As it happens, I don’t think we did ever find a story the Rudd government could tell the Australian people. Nor do I recall hearing anything further about this grand mission afterwards. A year or so later, of course, Rudd was gone and, at the 2010 election, so — almost — was the government itself. Julia Gillard, who led Labor to minority government, called Rudd’s “a good government… losing its way.”

It has recently been hard not to wonder: is Albanese’s going the same way?

In many respects, the comparison is unfair. This Labor government has plainly learnt a great deal from the last and has gone out of its way not to repeat its errors. Many of its ministers were there, in more junior roles, last time. Albanese himself, as a rising figure during that era and leader of the House for almost the entire period before ending up as deputy prime minister, sometimes seemed traumatised by the infighting that more than anything wrecked Labor in government.

The differences matter. Rudd wanted to win the media every day. Albanese often seems more like Malcolm Fraser in his aspiration to keep politics off the front page. Rudd talked a big game in opposition about keeping government accountable but then failed to follow through by calling inquiries into the grand failures and scandals of the Howard era such as the Iraq war and the Australian Wheat Board affair. Albanese’s government, by contrast, has called one inquiry after another, most of them exposing the sheer badness of the Coalition on issues ranging from immigration policy through to robodebt.

Barely six months into the life of his government, Kevin Rudd was being called Captain Chaos by the Australian’s John Lyons. Albanese has gone out of his way to emphasise the careful, orderly and process-driven nature of his government. Albanese probably intends such remarks as a rebuke of Scott Morrison, but they often sound equally applicable to Rudd.

The Albanese government has a right to consider itself a good government, even allowing for the fairly low standards we have so often seen this century in Canberra. It has fulfilled many election promises. It has grappled effectively with key areas of Coalition failure and neglect, including stagnant wages and a shambolic immigration policy. It has responded to the general challenge of rising inflation and the particular one of spiralling energy costs. It has conducted that bewildering range of inquiries — not, seemingly, just to kick a can down the road but with the apparent aim of consulting widely and doing good policy — which gives substance to its commitment to evidence and process.

If good government receives its due reward, you might imagine that this is a government coasting to a comfortable election victory next time round. It is remarkable to consider that Labor won a resounding victory in the Aston by-election as recently as 1 April 2023; at the time, it seemed unassailable.

But politics is rarely so simple, and it tends not to be terribly fair either. Recent opinion polling has been discouraging for the government: Newspoll had the two-party-preferred vote at 50–50 in November, and then Labor at 52 to the Coalition’s 48 just before Christmas. That’s not disastrous — the middle of a term often looks grim for incumbents — but it would have given Labor Party strategists plenty to worry over.

Three issues have figured in the commentary. Almost everyone gives significant weight to the cost of living, which is hitting lower- and middle-income families hard. Pollsters and pundits argue that Labor’s support in the outer suburbs is fragile and it needs to do more to show it is on the side of struggling families. Peter Dutton and the Liberals, meanwhile, see these same voters as their only serious pathway back to government. November’s Victorian state election gave signs that Labor’s vote on Melbourne’s suburban frontiers might be a little more fragile than many assumed at the 2022 federal election. The forthcoming Dunkley by-election will test some of the claims made in recent months.

The second issue was the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Labor championed this cause: it became part of the government’s brand from the moment of Albanese’s victory speech on the evening of 21 May 2022. When, therefore, it went down, it was inevitable that the government’s reputation should go down with it. Governments have not historically been thrown out of office on the back of such a defeat, but failure at a referendum can wrong-foot a government struggling under other pressures — as the defeat of its attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1951 did to a Menzies government grappling with 20 per cent inflation.

Third, there is the Gaza war. The horrors that have occurred in Israeli border communities, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and in Gaza will move anyone with a sense of humanity, but the political reality is that they have tended to move different groups of people in rather different ways. Labor’s problem here is that for large parts of the left, the Palestine issue is the defining cause of the age; for them, it divides pretend progressives from real ones.

There are parallels here with the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, which was also a divisive issue for a Labor Party that contained secular leftists and others who supported the Republican government, and Catholic right-wingers who leaned towards Franco and the Nationalist rebels. It was a part of John Curtin’s achievement as federal Labor leader that he was able to steer a course through these turbulent waters, largely by committing his party — then in opposition — to isolationism.

That kind of approach isn’t available to Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong. But they still must steer a course that takes into account Australia’s alliance commitments, its support for the so-called rules-based order and international law, the pressures of the domestic political scene and challenges of electoral politics, and its attachments to basic decency, humanitarianism and justice. The government’s hostility to Hamas is taken for granted everywhere except among the unhinged populist right, whose extremism nonetheless now often finds a platform in parts of the commercial media.

But we can be equally certain that it gives Australia’s Labor government no great pleasure to be seen as too close to the present government of Israel, a regime that is for very sound reasons deeply unpopular in Israel itself as well as among many Australian Jews. There is little doubt that in negotiating these pressures, which it has actually done with fair success, the government has nonetheless at times sounded windy and looked wobbly.

By Christmas, I would not have been alone in wondering if this government was going the way of Rudd’s and Gillard’s amid these pressures. A great part of the difficulty has seemed to me the particular combination of policy wonkery and electoral opportunism that has come to hold too much sway in the Labor Party this century. We all like good, evidence-based policy, and we all like electoral professionalism. Successful political parties need both to get anywhere.

But politics is also an aspect of culture. Otherwise highly intelligent Labor politicians can sometimes appear very naive about such matters. The Rudd and Gillard governments are a case in point: who in the Gillard government, for instance, came up with the idea of appointing a former Liberal Party leader, Brendan Nelson, as director of one of the country’s leading public institutions, the Australian War Memorial — in the lead-up to the centenary of the first world war, of all times? And under this government, which seems to support a new direction for the memorial on the issue of representing frontier warfare, it reappointed to the council a former Liberal prime minister, Tony Abbott. Such statesmanship!

These matters might seem trivial beside the problem of ensuring that millions of Australians can pay for their next power bill. But the political right has fewer illusions — Coalition governments stack boards as if their very existence depended on it. Labor shouldn’t follow that lead, but it should pay much closer attention than it does to the points of intersection between civil society, cultural authority and state power.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to explain how power and culture work in capitalist societies. The “common sense” of the ruling class — coinciding with its interests — comes to be seen as that of society as a whole — the “national interest,” to use some contemporary parlance. Conservatives apply Gramsci’s ideas faithfully in their relentless efforts to dominate culture. Their success in the recent Voice referendum was testament to such efforts. Labor governments imagine that so long as they can get that cost-of-living relief through the parliament next week, winners are grinners. That notion rests on a remarkably shallow understanding of how power operates in a society of any serious complexity.

This is why January has been a good month for the Albanese government. Two things happened almost at the very same time, one in “the economy,” the other in “the culture.” In the economy, it recast the stage three tax cuts to ensure that there was a redistribution of benefits towards low- and middle-income earners. Alan Kohler, so often a devastatingly astute commentator on such matters, was right to point out that this was somewhat of an argument over loose change: the tax system as a whole continues to favour those who are best-off. Yet it was something. Albanese, in a National Press Club speech and elsewhere, has framed the shift as a response to changed circumstances, and especially the cost-of-living crisis. A bolder leader would also have said that social democratic governments support progressive income tax and oppose massive hand-outs to those who already have enough.

At the same time as the upholders of national political integrity were launching philosophical disquisitions about Albanese’s “backflips,” “lies” and “betrayals” — often the same journalists and politicians who met far worse from Scott Morrison with vigorous shrugging or lavish praise — Labor was also attending to the culture. The appointment of Kim Williams as new chair of the ABC suggested a government that has an interest in ensuring that one of the country’s most influential public institutions is led by someone who has not only impeccable professional credentials but also sufficient commitment to public culture, the arts and the goals of excellence, independence and balance to align with values supposedly supported by the government itself.

The government can’t expect an easy run over the second half of its term. Media hostility has been increasingly uncompromising and will be relentless on the issue of tax cuts. The cost-of-living crisis, moreover, doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions.

On broader issues of policy, Labor’s Achilles heel seems to me to be housing. It has acted, but it has not done enough, and the Greens have made this one their own. It is ideally calculated to appeal to anyone under forty, and others too. The Coalition will also continue to pretend it has the solution, which involves allowing people with virtually no superannuation savings to use the little they have for a home deposit. The real estate industry will be delighted.

Labor would be well advised to craft a radical solution to housing in the spirit of the 1945 Commonwealth–State Housing Agreement — one that involves not only bold solutions to private provision but also a renewed emphasis on social housing. Even more than the “backflip” on taxes, a bold, evidence-based, well-costed housing policy could set Labor up for an extended period in office and a genuine opportunity to reinvigorate social democracy in this country. •

The post Gramsci’s message for Anthony Albanese appeared first on Inside Story.

Like others, I often wonder why the ABC I have so enjoyed and relied on can be irritating and sometimes infuriating. If it was on the edge of a cliff, there are days I’d have given it a push. Often that’s when the ABC seems to have no idea what it’s doing or no idea why people use it.

I look at ABC websites that sometimes have PR blurbs presented as news content. I watch Insiders who insist on framing every issue with their personal opinion, the first-person pronoun in heavy employ. News programs give me convoluted versions of a policy or event’s implications, but nothing of the actual policy or event itself. Above all, streams of programming have themes but not surprises. Lots of answers. Too few questions.

Ms Doogue raised the possibility (I think) of the ABC’s irrelevance. It’s the question that all media have had to face since the distribution of content was inverted. What used to be a limited, controlled flow of information and entertainment is now a dispersed, popular network that is both ubiquitous and constant. Technology allows people almost anywhere to view, read or hear almost anything: from live news like the Georgia grand jury’s indictment of Donald Trump to the video replay of all twenty minutes of the Matildas’ World Cup penalty shootout with France. Commercial aggregators like Apple and Netflix offer seemingly unlimited choices. Very soon algorithms will interpret your question, search the digital universe and present you with a composed briefing (which may be what News Corp sees as the future for “news”).

Former BBC director-general Mark Thompson, who was hired by the New York Times when it was mired in poor performance (and fixed it) and has now been picked to repair the ailing CNN, made a useful point recently. American television, he said, seemed to be stuck in the 1980s. With endless sources of opinion, what people really want is accurate and relevant news. Who’d have thought it?

