For fifty years, the national broadcaster has fought to bury a Lateline radio interview celebrating the sexual abuse of minors. Now the ABC’s secret pedophile tape is public, and The Daily Declaration has spoken with the whistleblower who exposed it.
In a stunning move this week, economist and former political advisor John Adams made public a 1975 ABC recording in which a group of adult men provided detailed descriptions of sexual relationships with boys, in a broadcast that has been suppressed for nearly half a century.
Originally aired on the now-defunct Lateline program and hosted by the late writer Richard Neville, the segment featured three men in their 30s and an underage boy who recounted and openly celebrated acts of pedophilia.
The Daily Declaration has reviewed the full 42-minute tape, which YouTube pulled within hours of Adams’ Monday upload, claiming it breached the platform’s community standards.
The ABC has since admitted to the Daily Mail that YouTube censored the recording at the broadcaster’s request.
Adams, who secured the recording from the ABC in 2023 under strict private-use conditions, defied those restrictions this week, citing the need for a truthful accounting of Australia’s history.
“In the past 24 hours, my co-host Martin North and I have taken extraordinary action to reveal the evil history of our national broadcaster, the ABC, promoting paedophilia,”
Adams told The Daily Declaration.
“Even though I had signed onto legal conditions with the ABC in 2023 to obtain the recording, I ultimately took the decision to breach those conditions in the public interest after exhausting all possible legal and political options,” he said.
Following its removal by YouTube, Adams has made the recording available on X, with a strong caution that it contains explicit accounts of sexual abuse involving minors. Watch Here
Rationalising Pedophilia on Air
The broadcast, aired on July 14, 1975, featured Richard Neville — a writer and counterculture figure, co-founder of Oz magazine, and an employee of the national broadcaster.
Neville began by framing the segment as an exploration of “pederasty”, citing the Penguin English Dictionary’s definition of “the homosexual relationship of a man with a boy”.
This is “not to be confused with pedophilia, a term which implies an assault on a young child by a man,” Neville claimed, setting terms that would justify the obscene content that followed.
Throughout the episode, the men detailed sexual exploitation of boys in their early teens and openly recounted the tactics they used to attract and manipulate minors, including offering gifts, taking boys camping, deceiving parents, and seeking out children from vulnerable homes.
One participant casually described abusing his three-year-old nephew while being 12 years of age himself, prompting laughter from the group.
The interviewees repeatedly invoked practices from ancient Greece in order to give cultural and intellection sanction for their behaviour, and portrayed themselves as enlightened mentors for young boys rather than perpetrators of abuse.
The teenager on the program recounted sexual experiences with older men and provided graphic depictions of child sexual abuse in glowing terms.
Throughout the program, ABC host Richard Neville offered minimal pushback, couching any objections as queries which enabled the guests to elaborate further and maintain control of the pro-pedophilia narrative.
The ABC’s guests dismissed outright any suggestion they were causing harm to their victims, claiming that young boys are naturally sexual, that acts of pedophilia liberate children from societal oppression, and that their victims would have been traumatised anyway by their family and the culture.
Neville’s guests further justified their abuse by describing it as “delightful” and “ephemeral”, claiming they were filling a gap left by absent fathers, and even recasting themselves as the victims of societal prejudice and the allure of young boys.
The ABC’s Dark Legacy
The broadcast sparked immediate and widespread outrage when it first aired in 1975. Prominent Christian leaders publicly condemned the program, including Auxiliary Catholic Bishop Thomas Muldoon, Anglican dean Lance Shilton, and Fred Nile — then National Co-ordinator of the Festival of Light — who formally referred the program to police.
Secular voices also expressed alarm, with federal Country Party MP Peter Nixon calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the broadcast.
Despite the protests, no formal investigation or charges were ever pursued, and ABC staff never reported the pedophiles to NSW Police.
The broadcaster’s response at the time was deeply troubling. While Managing director Talbot Duckmanton reportedly expressed discomfort with the program, he was overruled by ABC chairman Richard Downing, a Whitlam government appointee. Downing went on to defend the broadcast in The Sydney Morning Herald, stating,
“In general, men will sleep with young boys and that’s the sort of thing the community ought to know about,”
in remarks that invited further public outrage.
Historian Gerard Henderson has long noted that Richard Neville’s conduct prior to the broadcast — including an admission in his 1970 book Play Power to a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl in London — should have precluded the ABC ever giving him a public platform.
According to Adams, the decision to air the Lateline segment reflected a disturbing tolerance of child abuse within certain circles at the ABC in the 1970s protected under the guise of cultural discussion — a moral and institutional failure the national broadcaster has never publicly addressed and continues to avoid today.
“Basically, the entire elite establishment wants this tape to be buried in the sand of time, and no one’s allowed to hear it,”
Adams said in a recent episode of his podcast, In the Interests of the People.
