s ABC team had me as the last interviewee after they returned from the Strait. I was astounded that the report, already in its final draft, had just become a witch hunt against the Thursday Island immigration manager and the Cairns boat builder. In soap opera fashion, the blame game was aired between the participants in just one accident of many.

Like a Doctor reporting on a leper’s dandruff, the Four Corners team had focused on one small side issue of a non-existent transport system in one of Australia’s biggest ‘suburbs’. This ABC team had no intention of accepting my view of ‘let’s address the source of the problem to produce a system that is needed by the Torres Strait Islanders’.

So the slickly produced program went to air, the immigration manager got the sack, the boat builder went bust and the people of the Torres Strait still have to commute by tinnies. ‘Our ABC’ was, and still is, a disgrace.

When it looked like Tony Abbott was going to be elected in 2013, I rang his cycling mate Ross Cameron, to pass on just one piece of advice to Mr Abbott, ‘The first thing you must do after being elected is, you must sell 51 per cent of the ABC or they will bring you down.’ He ignored my suggestion.

Sure enough, the ABC embraced and embellished every opportunity to bring Abbott down, as they did with Morrison even after he increased their budget.

Alas the ABC could not help themselves and presented another totally biased piece of media on the small transshipment vessel Aburri at Big Bong in the Northern Territory. Aided by disgruntled crew members, who claimed that toxic materials were being discharged into the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, the ABC duly presented this ‘travesty’.

As the designer of that vessel and the port, I witnessed the mining company, Mcarthur River Mining, comply with the toughest environmental standards in the world.

This operation over the past 32 years still has EPA checks, the basin at Bing Bong has crocodiles and the channel is full of fish. The operation has exported $12bn worth of cargo earned the government over $750 million in royalties and employed many people. The ship is still jointly owned by the local Mawa Indigenous group and the returns have prospered them greatly. None of this positive feedback was ever reported by the ABC, and still no sign of ‘Honest and Useful’ reporting.

What about the other Australian flagship, Qantas? We have watched the CEO and ‘LGBTQ+ advocate’ focus on social issues instead of making a good airline great. He used the ‘sweat the assets’ strategy in keeping the shareholders smiling, while driving the airline from number two when he took over, to number seventeen.

As a frequent international platinum flyer, I saw this appalling decline of service and standard of aircraft first-hand and called the CEO out on an open letter May 19, 2017, to the Qantas Board which was published as a lead letter in The Australian. This became the ‘Margaret Court Incident’ after both my organisation and hers banned Qantas travel. The LGBTQ+ activists, the Project, and usual bedwetting suspects all jumped on her, trying to strip this legend of her awards.

It is amazing how shareholder dividends can obscure the full picture of decline and the whole Board should have been sacked in 2017 when I, and many others, and the international ratings themselves were telling them they were tanking.

Now they are figuring out how to reflect and regain the global reputation. The former CEO had a chorus of well-paid Board members, with eyes transfixed on the conductor Goyder and not one of them noticing they were going over a waterfall.

The Qantas shareholders, like a pack of wolves on a wounded buffalo, will exact their punishment. However, not so with the ABC, who are fundamentally the $1.1bn marketing machine for the ALP and Greens, in return for protection and stacked studio audiences.

This I wouldn’t mind, but as an active member of the workforce, also a frugal Scotsman, about $67 of my salary goes to supporting this broadcaster, which I strongly object to.

So Peter Dutton, when you get elected, make sure you sell 51 per cent of the ABC in the first week. We need the money without the aggro.