It's still better than the commercials. If nothing else, because they don't waste quite as much time on what colour knickers Brittney isn't wearing this week.
You identified the problem, though. The government (Howard's government, really) identified the ABC as an enemy. It couldn't do anything about it outright, but it could starve it. It found trivial issues, and blew them up into reasons not to maintain funding. It then found more serious problems, largely caused or exacerbated by lack of money, and used them as excuses for reducing the funding even further. And stacking the board, long a favourite pastime of governments, became an obsession. And now we're at the stage that while the ABC's superiority to the commercials still glimmers, there are large patches which have been dragged down to the commercials' level. Similar quality of newsgathering, if superior quality of reporting on what they can find, with the drought of money becoming obvious. Then people like erudito start going on about how there is no benefit the taxpayer paying for something no better than the commercials, and why not sell the whole lot off to Murdoch?
Re: I wasn't.
You identified the problem, though. The government (Howard's government, really) identified the ABC as an enemy. It couldn't do anything about it outright, but it could starve it. It found trivial issues, and blew them up into reasons not to maintain funding. It then found more serious problems, largely caused or exacerbated by lack of money, and used them as excuses for reducing the funding even further. And stacking the board, long a favourite pastime of governments, became an obsession. And now we're at the stage that while the ABC's superiority to the commercials still glimmers, there are large patches which have been dragged down to the commercials' level. Similar quality of newsgathering, if superior quality of reporting on what they can find, with the drought of money becoming obvious. Then people like
Which is what they wanted in the first place.