Edmund Burke notably recalled in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, that it was 16 or 17 years since he had last seen the now humiliated and degraded Queen Marie-Antoinette, and that ‘never lighted on this orb… a more delightful vision.’

‘Glittering like the morning-star’, he believed that ‘ten thousand swords’ must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge ‘even a look that threatened her with insult’.

‘But,’ he memorably declared, ‘the age of chivalry is gone,’ and that of ‘sophisters, economists, and calculators’ has succeeded and ‘the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’.

Had Burke lived to see a publicly funded broadcaster in one of the world’s oldest continuing democracies rejoice in the graphic, violent humiliation of a prominent woman – a call for her sodomisation and murder under the false flag of ‘satire’ – he would have recognised that his age of sophisters and calculators has been superseded by something far worse: an era of institutionalised, totally humourless, terrorist-inspired malice.

For close to four weeks, the ABC’s leadership refused to perform two simple acts which basic human decency demanded be immediate: take this depravity down and apologise to the lady so direly threatened by it. On 6 August, they finally relented. ABC Managing Director Hugh Marks issued an apology and scrubbed the terrorist video from the ABC platforms.

No one should mistake this belated retreat for an outbreak of moral clarity. We know this because of the astonishing caveat attached to the apology: the ABC’s internal ombudsman’s extraordinary declaration  that the segment did not breach the ABC’s ‘editorial standards’. She concluded that a graphic fantasy of impaling Mrs Rinehart and ‘mixing her guts up’ was justified by the ‘editorial context’.

If describing the sodomy and murder of a living citizen does not breach the ABC’s standards on harm and offence, one shudders to think what those standards actually protect.

Why, then, did the ABC finally pull the video? Certainly not the damages likely to be awarded in a civil action. In such cases –  reported now with a degree of regularity that should disturb any board doing its duty – any damages awarded are of course not paid by the perpetrators or their protectors. At least, not yet, despite the likelihood of personal liability. What was more likely was police interrogation and personal liability under the criminal law and the increasing evaporation of the ABC’s political cover. The sheer criminal depravity of this material achieved the rare feat of alienating the broadcaster’s normally robust supporters. When you have lost not only Labor’s acting prime minister Richard Marles and the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young – who rightly called the segment ‘disgusting’ – you have surely lost the room. The ABC bowed not to principle but to fear of police interrogation and political isolation.

The point, surely, is that this material should never have been broadcast. The precise moment the Managing Director and the Chairman became aware of it, it should have been immediately struck from all platforms, and followed by a profound and unreserved apology.

Despite the belated backdown, the national broadcaster is forever on record of having issued an invitation to mimic the increasing violence of far-left extremist terrorists.

Public officials are not immune from scrutiny when they intentionally permit the publication of material that reasonable people deem intensely menacing, and delay unreasonably any correction until they fear losing the support of their friends.

The ABC once fulfilled its charter, providing a national broadcasting service of great quality and utility. With no political editorial line, it delivered rigorously objective news to the cities and vital, practical information to farmers in the country.

Why, then, has the ABC fallen so low?

The fatal turning point was the disastrous decision that the ABC should have within it a virtual factory churning out internally produced and increasingly partisan, adversarial and fashionable political commentary. The result is the ABC has come to have something no public broadcaster should ever have in these matters: a predictable editorial line on the great issues of the day. The hypocrisy of this affair remains staggering. Consider the target of this taxpayer-funded malice.

Gina Rinehart did not – as most antagonists so lazily assume – simply inherit an empire like some Infanta de España. She took over a company in 1992 burdened with debt and under serious threat of asset seizure. Through sheer grit, intelligence and personal risk, she built it into the most successful private company in Australian history, so much so that this is the nation’s largest private corporate taxpayer paying many billions of dollars in federal and state taxes.

More importantly, she is one of the nation’s leading benefactors in a wide range of areas. At the time of the Commonwealth Games, she demonstrated again that she is by far the nation’s largest private sporting benefactor, quietly paying out over $1.2 million in bonuses to our swimmers to ensure Australian excellence is recognised and rewarded. While Mrs Rinehart was spending her private wealth elevating Australian athletes on the world stage, the ABC spent public money broadcasting violent fantasies to tear her down.

The progressive defenders of this broadcast operated under a dangerous delusion. They appear to believe that because a woman wields immense corporate power, true ‘equality’ dictates she must be subjected to murderous degradation so depraved it would be worthy of that monster, Lavrenty Beria, the deeply depraved architect of Stalin’s terror.

Margaret Thatcher would have recognised this progressive fallacy instantly. True equality does not require a race to the bottom where women are subjected to the vulgarity of the mob; it demands that public discourse be civilised.

Contrary to Burke’s despairing observation, the age of chivalry has not gone. Chivalry, in its modern form of basic human decency and mutual respect, is still alive, and will remain alive as long as civilisation, as we know it, endures.

The sad thing is that such chivalry and decency apparently no longer reside within the executive suites of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

By finally removing this broadcast, the ABC has attempted to cancel its suicide note. But the damage is done, and it has lost an enormous amount of the reserves of respect it still enjoyed. Right-thinking Australians who believe in the fundamental values of liberty, democracy and the rule of law will not underwrite such degradation forever.