I’ve never been a fan of Gordon Ramsay. More prudie than foodie, perhaps, I’ve always believed that what comes out of someone’s mouth matters more than what goes into it. So I like to think I wouldn’t patronise the Sydney CBD eatery in which the expletive-spewing Ramsay has a stake even if I could afford to (average cost $190 per head, since you ask). The ABC’s bill of fare, on the other hand, is well within my budget, but for some time now I’ve given it a swerve for much the same reason, and the all-staff email which the national broadcaster’s new head of content recently sent – and which is now posted on the corporation’s website – is unlikely to change that. ‘The reality,’ says Christopher Oliver-Taylor’s inaugural gush, ‘is that we don’t have enough colleagues that come from a diverse background joining the ABC’. If you’d just emerged from a 20-year coma you might wonder why somebody ostensibly employed to oversee the ABC’s broadcast output should have any say in its human intake. But if you’d been paying even cursory attention to the ABC over the last five years, you’d assume that Mr Oliver’s views on diversity have played a not insignificant part in his appointment – just as it would if he had applied to be the corporation’s Head of Tea-bag Buying or Lightbulb Changing. You might even surmise, from just this quote, that Mr Oliver-Taylor’s views on diversity were considered more important than his command of the English language, ‘diverse’ being a pluralistic adjective which can’t be applied to a singular noun like ‘background’. What Mr Oliver-Taylor meant to say, of course, is that in his opinion the ABC does not employ people from sufficiently diverse backgrounds. But the gaffe is notable less as a grammatical error than a Freudian slip, and one which, since it wasn’t corrected by Mr Oliver-Taylor’s new bosses, confirms what many people have long believed about them. Which is that the only diversity they care about is the kind in which people have no choice or agency. In other words, that they believe that the corporation they run has no diversity problem which can’t be solved by simply employing, as Mr Oliver-Taylor helpfully prescribes, ‘more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CALD), people of different genders, ages, sexual orientations, social backgrounds, and more people with disability’. From which anyone who has ever set foot inside an ABC building will conclude either that Mr Oliver-Taylor himself has a disability – blindness – or that his job interview took place on a public holiday, or at night during a power outage, or that it concluded along the following lines:

David Anderson: Thank you, Mr Oliver-Taylor, no further questions. We have several other candidates to see, but you’ll be hearing from us within the month.

Ita Buttrose: Before you go, do you have any questions for us?

Oliver-Taylor: Actually, yes. I’d like to ask why nobody has asked for my personal pronoun, why the lift instructions aren’t in Urdu, why only four of the toilet cubicles have wheelchair access, and why this interview didn’t begin with a smoking ceremony?

While Anderson and Buttrose ponder their response, Oliver-Taylor uses an app on his phone to find the direction of Mecca. Seeing this, Anderson’s eyes fill with tears and Buttrose extends an expensively manicured hand across the desk.

Buttrose: Congratulations, Chris.

Anderson: See you Monday, mate.

As watching, reading or listening to a few continuous hours of ABC content will confirm, the only kind of diversity which it currently lacks, but without which it cannot meet its charter obligation to the people who pay its exorbitant salaries and ever-increasing legal fees, is diversity of opinion. The truth is that when it comes to attitudes to just about every major issue – from climate change to the Voice to transgenderism to Palestine – diversity is the last thing the ABC wants to see in its staff. And the more senior and visible the staff, the more unwelcome that kind of diversity would be – irrespective of their beliefs, skin colour, first language or limb count. There is nothing in his first public utterance which suggests that the appointment of Chris Oliver-Taylor will do anything to change that. While the ABC continues to fill all its senior roles with left-leaning, inner-city elite clones it will continue to alienate ordinary Australians. The sooner it is privatised the better.