Janet Albrechtsen, Peter Costello, Jonathan Holmes, and keeping a sense of balance while skating on the pond ...

(Above: a reminder from First Dog that March is 'sexualharrassmarch' at your ABC. Click to get a bigger picture. Put on a pair of overalls to get the overall picture. More of the seminal - no I'm not talking about semen - First Dog here).

Heavens to Betsy - as we used to say in the bush long ago, not understanding that the origin of this American phrase is completely unsolvable - the wind has whipped up the waters on the pond today.

There's Peter Costello so severely savaging Tony Abbott's paid maternity leave scheme he sounds like an actual Liberal, and earns himself a splash by Phillip Corey under the header Costello slams Abbott parent tax.

And if reading Corey isn't enough, you get double bunger value because the Herald grandly allows Costello space for his column Leaders jostle in the race to rock bottom.

Costello displays his usual venom - no Abbott and Costello routine here - with words like Sweden, alarm bells, air-raid sirens, Bob Brown and the Greens lauding the scheme, private benefits socialised, and cruellest blow of all, Crocodile Dundee - that's not a maternity leave scheme, this is a maternity leave scheme.

Naturally in the interest of balance, Costello spends half his column treating Chairman Rudd's hospital scheme like a salad maker might shake around a lettuce leaf. But strangely Corey - in raptures with the Costello Crocodile Dundee routine - ignores this in his springboarding off the Costello column to grab his share of the headlines. And when we also read Tom Ormonde scribbling Abbott's parental leave scheme is an unfair stinker, we have to wonder if the Herald is embarking on a crusade, or a campaign.

Where is the balance, we sigh, as Fairfax shows once again it's an outpost of the ABC. Well we would if we were Janet Albrechtsen.

From where we sit, Abbott's scheme is cynical, grasping, opportunist, and way too indulgent, and the most dismaying thing is that clearly somewhere in our mind there must be a Liberal gene - as opposed to a liberal anarcho-syndicalist libertarian gene - that occasionally aligns us with Peter Costello. Oh shoot me now.

But we got to thinking about balance, because naturally as soon as she left the ABC board, we'd been waiting for Janet Albrechtsen to give the organisation a dust up, and she obliges with Strength in diverse views.

Naturally she works herself up into a lather about balance:

... was it balance when an ABC reporter asked Newman on Wednesday whether he was "a climate change denier"?

Or was it a damn sensible question to ask of Newman, who talked and sounded like a gherkin on the subject? And brave enough, because when you read ABC veteran rebuffs Newman on sceptics, you realise that in the ABC the best strategy is always to keep your head down, or the likes of Albrechtsen will lop them off:

Although several ABC journalists have criticised Mr Newman's speech anonymously, only Williams, a 35-year veteran of the ABC's Science Show, would go on the record.

He cited climate change sceptics he had interviewed, including Ian Plimer, Don Aitkin, Nigel Calder and Richard Linson.

Stephen Conroy has generously agreed that Newman can make as much of a goose of himself as he likes (here) - the great big internet filter isn't available just yet - but how shocking that Williams should think of climate deniers as geese of a feather:

"We don't interview people who say HIV doesn't cause AIDS, petrol sniffing is good for kids or smoking doesn't cause cancer, but they're out there," Williams said.

And of course you can read Janet Albrechtsen on climate change anytime you like, thanks to Chairman Rupert, but what's truly remarkable and amazing is the way Media Watch and its host Jonathan Holmes gets up the nose of the likes of Albrechtsen.

Here's my idea of balance - on the one hand, we have three commercial FTA broadcasters who offer little but dross and sport, and we have an SBS that's lost its way, its staff in despair, and we have a digital experiment that saw groups as diverse as Christians and NITV access to the spectrum, an experiment shortly to be terminated by the demonic despotic powers that be, and a community channel that's run on the smell of an oily rag currently lost somewhere in the analogue world, and pay television dedicated to the preposterous notion that you should pay for crap (even though its only temptation, Jon Stewart now slides his slippers under my bed regularly at 7.15 pm on ABC2 - oh Jon, tickle me again), and a newspaper world dominated by Chairman Rupert's seventy per cent stake, and full of commentariat columnists, handsomely paid, of the likes of the Devine, Gerard Henderson and Albrecthsen, not to mention Piers Akerman, Tim Blair, and that dolt Andrew B.

And up against this ocean of suffering, they get agitated about fifteen minutes or so once a week, delivered for the usual socialist working hours of nine months a year?

Spare me days, as we used to say in the bush without quite understanding that it was a plea to the absent god to go on living, and therefore quite meaningless.

Well you can read all of Albrechtsen if you like, thanks to the generous Chairman Rupert, as she gets indignant about Holmes, and blathers on about the ABC charter (in the process conflating gathering and presentation of news with opinion pieces), but when you actually read Holmes' Climate change reporting: balanced or biased?, it turns out to be a more intelligent piece than hers. And when you get to read his Mark their words: the battle begins, he astutely sets the scene for regular bouts of ABC bashing from the commercial sector:

... this much is certain: the current challenge to the ABC's plans to expand its regional websites by companies like Fairfax and APN, which own newspaper chains in regional and rural Australia, is just a preliminary skirmish.

The real battles will be over subscription TV, and subscription news online. The fact that the ABC doesn't take advertising is irrelevant to its commercial rivals in these spaces. It's looking more and more like a billion-dollar gorilla, with its supply of bananas guaranteed, posing an existential threat to the survival of some of this country's most powerful and influential businesses.

Make no mistake, the battle has hardly begun.

Meanwhile, it's good to have a chuckle at the paranoid mindset of the conservative commentariat, and the notion that if you hang around with dogs, you get up with fleas. Here's Albrechtsen:

The truth is that not much is required to make the ABC an even better media organisation, a truly vibrant town square of diverse opinions and perspectives. But you can see how easily group-think settles in. It happens at conservative gatherings, too. No conspiracy is necessary. The simple fact is if you spend too much time listening to views with which you agree, you grow complacent and bored. Even if a young journalist starts out with a refreshingly different perspective, Stockholm syndrome can happen in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra.

Phew. At last an explanation of why Peter Costello and I agree on Tony Abbott's maternity leave scheme. It's Stockholm syndrome. I've spent so long reading the views of commentariat columnists my mind has been captured, as I grew complacent and bored.

But funnily enough I've never felt captured by Albrechtsen. Perhaps because her group think is just a typical commentariat columnist group think, as here she faithfully echoes Gerard Henderson scribbling only yesterday about the evils of the ABC.

Oh and it wouldn't do if we didn't end with a dire, mysterious imprecation and muttered threat:

The ABC is there to serve the people who fund it. If it chooses to undermine its raison d'etre by ignoring constructive criticism, there will be greater existential threats ahead for Aunty.

Hang on, that sounds like Janet Albrechtsen sounding just like Jonathan Holmes. Existential threats?! The ABC threatening Chairman Rupert who threatens the ABC which threatens the Herald which threatens News Corp which threatens Fairfax which threatens ... Enough already, that's not an existential threat, that's an existential meltdown.

Have they both been reading Jean-Paul Sartre? And which one has Stockholm syndrome?

Just another day ice skating on the pond. Whatever you do, don't lose your balance ...

(Below: a nice Pieter Bruegel showing the pleasure of winter sports. Keep your balance!)