Since the moment consumers began to find serious value in digital channels, the traditional media have been struggling — most often with their financial sustainability, but almost always with their direction and purpose. When the media most needed to revisit fundamentals, many leading players did the opposite — they chose the values that suited them.

Audience numbers are the traditional measure of media strength. Commercial media generally pursued large audiences to justify their advertising rates. The newspapers or broadcasters that captured the largest consistent audiences generally made the most money.

Digital media fractured that concept in two ways. Aggregators of audiences (Google, Meta) offered advertisers far bigger audiences than any incumbent — and did so at a fraction of the cost. Other digital arrivals (Netflix, YouTube) catered extremely well to particular interests and were able to commercialise that offering at a global level; driven by consumers, they turned media measurement on its head.

But much of the established media stuck with tradition and used raw, aggregate numbers to measure their performance. This is why a lot of news media gave away valuable content online, at least in the early years of the internet. More importantly, the measurement of digital traffic encouraged a trend towards crude preferences: by favouring content that drives traffic it promotes popularity over value. Commercial media that didn’t pursue inherent value struggled to get enough people to pay.

The logical endpoint for a content business chasing pure numbers is fairly obvious. Pornography, or its intellectual equivalent, gets eyeballs and doesn’t cost much. People like Tucker Carlson and Alan Jones — not to mention Rupert Murdoch — discovered this formula ages ago.

The ABC has a different problem. The people who pay for the ABC are taxpayers and the people who decide how much they pay are politicians. Why pay? Because Australians want and value a service that isn’t sustained by commercial means. That is, they want something that commercial providers don’t provide. So the ABC should have been better placed than commercial media to respond to a media environment driven more by value than by mass. Yet it seems to have fallen for the same error that its commercial counterparts did.

While ABC aggregate audiences are holding up, its own measures of value, still strong, are declining. But these data don’t tell the full story.

Digital media aggregated audiences but also disaggregated content creation. People who have common preferences and prejudices can stay in the lane they prefer. For a person interested in news, it’s bit like walking down a busy street and asking each person for an opinion. Or, for those who don’t like discordant views, like choosing only the news offered by one’s priest or football coach.

I would have expected the ABC to start dealing with the new environment by asking some very blunt questions. Like: why are we different? What is value for our constituents? How do we impose discipline on our work to deliver value to the people who pay for it?

Jeff Bezos was, I think, one of the first to align a media strategy closely with value. One of the interesting results, to my eyes, is that his Washington Post is much more about news — facts that inform — than its competitors are. Bezos measures everything, but his metrics are about value and how the people who pay judge value.

The ABC does a lot of things well, but it doesn’t do them consistently. I suspect the reason for that is the absence of discipline guided by a clarity about what its paying customers (taxpayers) value. A strong emphasis on news and facts, clearly presented, would overcome the natural tendency of traditional media towards celebrity thinking. (Seriously, do all those TV and radio folk really think people want their opinion on what the Reserve Bank does?)

The ABC could be more obviously bringing Australia into our homes. It could be more obviously filling gaps in the media. It could be asking really interesting questions — not gotcha questions — and providing really helpful information.

I fear the ABC will fail to win sustained support and resources because it didn’t ask the right questions about the new media environment. The main one being: what is value for Australian taxpayers? •

The post Asking the right questions about the ABC appeared first on Inside Story.

Can the tricky manoeuvre be executed successfully? Well, the experiment is under way, let’s put it that way. It is too early to tell.

Can older creatives even hope to discern the preferences of younger consumers? Can cultural institutions like the ABC still preside over broad-based platforms that avoid the trying-to-be-all-things-to-all-people trap — platforms that nevertheless offer satisfying and stimulating material to enough subgroups of citizens, in any one week, to justify their continued existence?

Pity the programmer or decision-maker in any creative outlet pitching ideas amid constant social media reactions and furious streaming competition. A publicly funded broadcaster’s challenge is especially tough. It must be distinctively different from commercial offerings, read the emerging culture acutely, and maintain (most) pre-existing standards — all despite constantly challenged budgets.

This is hard, hard work. In the life-cycle rhythms of the past, younger people weren’t attached to institutions like the ABC — or orchestras or newspapers, for that matter. But they tended to shift closer once mortgages and children arrived and households were formed.

But to glance at the current figures for under-forties viewing, say, the ABC’s 7pm TV news is to see vividly the demographic cliff that prompts such consternation within the broadcaster and among other traditional news outlets. More than 80 per cent of broadcast viewers for this service are fifty-five or older.

To my mind, though, the vital question is this: how should the ABC, rather than panic, react wisely to changing patterns of cultural life? Many younger people do still rely on the ABC’s digital news offerings, which collectively rank as the second-most-visited digital news outlets in Australia. But are they actually trying as a group to keep up with the news cycle the way older Australians once did? It’s not too long since the question could reliably be answered “yes,” but not now, or not in the same way.

So how are broadcasters around the world approaching similar shocks? If the recent European Broadcasting Union conference is any guide, then a lot of them are busily absorbed in the same quandary. The Danes distilled it into a few words: younger people are seeking more content, and older listeners spend more time listening.

Attendees created various “audience-needs states” to describe the drivers of media consumption: keeping me in the loop, helping me escape, keeping me company, broadening my horizons and helping me buy “social currency” (presumably to join in water-cooler conversations). As they concluded, you could hit two audience-needs states at once, but not easily three.

The Danes are looking at the gaps: where are needs being met and where not? The phenomenal growth of podcasting has been documented virtually everywhere (the BBC reported a 27 per cent rise in titles so far this year), and it was no surprise that true crime was the most popular genre — interestingly followed by psychology and climate.

Swedish radio is actively engaged in this expansion, setting up trans-functional teams to release new podcasts, and trading on their experience managing complex production and content. The Canadians, via their CBC network, are particularly active in developing audio resources.

Some of the standout podcasts offered fascinating insights. The Moth, which has prioritised people telling their own life stories over its successful ten-year life, emphasises this advice to its would-be participants: “Tell stories about your scars not your wounds.” Then it works with them to achieve just that.

Slow Burn, a Slate production, has achieved a phenomenal one hundred million downloads over its six-year lifespan. It is highly produced, and thus not cheap, and makes much use of archive material to animate recent historical events, including Watergate, the Bill Clinton impeachment, the move to the Iraq war, and the Rodney King/LA riots of 2021.

The News Agents is the star achiever of Britain’s newest kid on the block, Global Media & Entertainment. Backed by big money and using well-known ex-BBC talent including Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall, it has been downloaded a massive twenty-four million times over the past seven months (compared with BBC News’s eighty-five million over four years). Significantly, the company puts immense emphasis on strategically marketing their material via Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

In fact, one of the common strands that emerged at the conference was summarised nicely by Radio France people: produce less, distribute more. The need to spread good-quality content across younger people’s platforms was seen as critical.

Other interesting insights about changing cultural tastes came last month from the perceptive RedBridge group in Melbourne. In a nutshell, after talking to young consumers, the research shows they follow each other’s news choices. “In terms of how news is consumed now,” writes the company’s Alex Fein, “news items from major outlets are now divorced from their publication’s context — that is, almost no one is actively going to news sites and reading them as though they are digital analogues of newspapers.” She goes on:

Instead, news items are read by people in an entirely new context: through the validation of their social networks. People in their social networks will link to an article, thus conferring some (limited) legitimacy to the item on its own. And this is key: the item’s legitimacy is fast becoming less the product of the source publication and far more a product of who inside the social network has recommended it. Some, particularly older people, are still watching television news, but they are watching it sceptically.

Young people, Fein argues, are increasingly rejecting both the form and content of old-style news. They find much of it “not relevant to their lives” and see a lot of media as “a small group of people largely talking to themselves.” And they find the news unspeakably “depressing” and actively avoid it for their own mental health. But she does say that new media outfit Crooked Media in the United States — which promises to not “just focus on what’s broken, but what we can do to fix it” — has developed a model that shows a different approach is not only possible but can be done very profitably as well.

I don’t claim to have sampled all these possibilities, but surely this is material for the ABC to work with? What I do know is that the broadcaster’s employees are constantly being told that demographic cliffs pose an existential crisis for us — that the once-assumed ABC brand identification among the broad populace is dropping, that usage patterns are moving increasingly fast.

Naturally, this prompts questions about our purpose as a public broadcaster. Do we understand our audiences? Can we articulate the tone that must be striven for and the tone that must be avoided?

An intriguing public service metric has been developed within the European Broadcasting Union — a kind of public service algorithm — with points notionally assigned to elements of the production to determine its fit. The yardsticks are telling: variety in terms of depth and breadth; importance (or what listeners and viewers need to know); age appropriateness; topicality; quality; local versus global; distinctiveness; and locally relevant languages. It comes back to the irritate–alienate dilemma.

Those two verbs are mine, by the way, based on gut instinct and personal experience of big changes in the past that didn’t turn out as planned. The 1985 revamp that turned the ABC’s 7pm TV news into The National, starting at 6.30pm, aimed to recruit a bigger available audience earlier in the night and fulfil the dream of a much wider audience. What wasn’t anticipated were complaints from diehard ABC consumers arriving home from work too late to access the earlier timeslot and furious about the disruption to their established household habits.

We were fiddling with an institution that was important in people’s lives. They didn’t approve and said so very loudly. I was there, and it is seared into my memory. Whatever the cool analysis, the move backfired, even though it helped shake up ABC newsrooms. The main bulletin, such a shopwindow of ABC information-giving and prestige, moved back to 7pm a year later.

Tastes and habits have fundamentally altered since then, of course, and are changing as we speak. But The National’s fate encapsulates an exquisite dilemma well known to many advertisers and marketing types: how to refresh an established, even venerable, brand and attract newer consumers while not losing your regulars? Never be cavalier about existing customers, as one adman insisted to me.

So engagement is still there. But that sure-footed confidence about gaining, in any one week, a decent slice of broad-church Australian viewing has become more brittle.

In times of extraordinary volatility — around cultural values, technological change, emerging communities of new chums — the challenge surely lies in posing the right questions about what will last beyond taste-frenzies, and what offers depth and delight to a majority of the culture. This is hard creative work — a dose of humility never hurt either — but supremely worthwhile.

