Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

ABC chairman Kim Williams denied any left-wing bias at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster just days before it aired a segment describing violent, sexualised harm against conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart.

The ABC broadcast a short film on Race Around the World earlier this month that culminated in a graphic, sexualised description of violence against mining magnate Gina Rinehart.

The segment, titled “A Very Relaxing Video,” was filmed in Scotland by contestant Kate McGuinness, a graduate of the Sydney College of the Arts, during the sixth week of the ABC iview series. It aired on 12 July and streamed on iview the same night.

The four-minute film follows a figure presented as a “Scottish forest warrior ninja” guiding McGuinness through a series of calming exercises: focussing on bubbles in a river, sitting motionless in the forest, and practising strikes with a wooden stick. The ABC’s own summary of the episode describes it as “a physical and mental program combining essential elements of Scottish Highlander living, muscle toning, enhanced flexibility and even stress reduction.”

Barbaric ABC Broadcast on Gina Rinehart

The tone shifts in the film’s closing monologue. The warrior figure invokes a coming “revolution” and describes, in graphic and sexually degrading language, the mutilation of Rinehart’s body, including the insertion of an object into her and the violent disposal of her internal organs. The passage was broadcast in full in the programme’s Sunday time slot.

Australian taxpayer funded ABC aired a broadcast involving calls to torture and murder Gina Rinehart. The description of the violence was extreme and even hideously sexualised. pic.twitter.com/q9KzdikTJ2

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) July 23, 2026

Race Around the World, first broadcast in the 1990s, returned to the ABC schedule in June, sending contestants to a new country each week with a day’s notice of their destination and ten days to produce a short film. The current series is hosted by Zan Rowe, with a rotating panel of three judges reviewing each week’s films before the next contestant’s segment airs.

Two of the three panellists offered no on-air criticism once McGuinness’s segment concluded. The only panellist to raise an objection was Leigh Sales, who opened by saying she “really did quite like it” but had “a bone to pick” with the “nasty gag about Gina Rinehart” for its “political” nature.

Andrew Bolt’s Critique

Commenting on the segment in a Herald Sun column this week, Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt wrote: “I thought — until last week — that the ABC could no longer shock me with its venomous hatred of conservatives” but that the broadcast had proved him wrong.

He described the segment as a “barbaric hate fantasy” and said that after working in television for decades, he believed “there’s no way that film would have gone to air without being checked by producers.”

Bolt located the segment within a pattern of sexualised ABC content targeting Rinehart. He cited a line from Wednesday Night Fever, a now-cancelled ABC variety show, in which a performer dressed as Rinehart sang “get off the dole, stop being a moll, get in my hole” — a line the show later clarified, on legal advice, was a reference to a mine. He also pointed to an Australia Day special in January in which Rinehart was described on-air as the “owner of Australia’s biggest hole”.

Bolt argued the pattern extends beyond Rinehart to other conservative figures the taxpayer-funded broadcaster has targeted. He cited a past ABC “comedy” broadcast depicting Sky News host Chris Kenny in a sexually degrading, bestiality-themed image, and coverage that, in his words, sought to “paint the innocent — and conservative — Cardinal George Pell as a pedophile” — a conviction later quashed unanimously by the High Court.

Bolt also referenced an Indigenous actor who, on another ABC program, said “I [defecate] on your colonisation” while appearing to deface an image of a white woman.

Bolt summarised the segment as “a very gendered and political attack that the ABC would never forgive if done to a woman of the Left — say, a Julia Gillard or Tanya Plibersek”.

He closed his column by asking why ABC chairman Kim Williams — who had told Sky News days earlier that the ABC is “not an especially left-wing or right-wing organisation” and “a force for impartiality” — had not apologised for the segment.

Rinehart has not commented publicly on the broadcast.

Update

Responding to The Daily Declaration, an ABC spokesperson said:

Race Around the World features films created by amateur filmmakers, whose contributions reflect their own viewpoints and creative treatments. While contributors are not ABC journalists, all content broadcast by the ABC is subject to the ABC’s editorial standards, policies, and review processes. In this case, the film was intended to be satirical in tone and considered to be editorially justifiable within the context of the program. We recognise that audiences may respond differently to creative content and hold a range of views about how it is presented. One of the judges critiqued the film during their assessment, and that feedback was included in the program.

___

Image by Brian Doyle.