“I’ll be damned if somebody’s going to tell me that you haven’t aired enough of the other side of (an) issue.”

Although there is no real constitutional right to free speech in this country, as there is in America, most Australians accept the fact that people have the right to speak their opinion.

But ACMA yesterday drew a line in the sand with its 2GB ruling, requiring that opinions must be backed up with facts and checked for balance. ACMA is enforcing the commercial radio industry’s own guidelines, enshrined in the Codes of Practice.

On his 3AW program yesterday, Hinch pushed back at ACMA, taking the regulator’s deputy chairman to task, saying ACMA is “increasingly infringing freedom of speech” and using commentary on child abuse as an example:

“I’ll be damned if somebody’s going to tell me that you haven’t aired enough of the other side of (an) issue. You’ll have to let somebody do it on your program. I’d say go hee.”

”If I say there needs to be a Royal Commission into child abuse, and nobody else on the station covers that and they don’t agree with me, are you saying Mitchell should then go on air and present the opposite view?”

Bean said the broadcast code with governs the commercial radio industry requires stations to make reasonable efforts to present significant viewpoints when dealing with controversial issues of public importance.

Derryn Hinch described Alan Jones as ‘somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan’, and argued that, while he didn’t like much of what he did or said, freedom of speech was paramount.

Listen to the interview here.

Listen to Alan Jones comments about the ACMA finding this morning here.