The respected community researcher Neer Korn, who has advised previous ABC boards, insists that the overwhelmingly important factor governing Australians’ attitudes towards the broadcaster is trust. We are a known factor, warts and all. He reiterated to me recently, notwithstanding all these changes I’ve outlined, that the importance of maintaining this trust — via our people, our overall approach — can’t be overstated.

Denial is no solution but neither is panic. And never forget Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” wisdom: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. •

The post Looking over the ABC’s demographic cliff appeared first on Inside Story.

Set up within the towering framework of the ABC, Radio Australia was, and remains, an institution with a lively multilingual culture of its own. Sometimes it has thrived and sometimes, especially in recent decades, it has struggled as political priorities and media fashions waxed and waned within the ABC and the wider world.

Phil Kafcaloudes, an accomplished journalist, author and media educator who hosted Radio Australia’s popular breakfast show for nine years, was commissioned by the ABC to write the service’s story for the corporation’s ninetieth-anniversary celebrations. The result is a nicely illustrated and comprehensively footnoted new book, Australia Calling, which uses the original name of the service for its title. (With appropriate good manners, Kafcaloudes acknowledges previous accounts of the Radio Australia story, by Peter Lucas in 1964 and Errol Hodge in 1995.)

The overseas service’s nadir came in 2014 after the election of the Abbott government. At the time, Inside Story’s Pacific correspondent Nic Maclellan described in devastating detail the impact in the region of the eighty redundancies brought on by the government’s decision to remove the Australia Network, a kind of TV counterpart to Radio Australia, from the ABC. The network had controversially been merged with key elements of Radio Australia to create ABC International.

Among the casualties was the legendary ABC broadcaster Sean Dorney, known and loved throughout the Pacific. Programs for Asia were axed, as was much specialist Pacific reporting, with English-language coverage to be sourced from the ABC’s general news department.

The ABC’s full-time team in the Pacific was reduced to a journalist in Port Moresby and another (if it counts) in New Zealand. Australia’s newspapers had already withdrawn their correspondents from the region, and online-only media hadn’t filled the gap. Where once, in 1948, Radio Australia had helped beam a signal to the moon, the countries of our own region now seemed even more remote.

Despite the steady erosion of the service over decades, though, Kafcaloudes’s book has a happy ending of sorts. Its final chapter, titled “Rebirth: Pivoting to the Pacific,” tells how Radio Australia benefited from the Morrison government’s “Pacific Step-Up,” launched in response to China’s campaign to build regional connections. Steps to rebuild Radio Australia’s capacities have since been enhanced by substantial new funding from the Albanese government.

When current affairs radio is at its most effective, it places listeners at the scene. Kafcaloudes tells of being on air when a listener in Timor-Leste called to tell of an assassination attempt on José Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmão. “Radio Australia instantly changed its scheduling to broadcast live for three hours so locals would know whether their leaders were still alive.”

But, as Kafcaloudes explains, “for all the good work, global connections and breaking news stories, the truth is, for many Australian politicians there was little electoral capacity in a service that a domestic audience did not hear.” Thus the abrupt funding reverses and the constant tinkering.

Former ABC journalist and manager Geoff Heriot describes how, during a challenging phase for the ABC about twenty-five years ago, managing director Brian Johns’s desire to defend the ABC meant that, “if necessary, you could cut off limbs.” And Radio Australia was the limb that often seemed most remote from the core.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Kafcaloudes says, the service “was often at or near the top of the polls as the world’s best.” Many listeners, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, testified to having learned English from listening to Radio Australia. Its popularity in Asia and the Pacific was boosted by the fact that it broadcast from a similar time zone, which meant its morning shows, for instance, were heard during listeners’ mornings. In 1968 alone, the station received 250,000 letters from people tuning in around the region.

For decades, broadcasts were via shortwave, the only way of covering vast distances at the time. But the ABC turned off that medium for good in 2017, so Radio Australia now communicates via twenty-four-hour FM stations across the Pacific and via satellite, live stream, on-demand audio, podcasts, the ABC Listen app, and Facebook and Twitter.

With new audiences emerging in different places, the geography of Radio Australia’s languages have changed too. As the use of French in the former colonies in Indochina declined, for instance, new French-speaking audiences developed in the Pacific colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

One of the continuities of Radio Australia is the quality and connectedness of its broadcasters. Most of them come from the countries to which they broadcast, and together they have evolved into a remarkable cadre who could and should be invited by policymakers and diplomats to help Australia steer and deepen its relations with our neighbours.

Kafcaloudes rightly stresses the importance of that first prewar step, when Robert Menzies, “a man who believed he was British to the bootstraps, despite being born and bred in country Victoria,” decided “Australians needed to speak to the world with their own voice.”

How best to do this has frequently been disputed. In a 1962 ministerial briefing, the Department of External Affairs argued that Radio Australia’s broadcasts “should not be noticeably at variance with the broad objectives of Australian foreign policy” — an instruction that John Gorton, the relevant minister, declined to issue publicly.

Tensions have inevitably resulted from the desire of the service’s funder, the federal government, to see its own policies and perceptions prioritised. Resisting such pressure has required greater stamina and skill at Radio Australia than at the ABC’s domestic services, which can count more readily on influential defenders.

Kafcaloudes says it was Mark Scott, who headed the ABC a dozen years ago, who linked Radio Australia with American academic/diplomat Joseph Nye’s idea of “soft power.” Then and now, this was a seductive phrase for politicians. It also became a familiar part of the case for restoring, consolidating or increasing funding, while underlining the familiar, nagging challenge for the station’s “content providers” of choosing between projecting that kind of power on Canberra’s behalf and dealing with stories that might well be perceived as “negative” for the Australian government.

Of course, the conventional public-interest answer to that dilemma is that fearless journalism is itself the ultimate expression of soft power by an open, democratic polity. But not everyone sees it that way.

The public broadcasting ethos of the station’s internationally sourced staff has meanwhile stayed impressively intact. Kafcaloudes introduces one of them at the end of each chapter, letting them speak directly of how they came to arrive at Radio Australia and their experiences working there.

Running Radio Australia has been complicated for decades by its being bundled, unbundled and bundled again with television services that have sometimes been run by the ABC and sometimes by commercial stations. Technologies have of course become fluid in recent years, freeing content from former constraints. So too has the badging — the service is now “ABC Radio Australia,” which morphs online into “ABC Pacific.”

Radio Australia continues to broadcast in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Khmer, French, Burmese and Tok Pisin (the Melanesian pidgin language spoken widely in PNG and readily understood in Vanuatu and, slightly less so, in Solomon Islands), as well as in English.

Dedicated, high-quality journalism remains the core constant of an institution whose story, chronicled so well by Kafcaloudes, parallels in many ways Australia’s on-again, off-again, on-again engagement with our region. •

Australia Calling: The ABC Radio Australia Story
By Phil Kafcaloudes | Tas Food Books | $34.95 | 224 pages

The post Speaking to the world appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all comes from ABC journalists with king-sized profiles and impressive CVs for whom you will never be sufficiently brave or bold, who will always want more from you. And when you are brave, according to Gaven Morris’s account of his time in the top job, you might not always tell them about it.

It’s just a month since Morris announced he was leaving both the job and the national broadcaster, after six years as the ABC’s director of news, analysis and investigations. His precise exit date, and his successor, have yet to be announced. His predecessor in the role, Kate Torney, also lasted six years, and Morris thinks that’s probably enough for anyone.

In an interview with Inside Story to mark his exit, he describes the job as relentless. “There are 1300 staff at ABC News. It’s a $200 million budget. The news cycle is twenty-four hours. You get really tired in a role like this.”

He is also, he says, not a “mind-the-shop kind of guy.” When he applied for the job he set out his ideas for change and asked not to be appointed if the board didn’t want to go in that direction. He wanted to prioritise digital transformation by bringing the ABC’s websites up to scratch as homes for the best journalism. He had already overseen the organisation’s shift towards continuous news, including the launch of the News 24 television channel, the pet project of the broadcaster’s managing director at the time, Mark Scott.

Although the road has been rocky, most would give Morris a tick on both those achievements. Much to the chagrin of Nine and News Corp, the ABC is now the number one news media website in the country, which is important to its continued claim on the taxpayer’s dollar. Website traffic is evenly spread across age groups, whereas the broadcast presence plays increasingly to children and retirees.

Morris’s internal critics concede this success. But they characterise him as more of a manager than a journalist’s journalist. They see change and platforms emphasised rather than content. But perhaps they don’t know the full story.

Six years is a long time — just how long is evident from all the controversies Morris has weathered. Shortly before he took up the top post, when he was still head of news content, there was the “burnt hands” controversy after the ABC aired asylum seekers’ claims that they had been mistreated by the navy. The ABC took five days to admit that its reporting could have been “more precise” and that it didn’t necessarily accept the asylum seekers’ claims.

Morris was only tangentially involved. The weight of the controversy fell on Torney and managing director Mark Scott. But he learned a lesson. “Taking too long” to resolve controversies has been a “recurring pattern,” he says. “Applying a little more triage to some of our dramas would have assisted us in not letting them get as big as they sometimes got.”

Then there was the filing cabinet full of cabinet documents sent to the ABC, only to be returned to the government after a few not particularly earth-shaking stories. There was the closing of the Drum opinion website, and the end of Lateline.

At times the organisation has seemed to be fighting internal battles as much as external ones. There was a bitter clash with former economics editor Emma Alberici, for example — something Morris says he is still not willing to discuss in detail.

More recently, during the controversies over successive Four Corners programs, some of the background briefing and leaking has come from inside the ABC, and against Morris. The delayed screening of a report on prime minister Scott Morrison’s QAnon-following friend, for example, was attributed to alleged political interference — something that Morris denies outright.

All news organisations experience battles between managers and strong-willed journalists, he says. “I think there’s something good about that creative tension… The difference with the ABC is almost every word of it plays out publicly in a way that would never happen at any of the commercial broadcasters or any of the newspaper organisations.”

He goes on: “I like being straight up and honest with people. But when that then gets played out immediately in a leak to a newspaper or a website, it makes you much more reticent than you might otherwise have been. That’s one of the real difficult parts of the ABC culture. I’ve always struggled with that.”

He never doubted the QAnon program would go to air, but the lesson from the burnt hands controversy, and others, is that if a story runs into trouble it is nearly always because it needed a bit more work and a bit more time. The QAnon story needed more of both, and then he approved it.

