Celebrity author Peter FitzSimons will be a paid ABC reporter only two months after it sacked 22 journalists.
The chairman of the Australian Republican Movement who is married to The Project host Lisa Wilkinson is filing a story for Foreign Correspondent, which airs next week.
The 57-year-old Fairfax Media columnist, who lives at Mosman on Sydney’s lower north shore, is interviewing New Zealanders who have been deported by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.
The ABC is paying Peter Fitzsimons, a private-school educated, left-wing columnist to be a guest reporter, only two months after it sacked 22 journalists
The chairman of the Australian Republican Movement who is married to The Project host Lisa Wilkinson is filing a story for Foreign Correspondent, which airs next week.
FitzSimsons is examining the expulsion of 1,300 Kiwis from Australia as a paid celebrity reporter, just 10 weeks after the ABC retrenched 22 journalists so new website staff could be hired.
While the commentator, educated at the prestigious Knox Grammar School on Sydney’s upper north shore, is receiving taxpayer funds at a controversial time, he has vowed to donate the proceeds to a homelessness charity.
‘They paid me bugger all and for what it’s worth I donated every cent to charity anyway,’ he told The Australian.
The former Wallabies player, who has written a biography on former federal Labor leader Kim Beazley, is potentially the most controversial guest reporter on Foreign Correspondent since 2008, when former Labor premier Bob Carr was given a segment interviewing author Gore Vidal in the United States.
The program has also recruited FitzSimons just two months after the ABC’s news director Gaven Morris, who earns $500,000 a year, complained bitterly about an $84 million funding freeze over three years.
‘Make no mistake, there is no more fat to cut in ABC news,’ he said.
‘From this point on, we’re cutting into muscle.’
The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the trade union for journalists, described the retrenchments as a ‘blow to local news coverage’.
FitzSimons’s guest report airs on Tuesday next week.
The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the trade union for journalists, described the retrenchments as a ‘blow to local news coverage’