It was embarrassing enough watching the communications minister Malcolm Turnbull try to cast an election eve lie – that there would be no cuts to either of our national broadcasters – as something less like a promise and more like chatter among the Real Housewives of Canberra. Being smashed to pieces with political hammer: ABC managing director Mark Scott. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Now, how can the government explain these cuts to voters in Australia's vast regional heart, whose voice, and whose right to see their own world reflected on the television screen, and on the airwaves, has been brutally smashed to pieces with what amounts to a political hammer? For a moment, let us sweep aside the political misdirection. This isn't about economic common sense. If it was, the government would be asking the tax minimising billion dollar multinationals, of which there seems to be no shortage, to help with some of the financial heavy lifting the government seems, so far, to have confined to the sick and the elderly.

Instead, what we have before us is an unpalatable combination of political payback and capital city tunnel-vision, where concern for the consequences of actions and reactions seems to dissipate, as it always does, at the city limits. Four hundred jobs at the ABC to go: Malcolm Turnbull announces the proposed $207 million in funding cuts to the ABC. Credit:David Mariuz Parliament may claim to serve Australia, but it seems that more often than not the needs of Australia's regions are left to crumble while money is poured into the back pockets of party-faithful donors and capital city cronies. There is no mandate to gut the ABC. As a broadcaster it delivered above and beyond its duty. Rallying against the federal government's plans for severe cuts to the national broadcaster. Credit:James Brickwood

While Australia's commercial broadcasters were stalling the development of digital television and going cap in hand to the government to ask for handouts in the form of licence fee cuts, the ABC was blazing a digital trail which is still the envy of its rivals. With their wallets fattened by government handouts - the same ones they claim the ABC unfairly gets – the ABC's digital firepower and its market leading iView platform – have become legitimate competition. Not a hard win when only one side was playing the digital game for the best part of a decade. Illustration: Cathy Wilcox Loading And true to form, rather than innovate, the ABC's rivals have instead pressured the government do their bidding and batter the ABC into submission.

As always, the voters lose to a bigger game of political bastardry. They lose a rich and robust national broadcaster, diminished through death by a thousand cuts. And they lose a vital platform through which regional Australia is illuminated for the betterment of all Australians.