Then there’s the constant rumble surrounding Q&A, and more recently Four Corners’s “Inside the Canberra Bubble” report, followed by the rape allegations against then attorney-general Christian Porter, which Porter vigorously denies.

Morris has recruited leading political journalists David Speers and Laura Tingle and seasoned investigative journalist John Lyons, and overseen an increase in diversity in the newsroom. He says his team, and its capacity to reflect a broader spectrum of Australian experience, is the thing of which he is most proud.

Reflecting on the six years, Morris is clear about when the organisation was most at risk, and that was during the two and a half years from mid 2016 when Justin Milne was chairman and Michelle Guthrie the managing director.

Guthrie was sacked by the board in 2018, and Milne was forced to resign shortly afterwards after Guthrie revealed he had pressured her to sack journalists — specifically Alberici and political editor Andrew Probyn — because they were supposedly “hated” by the government. Milne was widely known to be a friend of then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Morris says the problems were deeper and of longer standing than the pressure concerning Alberici and Probyn. A “subtle” but implacable pressure was applied over many months.

“When Turnbull came out and said, ‘Well, I’ve never phoned Gaven Morris,’ he’s right about that. I didn’t get phone calls from Turnbull, but what I would notice is that other people would get phone calls that were very similar to the ones I was getting from other quarters… So the [Canberra] bureau would get a phone call from somebody. I would get a phone call from somebody else. Michelle [Guthrie] would get a phone call from somebody else.”

The message was clear, he says. “We’re all getting different phone calls, and the people involved would all be able to say that they never talked to so-and-so. But on a number of occasions, it was clear to me what was happening. It was quite a dangerous time in terms of the editorial independence of the ABC because of the different characters involved and the dynamic that was at hand.”

Morris resists my several attempts to get him to identify these callers. Board members, cabinet ministers or others? He apologises for “speaking in tongues.”

He also says that sometimes, when asked to do something he disagreed with during that time, he would “just put it in the bottom drawer and ignore it… Quite often someone would come back quite angry because I hadn’t done it. And I would say well, frankly, that’s my choice, and that’s what I’ve chosen to do.

“I thought, ‘I either leave or I’ve just got to put my shell on and sort of trudge on.’ I thought, ‘If my only job in doing this role at this time is to try to protect the people in the news division and hope that somehow this gets sorted out down the track, then I’ll hang on.’ If I left, I didn’t know what would happen behind me, even though at times in that period I really didn’t want to be here anymore.”

When the controversy over Milne’s behaviour broke, some reporters were “quite angry” with Morris for not having told them about the pressure. But he saw his role as “taking the arrows into my own body. They should not know. There should be no question of them changing a story because of that pressure, so I kept it from them and I have no regrets about that.”

He credits Guthrie with seeing through a necessary restructure of the organisation around genres rather than platforms. “She did that with great verve and great passion, and it needed to be done.” Her departure was “brutal,” he says.

Morris was brought back to the ABC from Al Jazeera to drive the move to continuous news and launch the News 24 channel, all on a tiny budget. He soon realised it would be the leanest and most underfunded news channel on the planet.

The problems were exacerbated when Julia Gillard called an early election in 2010 after overthrowing Kevin Rudd. Scott had promised the new channel would be launched in time to report the campaign, and the early date meant the channel was deprived of three months of practice and dry runs.

On day two of the campaign came the awkward and iconic encounter between Gillard and Rudd in which they were purported to have made up but could hardly look at each other. “We totally failed,” says Morris. “We couldn’t get camera to it. We couldn’t get a live signal out of it, and it was the picture of the day. And, you know, it was our first real major flop for the news channel, and it was fairly dispiriting.”

Other missteps followed. “I often went home feeling gutted and deflated because it wasn’t as good as it needed to be in the beginning, and we were getting pilloried everywhere. People were working so hard and I wanted it to improve. We had live trucks, but no live truck operators. We had technology that wasn’t built for doing live broadcasting… Everybody was learning on the hop.”

The new service was also a “pretty violent revolution” in the culture of the ABC, and plenty of “old salts” among the reporters were expecting it to fail. There were fears that quality would be undermined by the pressure for continuous content.

Nobody now doubts that it needed to be done, says Morris — and the 2019–20 bushfire coverage, bringing together all the parts of the ABC, was as good as any continuous news in the world. “It might have taken us ten years to reach Nirvana, but it was worth the investment.”

With most of Morris’s time in the top job dogged by successive cutbacks in funding after the relative plenty of the Scott years, unpopular decisions were inevitable. He didn’t grieve the Drum, which he felt was simply adding to the ubiquity of opinion. But the decision to axe Lateline, with its shrinking but rusted-on audience of political tragics, was emotionally difficult.

“The impossible task of the ABC is not starting new things but working out how to resource them when your funding is falling.” Audience research showed that Lateline watchers also watched 7.30: in other words, they were being served twice, while in Morris’s view the ABC was under-resourcing investigative journalism. The funding was reallocated to a dedicated investigative unit, producing cross-platform content.

As to current controversies, he rejects the rumble from the government and its fellow travellers in News Corp that the ABC, and Four Corners in particular, has become a haven for “activist” journalism. He signed off on the recent controversial programs and has no regrets.

He also continues to defend the ABC’s three-part documentary on the Luna Park fire, Exposed, despite its being criticised — as well as praised — by an independent review (which I discussed here). Exposed was “an extraordinary achievement,” he says; and while the review should be “reflected on” it is “not the law.”

ABC journalists’ use of social media — and particularly Four Corners reporter Louise Milligan’s tweets about MPs Andrew Laming and Christian Porter — has also been controversial. The ABC has had a code of conduct that governs social media use for some time, so why were reporters allowed to tweet away, sometimes in apparent breach?

Morris says what was needed were the “right mechanisms” — upgraded advice and guidelines now put in place by managing director David Anderson. While Mark Scott encouraged journalists to use the then-new platforms of Facebook and Twitter, Morris says that has changed, and that reporters “are not required to be on social media for their work… so don’t bother unless you want to personally, in which case it’s your own personal realm.”

He is deeply disillusioned with social media, which has carried claims that he is a Liberal Party stooge, including false theories that he is related to Grahame Morris, John Howard’s former chief of staff. “It doesn’t reflect any sort of rational or fair-minded or even intelligent conversation very much anymore… Unfortunately, it’s one of the innovations of the digital age that hasn’t aged well.”

If Morris has a clear plan after he finishes up, he isn’t detailing it, talking about possible consultancy work. What about regrets?

“I am not a regrets kind of guy,” he says, but he regards one issue as “still a work in progress.” It is the quest to overcome the worldview of most journalists and better reflect the views of the Australian population. This is not a matter of left–right bias, he says. That is not how most Australians think. The ABC should spend less time worrying about the “noise” that comes from the Australian and its News Corp stablemates.

Rather, he worries whether the ABC tunes in to the breadth of experience and views of the audience — working-class people, people living with a disability, people most journalists never meet. He worries, for example, about whether the organisation adequately reflected the views of the 30 per cent of Australians who voted “no” in the marriage equality referendum. “I’m not talking about religious zealots. I’m talking about genuine Australians who have a point of view that’s different to the 70 per cent. Are we at least making sure that is reflected? I don’t necessarily think we struck that right.”

Otherwise, he thinks he is leaving the organisation on a high. David Anderson has “restored order” after the Guthrie–Milne trauma. The ABC is once again “confident, certain of its mission. Morale is good. Resources are being managed well, good programs are being made. It didn’t have to turn out like that, but it has.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Taking the arrows appeared first on Inside Story.

It has picked at sores that have been festering for almost forty years: sores created by the endemic corruption in New South Wales in the 1980s, the unresolved allegations in the so-called “Age tapes” and the record of Neville Wran’s Labor government. As for the present and the future, Exposed represents a small tragedy within the larger tragedy of the 1979 fire in the ghost train at Sydney’s Luna Park, in which six people died.

In my view, Exposed includes some of the best Australian television journalism of recent times. Yet it is being pilloried for faults in the final twenty minutes of its third episode, where the program details, and in places can be understood to be endorsing, an unsubstantiated allegation of corruption against Neville Wran.

The suggestion is that Wran interfered to help crime boss Abe Saffron gain control of the Luna Park site in the wake of arson. Spoiler alert here: I almost entirely agree with the report of the independent editorial review of the program ordered by the ABC board in response to complaints, which was conducted by peerless investigative journalist Chris Masters, a veteran of reporting on NSW corruption, and respected academic Rodney Tiffen.

Masters and Tiffen describe the program as an “outstanding achievement” that used deep, original and rigorous research to make a convincing case that the fire was probably arson, that the original investigation was perverted by corrupt police, and that Saffron may have been involved.

But when it comes to the allegation that Wran was friendly with Saffron and may have intervened on his behalf, Masters and Tiffen believe parts of the program are “misleading” and its references to political corruption “vague, anonymous, and unhelpful.” One of their terms of reference was to ask whether the program “demonstrated open-mindedness to alternative interpretations of events and issues,” and on this they clearly found it wanting.

Let’s talk about the old sores first. Prominent in public life today — and among the program’s most trenchant critics — are people who built their early careers during the decade, 1976–86, in which Neville Wran was premier of New South Wales. They are deeply invested in how history judges those times.

Journalists, too, put their careers on the line back then. Watergate was still a recent memory, and it was much easier to see journalism as an honourable, even heroic profession.

I was a junior journalist in the Age newsroom when Bob Bottom, a journalistic refugee from Sydney, arrived in 1984 in a cloud of glamour, righteousness and zealotry. He carried with him what became known as the Age tapes, which were alleged to contain evidence of corrupt activity by High Court judge Lionel Murphy. That the Age published this material — drawn from illegal phone intercepts by NSW police — was controversial at the time and remains so.

I remember the drunken post-mortems and the anguish when the parliamentary inquiry into allegations of misbehaviour by Murphy — which also involved allegations about Wran — was closed down because of Murphy’s terminal cancer. The records of the investigation were sealed for thirty years, and released in 2017.

It is hard, now, to convey the atmosphere of those times. A raft of royal commissions and corruption inquiries in six states in the 1980s and early 90s, many prompted by excellent journalism (much by Chris Masters) exposed corruption within state governments and aired allegations of federal significance. But among some of the journalists, the zeal was sometimes excessive, and the shades of grey too often depicted as black and white.

