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Australia Needs a Fairness Doctrine—Who Will Propose It?

By Vinay Kolhatkar

February 27, 2026

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The months of speculation are over. Australia has a new Opposition Leader, Angus Taylor, likely to take the Coalition to the next federal election, come what may in Farrer, NSW. Unless he doodles and dawdles on key issues like energy prices, inflation, and housing, which are on everyone’s lips, including the Prime Minister’s. Taylor has promised to attack Labor at every turn—that may be enough to stave off a leadership challenge but not to defeat a 94-seat-strong Labor with a 42-seat Coalition (with the seat of Farrer already at risk).

But the party moderates hush the truthtellers.

We know that at heart, Angus Taylor does not buy climate alarmism. Privately, he even accepts that it is a racket. But the party moderates hush the truthtellers. Yet, with respect to climate, he needs to use that “scam” word loud and clear and often enough to keep the Coalition from bleeding members and donors to One Nation (ON). The climate racket is the second-largest scientific scam of all time, and Taylor must say so, damn the moderates.

Even that will not win him an election unless there is another terrorist attack on Australian soil before people go to the general-election polls. Then Labor is done. Not suggesting an evil false-flag operation here.

What else can Taylor do besides mimicking ON’s policies? He can take the momentum away from ON with creative input which the Coalition has sorely lacked. There is one such measure. It will have phenomenal long-term consequences for the future of this country.

 

The Fairness Doctrine (US, 1949–87)

In the US, fearing conservative takeover of media, the Left argued for and implemented a “Fairness Doctrine” (1949–87).

Lawmakers were concerned that the rich (“conservatives”) would buy all “scarce spectrum” media licenses and effectively control the media. The Fairness Doctrine required that broadcast networks devote roughly equal time to contrasting views on issues of public importance. The US Congress backed the policy. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) called the doctrine “the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest”—no renewal of a license could be granted unless the doctrine was adhered to. Broadcasters obeyed.

The Supreme Court of the United States upheld the doctrine. The Court relied on the scarcity of radio spectrum to justify the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969). The FCC required the broadcaster to afford individuals an on-air opportunity to respond to personal attacks aired by Red Lion broadcasting. Broadcasters argued these rules abridged their right to broadcast whatever they choose, citing the general right of an individual to “say or publish what they think.”

By 1987, the tide had turned in favor of the First Amendment. Some broadcasters had avoided controversial topics altogether, fearing the FCC’s snooping eye and exacting control. When Congress sought to push the doctrine into law, President Reagan vetoed it. Under Reagan, the FCC eventually abandoned the doctrine.

 

Public Assets like the ABC and SBS

A most crucial distinction slipped both President Reagan and the FCC.

However, a most crucial distinction slipped both President Reagan and the FCC. Private broadcasters should have the freedom to air whatever views they wish to. But taxpayer-funded broadcasting assets, like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) television and radio, should not be allowed to exclusively peddle only one side of controversial issues like the climate alarmism hypothesis and its highway-robbery consequences of stealing from consumers and fossil-fuel projects to subsidize unstable energy sources, or to exclusively air only one side of the absurdity of a central bank setting interest rate and inflation targets (as against a gold standard moderating money supply and zeroing inflation for a century), or only one side of the unscientific nonsense that men can have babies.

Coincidentally, by 1987, neo-Marxism (aka Cultural Marxism) had become the dominant cultural force in both education and media in all of the West. Hordes of intellectuals left the Frankfurt School (Goethe University) for the US in the 1930s and 1940s, and by the 1960s, entrenched a neo-Marxist pedagogy in the Humanities at major universities. Later, the oppression theory attacking gender, family, narrated imperialism (read: the white race) percolated down to high schools all over the West. So much so that universities began to discriminate against Jews and Asians who would have otherwise been admitted to Ivy League schools in higher numbers than their pro-rata share of the population.

By 2006, Al Gore was peddling a global warming theory with zero predictive ability and no evidence.

By the 1990s, the legacy media was theirs for the taking. The dominant discourse changed the intellectual culture. The first Club of Rome meet was in 1968. By 2006, Al Gore was peddling a global warming theory with zero predictive ability and no evidence. By 2013, DSM V had amended gender-identity disorder to gender dysphoria for psychologists and psychiatrists—the politicization of science and research funding was thoroughly entrenched. Now the neo-Marxists could dictate an expert-driven policy agenda, but the well-paid experts were only ever selected by the fascists. All this cultural territory was won by the neo-Marxists without ever lifting a gun. Antonio Gramsci was laughing in his grave.

Suddenly, the Left did not want a Fairness Doctrine to destroy their monopoly on education and public media, now that the shoe had landed on the other foot.

But a Fairness Doctrine policy must be imposed on taxpayer-funded influential assets in Australia, particularly state-owned media and higher education, where the curriculum is essentially controlled by TEQSA (the Tertiary Education and Quality Standards Agency). Education, too, must respectfully convey all scientific sides of controversial issues.

The ABC’s Editorial Policies apply to “news and information.” That editorial stance is not being stretched to scientific controversies.

The ABC’s Editorial Policies apply to “news and information.” That editorial stance is not being stretched to scientific controversies such as climate alarmism, transgenderism, and fiat money. Section 4.5 of the ABC’s “Editorial Policies on Objectivity and Impartiality” says: “Do not unduly favour one perspective over another.” That’s not doing its job. The truth with respect to scientific controversies is being hidden under the guise of it not being the truth, but just a conspiracy hypothesis that deserves no airing. A Fairness Doctrine wording at law would reject the monopoly of government-funded experts as arbiters of truth.

 

Politics Is Downstream of Culture, Which Is Downstream of Philosophy

In 1972, despite recognizing the “Fairness Doctrine” as a “messy little makeshift of the mixed economy,” Ayn Rand advocated its use in the US for education as a temporary measure in what called “a grave national emergency”, because it had prevented “the Establishment’s total takeover of the airwaves.”

ON may launch this policy first if Taylor is not quick. But it would be worth mirroring anyway. So let me say that Angus Taylor has a fantastic opportunity to not only startle the media and his Labor and ON opposition but throw a spanner into the nonstop upward trend of Australian youth signing up to the nonsense of climate alarmism and transgenderism. Unless that philosophical trend is reversed, the minor and major right (well, who are the minors now, ON or the Nats & Liberals?) may only win one of the next two federal elections at best, and that too, as an aggregate of ON, LNP Queensland, Liberals, and Nationals all together amassing 76 seats in the lower house—a “governing coalition” of the Coalition itself with ON.

Much damage has been done to young minds. But it can be reversed in many who are not yet fully brainwashed.

Much damage has been done to young minds. But it can be reversed in many who are not yet fully brainwashed like Malcolm Turnbull appears to be. Or was that just his renewables investment taking over his oral apparatus to satisfy his lost-status-deficiency (LSD) syndrome, with the ABC only too willing to air his unprovoked assault on right-wing media? If only the Fairness Doctrine was in play—then the ABC would have needed to allow the right-wing media to answer their critics on public media, too.

The ABC would even be forced to air an equal amount of time of Professor Ian Plimer as they do of Chris Bowen’s gabfest—now that would be a treat to watch.

 

First published in Spectator Australia under the title “Angus Taylor Should Propose a Fairness Doctrine for Australia” on February 17, 2026, and reprinted with permission.

 

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