From Hong Kong: While the rest of Australia is doing it tough under Labor’s cost-of-living catastrophe, state-owned media, the ABC, has staged its first strike in 20 years.

People forget that unions love striking when Labor is in power. Other governments are reluctant to give in to their selfish demands. But demanding more of your hard-earned cash to keep pumping out one-sided political sludge is, to quote my country mates, bull.

Apparently, the ABC even called in the BBC to fill in for them. Talk about a WOFTAM.

Let’s recap what happened at the ABC during the worst economic crisis in decades.

Thousands of ABC staff walked off the job for 24 hours after rejecting a 10 per cent pay rise over three years. That’s right, a deal they reckoned was below inflation, despite the fact that the rest of us are watching grocery bills balloon, rents skyrocket, and energy prices hit the roof thanks to the very green-left agenda the ABC has cheered on for years.

These are the same chattering classes who’ve spent the better part of a decade lecturing us about ‘equity’, ‘climate justice’, and how we’re all racists for not wanting a Voice. Now the ABC wants a bigger slice of the public pie.

Industrial action may be a right, but the taxpayer is allowed to have an opinion on it. The ABC should remember that when you’re bankrolled by the punters, it’s not a strike, it’s a tantrum.

The ABC’s staffers aren’t exactly flipping burgers. They’re on cushy public-sector gigs with super, security, and the sort of job-for-life vibe that vanished from the private sector, about the same time as the ABC last pretended to be balanced.

Yet here they are, shutting down 7.30, AM and half the radio schedule, forcing the ABC to wheel in BBC World Service filler and reruns. BBC – the British Broadcasting Corporation, or should we call it the Backup Bias Channel? The irony is thicker than a Teal independent’s non-party party.

Because let’s be honest about what the ABC actually does. It doesn’t ‘inform’ Australia. It indoctrinates one side of it. The left side. The side that thinks coal is evil but Chinese wind turbines are sacred. The side that backed the ‘Yes’ campaign like it was gospel and treated the 61 per cent ‘No’ vote like a national embarrassment. The side that spent years renaming Melbourne ‘Naarm’ and pretending the Voice was just about ‘recognition’.

Year after year, the ABC has been the reliable propaganda arm for Labor, the Greens, and every inner-city progressive fad going. And we, the taxpayers who don’t watch it, keep paying the bill.

Meanwhile, the country is suffering. Families are choosing between filling the car and feeding the kids. Small businesses are buckling under energy costs and red tape. Regional Australia, the bit the ABC occasionally flies over in a helicopter to do a ‘rural story’, is being hollowed out by Net Zero zealotry.

And what do the ABC strikers want? More pay. More job security. Fewer ‘insecure’ contracts. All while the rest of us are told to suck it up and embrace the ‘transition’. The entitlement complex is breathtaking.

Today, I saw an old school sheet metal worker on Antique Street in Hong Kong sleeping on his work materials. After his nap, he awoke to start pounding out his sheet metal project for the next job. If he were in Australia, he probably would have qualified for the pension 20 years ago. Instead, he laboured away and gave me a smile when I gave him a thumbs up for his craftsmanship skills. I can’t imagine him going on strike.

But I can imagine what the average battler in Western Sydney or regional Queensland makes of the ABC’s strike. Probably the same thing they make of the ABC’s endless climate doom, left-wing cultural bias, and the newly fomented PDS (Pauline Derangement Syndrome) they are screaming about now that One Nation is reinventing Australian politics. Australians don’t want a bar of the ABC’s nonsense.

Which is exactly what millions have demonstrated. The ABC’s ratings are in the toilet. Viewership is a fraction of what it was. Yet the public funding flows on with $1 billion-plus a year of your money. Heaven forbid we suggest privatisation or a proper user-pays model. That would be ‘attacking the ABC’.

When the BBC simulcasts stop and the reruns end, everyone will know that the Australian Labor government is on the same course as the pathetically weak UK Labour government. UK Labour used their time in government to transform the greatest empire in history into a limp and soggy tea dunker.

Soon, the partisan punditry will crank up again as the ABC unionists get more than their fair share of the bleak Australian pie. Who but greedy grifters would go on strike when the nation was in peril? The same grifters who went on strike when my grandfathers were defending our country.

Only the current grifters aren’t doing and never will do any heavy lifting. And their current grifting episode has laid bare the racket.

The ABC isn’t a public service, it’s a publicly subsidised political player. It supports one side of politics with relentless consistency while demanding the other side’s taxes keep the lights on. And when the pay offer doesn’t meet their gold-plated expectations, they go on strike. Anybody else would get sacked.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped shrugging our shoulders and saying ‘it’s just the ABC’. If ABC staff want to play union hardball, fine. But the rest of us should start asking, why are we still paying for this? Privatise it. Make it earn its keep. Or better yet, let the market decide.

Because right now, the only people the ABC truly represents are the ones walking off the job while the country pays their wages.

This is hardly the time for taxpayers to have to shell out for even more Labor shills.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.