A fuller explanation of the times, and what can and can’t be said about the Wran government and corruption, is in an essay by Rodney Tiffen published by Inside Story earlier this week, given extra punch because of its author’s work on the ABC review.

Tiffen gives little comfort to Wran’s boosters and defenders, who have been among the program’s chief critics. While confirming that there is “no persuasive evidence” that Wran was corrupt in the sense of personal financial gain, he also lays out how corruption grew on Wran’s watch, and how he used government patronage for political advantage. In particular, Wran did favours for media barons — Rupert Murdoch chief among them. Tiffen sees Wran as a transitional figure between the rampant and established corruption of his predecessor, Robert Askin, and the reforms of the 1990s, including the creation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

The issues here — the slippery connections between the unscrupulous use of power for political advantage, the importance of ICAC, the enmeshment of media with government and power, and journalists’ roles on both sides of the corruption fight — could hardly be more relevant to our own times.

So much for the currents and the shadows. What of the program itself?

One of the chief critics of the ABC and Exposed has been Troy Bramston, a senior writer with the Australian. Bramston, in my view, makes some fair points but over-eggs his pudding. He has said the Luna Park fire was probably caused by accident rather than arson. How he can feel so secure in that conclusion after viewing episode two of Exposed is beyond me. Here, Bramston betrays biases and blind spots of his own.

Bramston and others have also suggested that the media — and the ABC in particular — should not report unsubstantiated allegations, including the allegations against Wran. I think that’s ridiculous. As the ABC editorial policies say, and surely all journalists would assert, publishing allegations “in the public interest is a core function of the media in a free society.” But of course it should be done after careful judgement, with context, clarity and balance.

The claim that the ABC should not have broadcast the allegation against Wran is particularly weird because it was already public. It can be found in the records of the parliamentary inquiry released in 2017, where it features as “Allegation 28.” It rested on police officers’ memories of what was contained in since-destroyed transcripts of the Age tapes. Exposed found one of those officers, Paul Egge, and interviewed him, and he stood by his recollection.

When the documents, including Allegation 28, were released in 2017, virtually all media outlets, including the Australian, reported them, despite the fact that they were untested allegations. Quite right too. This was of historical significance. It would have been wrong for Exposed not to deal with this material.

On Tuesday this week, the chief reporter on Exposed, Caro Meldrum-Hanna, tweeted screen shots of some of this coverage. “This morning,” she wrote, “I’m looking forward to an avalanche of complaints about all the previous coverage by all other media outlets who reported the exact same allegation & Paul Egge’s evidence (but without contemporary interviews with him or other relevant police and judicial witnesses).”

She has a point, but there is a difference between contemporaneous reportage of a document release and the way Exposed wove those same allegations into its narrative. The core problem with those last twenty minutes of Exposed, in my view, is not the material that was run but rather that more needed to be added. The allegation needed clearer signposting and contextualisation.

The suggested narrative has holes in it. It isn’t clear how Abe Saffron benefited from the Luna Park lease — if he did. There is no firm evidence that Wran intervened in the tender process, and some evidence that goes the other way. The allegation that Wran was “pally” with Saffron rests on the word of just one witness without corroboration. These things could and should have been clearly stated, perhaps in the conversations between the reporters that are used throughout Exposed as a narrative device.

A key graphic, screened twice in those final twenty minutes, depicts the substance of Allegation 28 as a hard red line linking Saffron and Wran. But even if the transcript Egge remembers still existed and the ABC had a copy, it would still amount to hearsay evidence — what others were saying about Wran — rather than direct evidence.

All these things should have been more clearly declared in the program. Other points of view could have been included — perhaps from some of the former ministers and staffers who have been among Exposed’s critics. Other material in the Age tapes that suggests Wran wasn’t corrupt could have been mentioned.

The ABC claims the program was not adopting the allegation against Wran, merely reporting it. And it is true that the crucial passage is littered with the word “allegation.” But other material pulls against this, including highly suggestive yet evidence-free comments from interview subjects, such as “there must have been something in it for Wran.”

As Tiffen and Masters conclude, “The series offers a penetrating and precise account of police corruption, judicial shortcomings and probes behind the façade of commercial interests. In contrast, its references to political corruption remain vague, anonymous, and unhelpful… The cumulative effect… left the reviewers with a strong impression the program concluded Wran was complicit… The program makers have not succeeded in framing a conclusion that plainly stated their position.”

The tragedy is that all these things could have been fixed with relatively small changes. Had that been done, Exposed would probably still have been attacked, but it would have been entirely defensible.

And so we come to another shadow on the present. I don’t blame the program makers for the muddiness and the overreach. Anyone who has worked for years on an investigation like this grows too close to the material, and then defensive of it. That is why the ABC has its rigorous processes of upward referral, and program review and sign-off.

In this case, in the case of those last twenty minutes, those processes failed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. But I nevertheless find it hard to believe that these issues were invisible to the executives who would have reviewed the content.

Add to this failure an unimpressive appearance before Senate estimates by ABC managing director David Anderson and editorial director Craig McMurtrie, in which McMurtrie suggested that the allegation against Wran didn’t need to be backed up more thoroughly because it was not the focus of the series.

And add to that the way the ABC dealt with the Masters and Tiffen report. First, the corporate communications team released ABC management’s response selectively: to the Nine newspapers and the Guardian, as I understand it, but not to the Australian, which had done most reporting on the affair. And then it only released the Masters–Tiffen report itself, quietly, about twenty hours later.

This was a classic spin manoeuvre by the ABC: getting your own version out there first to try to frame the coverage. We expect it of politicians but not of a publicly funded media organisation.

Having said all that, I suspect the legacy of Exposed will not be the controversy about its final minutes. The coroner has indicated a new inquest may be held as the result of evidence in the program. Exposed certainly makes a compelling case that one is needed. If that happens, this is what Exposed will be chiefly remembered for.

Other sores will continue to fester, though. The lesson here is that failing to combat allegations of corruption — both in the specific, criminal sense and in the broader political sense — is a flaw with generational longevity. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The premier, the crime boss and the ABC appeared first on Inside Story.

The most glaring example is the lack of systematic action on climate change. Australia drags the chain on emissions reduction and continues to punt on energy-intensive exports with a dwindling customer base. A price on carbon wouldn’t have solved all our climate challenges, but it would have left us better placed than we are now.

The failure to rein in house prices is another case in point. The tax system has helped turn housing into a speculative asset, pushing funds into property rather than productive sectors of the economy, driving household debt to spectacular levels, and ramping up inequality. Again, reforming the tax treatment of residential property would hardly solve all our housing woes, but it would ameliorate some of the real estate boom’s worst effects.

In a new essay in Monash University Publishing’s “In the National Interest” series, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen argue that carbon pricing and property tax reform have become “pariah policies.” Despite evidence that they would have a net positive impact on Australian society, these measures have become untouchable. Events bolster their case: as we gear up for a federal election, Labor has walked away from its modest reforms to negative gearing and capital gains, and the phrases “carbon price” and “emissions trading” are banned from its political lexicon.

But, Errington and van Onselen argue, weak opposition means poor government: “The progressive side of the two-party divide is too inept to apply pressure to the conservative side, meaning conservatives stay in government without lifting their game.”

The title of their short book is Who Dares Loses. If this bleak declaration is true, then ambitious policy proposals are a recipe for electoral defeat, which appears to be the conclusion Labor has drawn from its loss in 2019. The flip side is that winners aren’t reformers. Having achieved office, governments avoid risking political capital to change society for the better.

Errington and van Onselen set out to “selectively challenge the conventional wisdom” by arguing the case for several “pariah policies,” including a universal basic income, the reintroduction of estate duties, a tax on the family home, a price on carbon, a levy on sugar, and the commercialisation of the ABC. Some of their arguments are convincing, others less so.

The case for a levy on sugar is strong. It would induce manufacturers to produce healthier food and encourage consumers to eat it, reducing the burden of diseases like diabetes and raising extra health dollars to boot. The idea that education campaigns and better labelling can drive this much-needed behavioural change was debunked long ago.

By contrast, the case for putting ads on the ABC is thin. Bizarrely, the authors propose this as a way of countering the decline of quality journalism in Australia. Their argument runs as follows: having lost valuable revenue streams like classified ads, commercial media have cut their newsrooms to the bone; as a result, subsidies for investigative reporting and quality debate must now “reach beyond the current public broadcasters.” So far so good — the case for funding more public interest journalism is strong. But their conclusion — that the ABC, like SBS, “will have to generate more of its own revenue” — is a non sequitur.

Are budget constraints so great that we can only increase funding in one area by reducing it in another? Believing that would be inconsistent with Errington and van Onselen’s support for a universal basic income, at an estimated $125 billion annual cost they claim “isn’t quite as eye-watering” as it may have seemed before JobKeeper.

In order to get more of the public interest journalism and investigative reporting that the ABC still does well, they want to make the ABC more like the commercial media. With the ABC competing for ads, they say, the other networks “would have a market incentive to lift their standard of news coverage, in a bid to steal ABC viewers and their lucrative advertisers.”

The reverse scenario is far more likely — the ABC would move downmarket as it sought to peel advertising dollars away from its (more) commercial rivals. And if it succeeded, the government would quickly cut public funding accordingly.

The “pariah policies” in Who Dares Loses overlap significantly with the reforms identified by the former chief executive of Grattan Institute, John Daley, in his recent report, Gridlock. Daley identifies carbon pricing, the tax treatment of housing, and sugar taxes as areas where government action has stalled. (He doesn’t mention commercialising the ABC.) Other initiatives consigned to the too-hard basket include congestion charging on roads, raising the pension age, introducing an effective mining resource rent tax, broadening (or increasing) the GST and lifting unemployment benefits.

Gridlock sets out to answer three questions. To the first — are twenty-first-century governments more reform-averse than their predecessors? — Daley’s answer is an emphatic yes. The 1980s and 1990s under Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and, initially at least, John Howard were “golden years” for reform. We might argue about the relative merits of measures like floating the dollar, cutting tariffs, deregulating the banks, introducing compulsory superannuation, imposing the GST, and privatising Telstra, Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank, but it is hard to dispute Daley’s contention that recent governments have been far less ambitious.

