Anderson’s exit can be a reset at the ABC. It must start with Radio National

Your correspondent was at ABC Southbank in Melbourne the afternoon the board met there to edge out managing director Jonathan Shier. It was the early 2000s, and Shier, an Australian who’d been a jobbing UK TV exec, had been appointed by the board led by Donald McDonald, a friend of John Howard’s in the world of culture. 

Many alleged Shier was hired to de-leftify the ABC. Most observers understood that to be his role, except perhaps Shier, who took on a grand reorganisation of program-making and commissioning, whose signal achievement was that both of those activities ceased almost immediately and the ABC ended up playing Fawlty Towers reruns on Friday night.