Decades of Institutional Coverup
The path to public disclosure of the 1975 tape spans nearly a decade of formal inquiries and legal negotiations.
The recording was first publicly raised in Parliament by Senator Eric Abetz, who in 2016 and again in 2018 questioned the ABC about the tape’s existence and its refusal to acknowledge or apologise for the broadcast. In response to the scrutiny, the ABC variously claimed that the recording was a legitimate news item in accordance with its editorial standards, and that it did not exist.
In July 2023, John Adams obtained a copy of the tape directly from the national broadcaster under strict private-use conditions, which prohibited public broadcast or dissemination. Having heard the tape, he subsequently requested the broadcaster to lift the restrictions to allow public access, but the ABC declined.
In August, Adams wrote to Communications Minister Anika Wells seeking her intervention to compel the ABC to publish the recording across its digital platforms. When the Minister’s office replied, it stated that the interview did not meet the broadcaster’s current editorial standards and that the decision was a matter of ABC editorial independence.
The issue was further raised in Senate estimates by Senator Malcolm Roberts, who questioned the ABC on its handling of the recording, and was similarly stonewalled.
“After exhausting all political and legal options, I am going to breach the legal conditions imposed on me by the ABC to expose Australia’s dark history,”
Adams finally conceded last week, warning that the tape would be uploaded to YouTube at 5pm on Monday.
At the eleventh hour, the ABC’s Head of Disputes and Litigation issued a legal notice to Adams, warning that releasing the tape would breach copyright and violate the terms of his private-use agreement. The letter cited ethical concerns, including potential harm to victims, and threatened legal action against Adams, including injunctions or damages, should he proceed.
Undeterred, Adams and his co-host Martin North published the 42-minute recording, first on YouTube, and then on X.
“The culture of corruption and concealment in Australia, especially around paedophilia, is so disgusting that a circuit breaker [was] needed,”
he explained to The Daily Mail.
New South Wales MLC John Ruddick has since raised the issue of the ABC’s secret 1975 pedophile tape in the NSW Parliament, calling for the ABC to cease whitewashing its own history, and for the NSW government to release details of any investigations that took place at the time.
The ABC’s Political Double Standard
Recent convictions of politicians, childcare workers and clergy serve as a reminder that pedophilia remains an ongoing threat in Australian society. John Adams and Martin North contend that exposing historical episodes like the 1975 ABC broadcast is crucial for public accountability and national reckoning.
In a recent discussion about the release of the tape, Adams called out the double standards employed by elite institutions like the ABC in handling child abuse scandals depending on the politics of the perpetrators.
“You have what I call right-wing pedophilia and left-wing pedophilia,”
he explained, clarifying that it’s a phenomenon that happens
“right across the political spectrum”.
Nevertheless,
“if it’s right-wing pedophilia — in the Catholic Church, in the Coalition, a far-right politician, potentially big business — the ABC is very eager to report about that.”
“Of course, it should,” he added, “because any form of pedophilia is bad”.
However, he elaborated:
“There’s another form of pedophilia, and this was rampant in the 1970s… among left-wing groups, people associated with centre-left politicians, political groups… [and] left-wing social justice causes who also embraced pedophilia” and “were pushing pedophilia as an accepted practice”.
“Some of those groups have been associated with the ABC, and some of these people have worked at the ABC,”
Adams explained.
“Anytime there is pedophilia on the centre-left of the political spectrum, the ABC attempts to downplay it or conceal it or won’t even report about it,”
he said.
“So people need to understand that while you and I consider pedophilia to be a moral evil, no matter where it happens, and we’re prepared to call it out, at the ABC there’s a form of pedophilia which is acceptable because it’s their side of the political spectrum.”
Adams told The Daily Declaration that his decision to defy the ABC’s legal constraints is borne of a conviction to expose institutional misconduct and see Australia’s cultural institutions reformed.
“We cannot defeat evil unless we shine a bright light into the darkness. I refuse to surrender to legal threats, intimidation and the culture of corruption and concealment by Australia’s ruling elite establishment,”
he said.
“Publishing the recording and exposing Australia’s ugly history was the only option available if we are going to drive real change in Australia. Protecting Australian children is our highest duty as parents and citizens.”
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Kurt Mahlburg has studied architecture and theology among other interests of philosophy, history, surf, the outdoors and travel. He spent several years in Indonesia and has worked as a young adults pastor. He is now a teacher, a freelance writer, the Features Editor of the Canberra Declaration and contributes regularly at Caldron Pool & other online publications. He hosts his own blog 'Cross + Culture' at KurtMahlburg.blog. Follow Kurt on 𝕏.
Check out Kurt Mahlburg’s new book Cross and Culture: Can Jesus Save the West?