Daley’s second, more difficult, question is why are contemporary governments so timid? He identifies three obstacles that seem to be stopping governments from tackling major reforms: the lack of popular support for particular changes; the power of the “shibboleths” that mark out loyalties within parties or factions; and the opposition of powerful interest groups. The size of the required budget investment can also be a barrier, but Daley dismisses as relatively insignificant two of the most oft-cited roadblocks — the Senate and the messy division of responsibilities between the Canberra and the states.

But these obstacles aren’t new. The GST was deeply unpopular, but Howard risked electoral defeat to go ahead anyway. Privatising the Commonwealth Bank contradicted Labor shibboleths, but Hawke and Keating pressed on regardless. Vested interests vigorously opposed native title legislation, but it was still steered through parliament.

What’s different today? The glib response is that we’ve stopped electing politicians willing to push through obstacles in the belief that the change is worth the fight. As we contemplate an unedifying electoral contest between “ScoMo” and “Albo,” it’s easy to believe that current leaders don’t measure up to leaders past. That might be an emotionally satisfying answer, but it leaves us hoping forlornly that someone better will eventually turn up.

Deeper answers lie in structural economic and social changes. The echo chamber of social media has driven polarisation and division. The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the professionalisation of politics mean policies are more likely to be shaped by polling and focus groups than by evidence. The shifting and shrinking bases of the major political parties have reinforced polarisation.

Meanwhile, the hollowing out of the public service, the rising power of political staffers and the outsourcing of advice to corporate consultancies have weakened governments’ capacity to generate and implement good ideas. And the “revolving door” that turns a ministerial adviser into a “government relations” professional has picked up pace, as has the “golden escalator” from ministerial portfolio to corporate board or strategic advisory role.

Daley’s third question is obvious: what is to be done? If we want more ambitious, reform-minded leaders, we need to change the system that supports the current epidemic of policy timidity. “Institutional changes to ministerial adviser roles, to processes for appointing and dismissing senior public servants, to ministerial influence over government contracts and grants, and to controls over political donations, campaign finance, lobbying, and post-politics careers would all help to break the gridlock in policy reform,” he writes.

Errington and van Onselen recommend similar changes, and throw in a shift to proportional representation. If New Zealand can change its electoral system, why can’t we? The catch, as always, is that the people we need to fix these problems are a big part of the problem. As Daley says, the institutional changes he proposes “are themselves an example of blocked policy reform.” If our political caste can’t manage to abolish franking credits, let alone create a federal corruption commission, then the chances of substantial systemic reform appear slim.

Daley puts his hope in more independent MPs getting elected to parliament and using the balance of power to force systemic change. It’s hardly a quick fix, but it chimes with the fact that the reform highlights of the past two decades — including the (shortlived) carbon pricing mechanism, the NDIS, the Gonski school funding scheme, and plain-paper cigarettes packaging — mostly came when Julia Gillard was leading a government reliant on crossbench MPs.

Daley’s conclusion suggests the answer lies in getting back to the basics of political organisation at the local level: engaging citizens, listening to their concerns, and involving them in developing campaigns and policies. This is the nuts-and-bolts work that helped the campaign for marriage equality succeed. It is the kind of community organising that elected independent Cathy McGowan in the formerly safe Liberal seat of Indi in 2013, and enabled Helen Haines to succeed her in 2019.

In other words, we need to build democracy from the bottom up, not suffer it from the top down. Electing more independents to parliament seems like a good place to start. •

The post Good ideas going nowhere appeared first on Inside Story.

The fear was that the government would appoint ideologues with a brief to punish the organisation. Instead, two out of the three newcomers — former News Corp executive Peter Tonagh and former Channel 7 Perth managing director Mario D’Orazio — are unquestionably creditable appointments.

The question mark is over the third, IT specialist and serial board director Fiona Balfour. She is the “captain’s pick” of communications minister Paul Fletcher, and is said to be his long-term friend and ally. “She will be his eyes and ears on the board,” one ABC insider said this week. But this person admitted to having never met Balfour. She will be under scrutiny, and judged on her record.

So, why the cynicism and foreboding, and why the relatively benign reaction?

The foreboding reflected the fact that relations between the ABC and the government could hardly be worse, with the Christian Porter defamation case before the courts and the government still smarting over the Four Corners “Inside the Canberra Bubble” report, which revealed education minister Alan Tudge’s extramarital affair.

I understand that the ABC wasn’t told the appointments were imminent — or who was on the list — until a few hours before the public announcement. This seems like a calculated snub by Fletcher, particularly given that ABC chair Ita Buttrose protested only a couple of weeks ago about not being consulted.

The government’s lack of regard for the ABC is also evident in the fact that the appointments came months after the departure of the people they replace. The board has been seriously under-strength in the meantime.

As for the cynicism, that has a longer history.

For decades, both Labor and Coalition governments have stacked the ABC board with their political friends. Until the Howard government took office, though, these allies usually also had useful qualifications.

Under Howard, the board appointment process became nastier, more ideological and increasingly damaging. Board positions were handed out like purple hearts for perceived courage in the culture wars.

Thus, we had Ron Brunton, the anthropologist who had attacked the testimony of Aboriginal women protecting a sacred site during the Hindmarsh Island affair; Quadrant editor and frontier war sceptic Keith Windschuttle; Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger; and News Corp columnist and ABC critic Janet Albrechtsen — with only the latter having any relevant experience.

The Rudd government tried to clean things up by introducing an arm’s-length process for ABC and SBS board appointments, under which an expert nomination panel assessed the applicants and delivered a list of recommended appointees to the minister. This worked moderately well under Labor, but when the Coalition again took office the process was progressively trashed.

First, the new government nobbled the four-member panel, appointing Albrechtsen and former Liberal minister Neil Brown. As the Australia Institute observed in a report on the process, both were “highly questionable appointments.”

Not satisfied with that, the communications minister at the time, Mitch Fifield, took to ignoring the panel, picking a succession of people it hadn’t recommended and in some cases who hadn’t even applied for the position. These “captain’s picks” included Vanessa Guthrie, Donny Walford and lawyer and investment banker Joseph Gersh, who is still on the board.

Guthrie was best known as chair of the Minerals Council of Australia and an outspoken advocate for the coal industry. Walford was a South Australian company director with no media experience, and hadn’t applied to be an ABC director. But the real cost of this abuse of process was the loss to the broadcaster of the better-qualified people who had been recommended by the nomination panel but passed over by the minister.

After a couple of rounds of this tomfoolery, good people became understandably reluctant to apply. Why would they subject themselves to a gruelling selection process when, even if they got to the top of the pile, it meant nothing?

Prime minister Scott Morrison continued this pattern by appointing Ita Buttrose as chair of the ABC even though she hadn’t applied for the job. The independent panel had recommended former Fairfax Media chief executive Greg Hywood, former News Corp chief executive Kim Williams and senior lawyer Ian Robertson, the national managing partner of Holding Redlich.

Morrison declared that he trusted Ita and Australians trusted Ita. (Nobody has asked him in recent times if he still feels that way.)

Many — including me — agreed that Buttrose was at least as good and probably a better pick than the shortlisted men. Her fierce defence of the ABC since her appointment proves she was not compromised by the manner of her appointment. But the lack of proper process still matters. Why, if Morrison wanted her, did he not encourage her to apply and go through the proper procedure?

By now the arm’s length process had become a bad joke. Yet,  quietly, the independent panel was being cleaned and smartened up. It now comprises three people, all of them suitable and none of them ideologues.

The chair is Sally Pitkin, who also chairs the Super Retail Group. Helen Williams, a former Australian Public Service commissioner, has been a member since 2017 and was recently reappointed. The newest member is journalist and Australian National University professor Mark Kenny, who joined in May 2019.

Which brings us to this week’s much-anticipated and better-than-expected appointments: Peter Tonagh, Mario D’Orazio and Fiona Balfour.

Some may be worried by Tonagh’s News Corp background, but this would be to misunderstand the politics of that most tribal of organisations. Tonagh was not a Murdoch man so much as a Kim Williams man — Williams being the chief executive who quickly ran afoul of News Corp’s old editors’ culture after Rupert appointed him to head the company. Tonagh survived but didn’t particularly prosper once Williams was forced out.

Since he left News Corp in 2018, Tonagh has led the consortium that revived Australian Associated Press, which News Corp tried to kill. He has also invested in media startups including the Squiz, a daily digital update of Australian politics, news and current affairs, and Inkl, which compiles news from different publishers across the world under one subscription plan.

In 2018 Tonagh also led the latest in the perennial efficiency reviews of the ABC. The result was an intelligent and nuanced report that rejected the idea that the ABC should save money by adopting a Sky News bargain-basement model of news reporting, with rip-and-read bulletins and a heavy reliance on televising stage-managed media events.

Tonagh argued that the ABC, with its curated shows, analysis and charter-mandated presentation of diverse points of view, needed proper and reliable funding to do its job well. He recommended that it and SBS refocus on charter activities, which would involve less lifestyle journalism at the ABC. He sensibly recommended that the ABC funding cycle be shifted from three years to ten, which would enable better planning and remove the broadcaster from the electoral cycle and the pressures generated by any controversies. (If only that recommendation had been adopted!) In other words, Tonagh is well qualified, well regarded and no Murdoch patsy, and understands the ABC, even if insiders don’t agree with all his conclusions.

D’Orazio, the other appointee recommended by the independent panel, has been a journalist, making him the only board member apart from Buttrose and staff-elected director Jane Connors with reporting experience. He was managing director of Channel 7 Perth for seven years until his retirement in 2019, and also has experience in public sector and cultural organisations. He chaired Western Australia’s contemporary dance company, Co3, was a director of WA Opera and has been on the board of the Australia Council.

D’Orazio is smiled on by the government. In 2019, Fletcher and then finance minister Mathias Cormann appointed him to the board of Australia Post, where he has recently been caught up in the controversy over the sacking of chief executive Christine Holgate. According to Holgate, he is a friend of Cormann’s and, with the rest of the board, was considering privatisation plans for parts of Australia Post, but aspects of Holgate’s account are disputed.

Finally, there is Fiona Balfour. She was not recommended by the independent panel and it is not known whether she applied for the job. She has no media or public sector experience, but she does have an impressive CV, with stints as chief information officer of both Qantas and Telstra and wide board experience.

