The ABC was a staple in my outer ’burbs childhood home. I have fond memories of Big Ted and the sound of my father’s piercing “shoossssh!” if we dared interrupt the 7pm news with Mary Delahunty. But my fondness for the ABC has waned.

The allegations against Aunty by the likes of Stan Grant and the newsroom revolt over the sacking of Antoinette Lattouf raise concerns about the ABC’s workplace culture. But there are other deeply worrying issues.

The allegations against Aunty are deeply worrying.Credit: Andrew Dyson

The ABC has near monopoly status when it comes to Australian documentary programmes, but its practices have slowly strangled our documentary sector to death.

Until the late 1990s, the ABC had a popular weekly primetime slot featuring Australian documentaries made by independent filmmakers. Now the national broadcaster favours formulaic presenter-led factual entertainment made by large production enterprises.

In the “Uniquely Australian” documentary category on ABC iView you’ll find Bill Bailey’s Wild West Australia, in which the British celebrity travels around the outback or Australia’s Open, which bears closer resemblance to a promotional film for the tennis event than a documentary. Elsewhere, you’ll find Grand Designs Transformations, an Australian take on a British concept that the ABC calls “formatted observational documentary”.

These shows have a place, but they are increasingly displacing independent Australian documentaries. And on the odd occasion such films are acquired by the ABC, the amount offered is so low that it’s been known for a producer to walk away rather than suffer the indignity after spending years making their film.

Daryl Dellora – director of the popular Search for the Palace Letters doco recently aired on the ABC – struggled for many years to finance the film. Dellora says he and producer Sue Maslin are significantly out of pocket after Screen Australia passed on his film. In the end, the ABC purchased the film for $20,000, a fraction of the $350,000 spent on the four-year project. Dellora says he simply can’t afford to go through that again. He thinks his documentary career is over.

I have also been on the wrong end of the ABC’s practices. After failing to attract funding from the ABC and Screen Australia, I put my own money on the line for my feature documentary How to Capture a Prime Minister – about the wild time in 1976 when then-prime minister Malcolm Fraser was trapped in a basement by angry students in the aftermath of the Whitlam government’s Dismissal.