Whom did we miss out on because of her appointment? We know that award-winning television producer, broadcast executive and journalist Anita Jacoby was in the mix. There would have been others as well. And which skills and experience are still missing from the board? What might Buttrose have asked for, had either the government or the independent panel consulted her?

For several years now, no one other than managing director David Anderson and staff-elected director Connors has had public broadcasting experience. The board is underweight in public and community sector experience more broadly. It remains light on journalistic experience, and overweight with conventional commercial corporate board experience. It lacks anyone with a practitioner’s understanding of the arts, science or academia.

In other words, a lot is still wrong with the ABC board. The legacy of previous politically motivated appointments has not yet washed out.

Nevertheless, there is nothing in the current crop that suggests deliberate government vandalism. And in the current context, that is a mercy for which we should be grateful. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Good news week appeared first on Inside Story.

In Victoria, we had the Daily Dan — premier Dan Andrews’s marathon 120 days of answer-all-questions media conferences, some of them lasting more than two hours. No matter how aggressively journalists asked their questions, Andrews never lost control. Their aim was to rattle the premier’s cage and provoke a grab for the television news, but they were mostly props in the Dan Andrews show. His power was undisturbed.

Meanwhile in Canberra, prime minister Scott Morrison stuck to normal methods of media management, holding his press conferences in front of an open door so he could leave at a moment of his choosing. He wasn’t held to account either — among other things, for the failures in aged care that led to so many Covid-19 deaths.

If you care about the role of a free media in a democracy, it was all very dispiriting.

But then something else started going on. Since November last year, when Four Corners’s “Inside the Canberra Bubble” went to air, we’ve seen a different kind of journalistic work being done. It is uncertain and uncomfortable because it is part of a paradigm shift in society and in journalistic practice.

We can see the change in the difference between the treatment of rape allegations against attorney-general Christian Porter and the coverage of allegations against Labor leader Bill Shorten a decade ago. The two cases aren’t directly comparable, of course: Shorten was being investigated by police at the time, and most of the media let that process play out. The police decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

If those allegations were made today, journalists would undoubtedly call for Shorten to stand aside until the investigation was complete. Porter faces no such investigation, which is one reason why the media won’t let it go.

We are watching a new field of journalism opening up within the media’s traditional endeavour of exploring alleged abuse of power. Almost everything about it is uncomfortable and unpredictable, with complicated and uncertain ethical boundaries. These dilemmas are being worked out through practice, and in interactions largely out of the public eye.

Meanwhile, an examination of recent journalistic history tells us a lot about the challenges of journalism — in particular, the impact of defamation law on what the public gets to hear and the responses politicians get away with. With this in mind, we can see the hole in the middle of last November’s Four Corners report. Louise Milligan knew about the rape allegations against Christian Porter but was unable to air them for legal reasons.

As a result, the program felt thin. It revealed a consensual affair involving human services minister Alan Tudge and staffer Rachelle Miller. Porter was accused of a longstanding pattern of misogynistic behaviour, and of having canoodled with a young female staffer in a public bar. These seemed like slim pickings, and prime minister Scott Morrison responded by suggesting that the Australian public understood “human failings.”

With the benefit of hindsight, that program takes on new meaning. Milligan referred to women who appear to have been unwilling to speak publicly. She referred to Porter’s time as a part-time lecturer at the University of Western Australia, with former students describing “incidents of inappropriate behaviour” including “sexualised comments about female students and a gratuitous focus on violent and sexually graphic material in the legal cases he taught.”

And then there was the strange, almost strangled, exchange with senator Sarah Hanson-Young about her dealings with a “pretty distressed young woman” who was talking about Christian Porter. “She told me that she’d found herself in somewhat of a relationship,” said Hanson-Young. “And that, clearly, [she] had found herself in a position that, at some point, she didn’t want to be there. I’m not going to speculate why or how… [S]he started crying. And it was quite clear to me that there was a lot more going on than she felt she could say.”

Last Monday, Australia’s political class was waiting for Four Corners’s follow-up episode. Did Milligan have new material on Porter that would change the government’s political calculations?

She did not. Rather, the program gave a detailed account of the allegations already on the public record, together with commentary and the testimony from friends of Porter’s accuser, “Kate.” The only new revelation — vigorously promoted by the ABC throughout Monday — was that Kate had detailed her allegations to a sexual assault counsellor eight years ago.

What is significant here is that this point was mainly aimed at other journalists — specifically Crikey’s David Hardaker, Sky News’s Andrew Bolt and others who were suggesting Kate’s allegations were unreliable because they were based on memories “recovered” through repressed-memory counselling in 2019. The new Four Corners material made it clear that was unlikely to be true.

Here we have one of the most dispiriting aspects of contemporary journalism: media outlets defining themselves in opposition to each other, and their political positions seemingly determining which “facts” they credit and report.

This is happening on all sides. Ever since breaking the story about Kate’s allegations, Milligan has used her social media to promote and advocate for her story. She has amplified lawyers’ calls for an inquiry and defended herself against allegations from News Corp papers. And so, even as the attorney-general faces such grave allegations, even as the government is weakened by two of its ministers being on stress leave, the journalists risk becoming the story.

Clearly, some of the attacks on Milligan’s work have been wildly inaccurate. It is unrealistic to expect her not to defend herself. Yet she, too, has gone beyond the reported facts. She tweeted last week that she had been asked by NSW police if she knew of other allegations against Porter. “Not in your jurisdiction,” she claims to have replied. Her Twitter followers drew the obvious conclusion.

Choose your outlet; choose which “facts” get prominence. We’ve seen where this can lead. In the United States, the rise of Fox News caused other outlets — notably CNN — to define themselves in opposition to its partisanship. Those two networks became mirror images, giving every appearance of caring more about discrediting each other than serving the public.

So far, prime minister Scott Morrison and his ministers have held fast to their refusal to hold an inquiry, claiming that doing so would undermine the rule of law — a view disputed by some of the country’s best legal minds. In the face of flat denials, political scandals are hard to maintain without new disclosures and developments. If there is nothing new to say, then the story fades from the headlines. Will that be the case here? Can Morrison and the government tough out the calls for an inquiry?

The journalism on Four Corners is far more than a performance. It is the hard, admirable stuff, running against the tide of legal and government pressure, taking courage and institutional backing. But there is always the risk that the performance of journalism will obscure the importance of what’s being reported, and that this will dissipate the pressure on government for an independent inquiry. If so, we will all be the poorer. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Muting the messenger appeared first on Inside Story.

This response — criticised for essentially kicking the can down the road — says a lot about the complicated politics surrounding the ACCC’s forthright assessment of the digital environment.

The ACCC inquiry emerged from the horse-trading in the lead-up to the relaxation of Australia’s media ownership laws in 2017. The context meant that many industry participants assumed the ACCC would focus on the regulatory and commercial imbalances between news publishers and multinational platforms.

Industry events during the inquiry tended to reflect that view. ACCC chair Rod Sims and deputy chair Delia Rickard made frequent speeches critiquing the business practices of the digital platforms and their reluctance to embrace regulation. Encouraged by these public statements, the media industry expected substantive recommendations supporting their commercial interests.

But from the beginning there were signs that the ACCC interpreted its role more broadly. As Sims explained in a November 2017 speech, the commission mainly intended to investigate the state of competition in online media markets and assess whether online consumers were protected from an over-concentration of operators.

This difference in approach can partly be explained by the ACCC’s statutory focus on competition and consumer issues and partly by the breadth of the inquiry’s terms of reference, which didn’t so much ask “How can we save journalism?” as “How is money made through digital media and who benefits?” So, while the inquiry continued to commission studies on news media, the ACCC had less and less to say about journalism as it went on.

The final report makes it clear that the ACCC will not save journalism. Few of its recommendations offer direct panaceas, with the most practical one requiring digital platforms and news publishers to establish a voluntary code of conduct. The government accepted this recommendation and has asked the ACCC to begin negotiations with the major players. And the implementation process has teeth, with government stating that a mandatory code will be imposed on parties if a voluntary code can’t be finalised by October 2020.

The other recommendations targeting journalism are not substantially innovative, essentially asking the government to keep funding public broadcasting and maintain its grants package supporting small and regional publishers. The future of commercial news media looks like it will be decided by market forces and private ordering through a co-regulatory approach.

With the future of public interest journalism at stake, this limited intervention could be viewed as a worrying sign. But Australia already has important measures in place. Faced with the economic collapse of digital journalism and the emergence of regional news deserts, media industry commentators in the United States have been calling for the creation of national public service media organisations. Here, governments created the ABC and SBS many decades ago.

It is also important to note that the state of the news media might be a sign of transformation rather than death. New entrants include the Saturday Paper, and Crikey launched a team of investigative journalists (Crikey Inq) last year. Social news outlets such as Junkee have matured, and international organisations like the Guardian and the New York Times are investing significant resources in local editions.

This is not to play down the fact that the Australian media market faces major challenges. But these new outlets are positive signs of market innovation and transformation. Newer entrants are no longer attempting to copy the mass media format of the past, instead providing niche news offerings that target specific demographics. They are also lightly staffed. Junkee has about sixty employees and the Guardian Australia around fifty. The news media may become a smaller business but one that is more focused on the core role of public interest journalism.

So, while the ACCC’s final report criticises digital platforms extensively, its recommendations represent only small wins for news organisations. The ACCC has largely focused on the risks associated with digital platforms — concentrated online markets, a lack of competition in online advertising, and privacy concerns — and proposes a range of reforms in response, encompassing proposed wholesale reforms of media policy and privacy law and amendments relating to copyright enforcement and mergers.

This is an incredibly important outcome for the public, but the ACCC’s focus means that no stakeholders are wildly enthusiastic. Indeed, the submissions to Treasury as part of the final consultation process reveal that both the platforms and the publishers are trying to apply some brakes to the policy process. The platforms have continued their push against the threat of regulatory burdens, and the publishers now realise that the ACCC was never completely in their corner.

An ongoing review of media regulation means that newspapers must once again justify the self-regulation of the press in an age of convergent media. Publishers have never been strong supporters of privacy law reforms and are especially hostile to the oft-raised proposal to introduce a statutory right to privacy.

Although various ministers have said that Australia won’t be afraid to regulate the platforms as required, the ACCC has given the federal government a difficult hand to play by sketching out major reforms across multiple domains. The government has taken bold steps in some areas, asking the ACCC to launch a further inquiry into the ad-tech sector, which Google dominates, and ensuring that a code of conduct between publishers and platforms is implemented. But action on most recommendations has been delayed subject to further consultation.

This policy détente is perhaps no surprise. The media and content industries have never been afraid to criticise ministers and policymakers when reforms to privacy, copyright or media regulation have been canvassed, and technology companies are learning to become formidable lobbyists outside Washington, D.C. During the debate about whether they should be forced to reveal the contents of encrypted messages, tech companies appeared uncertain about how to navigate Australian politics, but that seemed to change, with the Saturday Paper reporting that that senior executives from the United States were present in Canberra during the final lobbying push.

Australia can’t avoid reforms in the way it regulates these technologies. But the Coalition can buy itself time while it takes stock of the changing landscape. The extension of the original inquiry for a further five years forms part of this broader strategy.

The reaction to some of the ACCC’s key recommendations also points to one of the stranger outcomes of the inquiry. Platforms and publishers are largely opposing parties and will continue to clash over any proposed amendments to copyright and merger laws. But their interests may converge around privacy law and media regulation. Privacy reforms would be seen as a threat to the data-based business models of platforms and the investigatory capacities of the news media and both parties would push back strongly against media reforms that increase their regulatory burdens. But change in both of these areas is needed, with Australians now stuck with complicated and increasingly dated regulatory frameworks.

With both groups of commercial stakeholders starting to resist reform in certain areas, it is understandable that new legislation hasn’t been forthcoming. Australia had a chance to lead the world in the implementation of major policy frameworks responding to the new digital environment. Instead, the government has taken a gradual approach. This should allow it to carefully navigate the concerns of commercial actors, stay informed through the ongoing ACCC reviews and follow international regulatory trends. At a certain point, though, it will have to abandon its caution and take a stance. Consultation can only take the government so far, and at certain points the intersecting agendas of platforms and publishers may work directly against the prospect of much-needed regulatory reform. •

The post Publishers, platforms and policy détente appeared first on Inside Story.

Speers departed from the informal style of his distinguished predecessor Barrie Cassidy, making his debut in a sharp suit, commencing with a longer monologue to camera, and offering some explicitly judgemental commentary in place of Cassidy’s sly irony. Perhaps we are beyond irony in this new landscape. Adjudication is part of the job of political journalists, and when things get seriously rocky, the pressure is on to show their hand and reveal where they draw the line on matters of principle rather than simply scoring the key players on how successfully they manage the narrative.

If there was some prevarication in Speers’s opening remarks, it was more than compensated for by the brilliantly incisive video montage that preceded them. It’s hard to know whom to credit for these sequences, but the pace of the cross-cutting and the killer instinct for juxtaposition did more to expose deceit, hypocrisy and incompetence than any verbal commentary.

The panel discussion, featuring veteran insiders Niki Savva and Phillip Coorey with newcomer Renee Viellaris (political editor of the Brisbane Courier Mail), led off with the bushfire crisis. Savva was not mincing words. The PM’s Hawaiian holiday was a big mistake, she said. Coorey agreed. A mistake compounded by the attempted cover-up. “They lied about it,” said Savva. It was Viellaris who sought to fudge the issue, suggesting that the real problem was an ineffectual deputy.

Underlying the task of adjudication is the fundamental distinction between political issues and matters of government. Politics is a game of perceptions; government is consequential. A good commentator should never confuse those registers.

Here it was Savva who stood out, refusing at every point to revert to a merely political view of what had transpired by focusing, laser-like, on how Morrison’s essential failure has been his incapacity to act and think like a head of government. An attempt to rescue his image with a party-political ad, she said, was revealing in precisely the wrong way. “The last thing people needed at that stage,” she said, “was a reminder that his driving instincts are political instincts.”

Speers is less firm on where political instincts need to be called out. He deserves his accolades as an interviewer, but the interview with treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Sunday was a mixed bag.

Starting off in low gear with questions about the evacuation and quarantine of citizens caught up in Wuhan, Speers almost immediately steered into a gotcha moment of some significance. What about the plan to charge them $1000 each for the flight to Christmas Island, he asked. “Why do you have to do that?” “Well, we’re not,” was the stark response. Frydenberg was here contradicting a statement by the prime minister that Peter Dutton had reiterated that very morning. The Department of Foreign Affairs, Frydenberg said, had given the wrong advice. This was surely a major embarrassment for the government, especially since Morrison had explicitly pronounced that this was the standard rule.

At this point many interviewers would have gone in for the kill, but that is not Speers’s style. He has a very effective way of increasing the speed of questioning without raising the intensity, especially as his quickfire comebacks are based on meticulous command of the relevant facts and figures.

On the topic of sports rorts, though, he missed an opportunity to push home the case for the prosecution. “Do you admit the government used taxpayers’ money for blatant pork-barrelling?” sounds like a confronting question, but the choice of words actually let Frydenberg off the hook. This was so much more than the traditional political game of pork-barrelling, with its folksy connotations. It was something planned and executed in knowing contravention of due process, a matter of government, not politics, and of behaviour that dangerously tests the boundaries on ministerial — and prime ministerial — integrity. As Coorey put it, it was at the least “an abuse of ministerial discretionary powers.”

Insiders looks set to continue its strong track record. When it risked degenerating into a coffee morning for sparring political umpires, Cassidy always managed to get it back on track, building a cohort of serious-minded journalists who know the importance of holding government to account. With these stalwarts to depend on, Speers brings pace and agility, and his own form of authority. The succession plan, it seems, is working out well.

The following night, Four Corners and Q&A presented coordinated perspectives on the bushfire crisis, both introduced by Hamish Macdonald. In place of Four Corners’s trademark style, the inferno was documented by citizens caught in its path. They reported in conditions so terrifying and perilous no professional journalist, however intrepid, would have been authorised to venture into them. Some of those caught up, though — like Macdonald — were journalists who continued to front the camera without any assurance that they would find a way out.

On the Gold Coast hinterland in September, the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales in November, Gospers Mountain and the Adelaide Hills in December, East Gippsland and the NSW south coast as the new year turned, and Kangaroo Island in January, the catastrophe unfolded. The images recurred: a chopper against an amber sky, silhouettes of firefighters dwarfed by seventy-metre flames, vehicles moving through ember attacks so dense that the surrounding environment looked like molten lava. The colours of the natural world were gone, sucked into blackness and then erupting in bursts of crimson and fluorescent orange.

People spoke of the fires as if they were a motivated enemy force, attacking with ever greater fury and vindictiveness. Just to watch it all was an ordeal. We were blitzed with every mythological human nightmare: the fire-breathing dragon towering over some tiny human adversary, the great snake working its way across the landscape. It was darkness at noon, the inferno, the apocalypse. But it is happening now.

The immediacy was like nothing else I have seen on television. As a fire truck is engulfed in bushland south of Nowra, the driver continues to report over the radio. The crew speak to each other in steady voices, focused on the practicalities. A father and daughter experience the full onslaught of the fire front as they defend their home with ordinary hoses. People survive because they are quick-thinking, collaborative and disciplined.

But now, in the aftermath, those same people are in need. Many will suffer traumatic recall, and are faced with intolerable ongoing stresses. Homes and businesses have to be rebuilt, stock must be fed, fences replaced, injured animals tended. Where are the resources, and how are they to be channelled most swiftly and effectively? That was the overriding question for the studio audience of Q&A, assembled in Queanbeyan from the fire-ravaged towns of the NSW south coast and northeastern Victoria.

Practicalities were to the fore. Panellists Kristy McBain, mayor of Bega Valley, and Cheryl McCarthy of Surf Life Saving NSW have been on the front line, working to provide safe refuges and essential resources to evacuated communities. Both have exercised exemplary leadership. They understand how survival depends on responsibility, cooperation and generosity, and that was the spirit in which they responded to a succession of urgent questions about what happens next.

But Macdonald, in the chair, wanted to go beyond the practicalities, to generate “a big conversation” about causes and consequences. That meant talking about climate change. Here Michael Mann, billed as a “renowned US climate scientist,” faced off against Liberal senator Jim Molan. In one exchange that immediately went viral, Molan said his mind was open, and Mann quipped back that it was good to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out. With almost the entire studio audience now audibly hostile to Molan, Macdonald intervened to point out that his views were representative of a recently re-elected government and therefore reflected widespread public opinion.

It was a significant moment — not because the exchange between the senator and the climate scientist mattered, but because it did not. We learned nothing from Mann, who didn’t even explain what he was an expert in, and less from Molan, who was very good at hogging the airwaves but had done no new thinking in response to the catastrophe. Why were they on the program at all? This is a serious question for the producers. If Q&A is losing audience, it is because so many people have lost all tolerance for the “both sides of politics” convention in public discussion.

More time needed to be spent with those on the panel who had something substantive to offer, like Indigenous fire practitioner Victor Steffensen, who left us in no doubt about what he knew and how. For twenty years or more, he said, elders had been talking about changing conditions. We need to listen to those who are trained to read landscapes, who understand the soil and how to reduce fuel in the right ecosystems at the right time. Introduced vegetation has changed the flammable potential of ecosystems. “What would you say to the authorities about what we could do ahead of next summer?” asked Macdonald. “I would say jump in the passenger seat and let us do the driving,” Steffensen responded, without missing a beat.

A truly big conversation can only happen if everyone in it knows when not to speak, and can give the floor to someone who really has something to say. Just as Four Corners showed how these fires are so much greater than the human scale, Steffensen was showing how we must enlarge our thinking to meet the emergencies we face.

People don’t come through those emergencies unchanged, and part of the change is a fundamental shift in priorities and perspectives. Andrew Constance, Liberal MP for Bega, contributed to the discussion not as the representative of a political agenda but as someone who had been brought to the limits of his own abilities. Constance is calling for an embargo on political wrangling over the causes of the fires and a focus on community-generated response strategies. His is the kind of voice we need on Q&A if it is to have a future.

Macdonald is a dynamic and original figure, one of the most promising talents in contemporary Australian media. There could not be a better choice of host for the program, but please, can we dispense with business as usual in the choice of panel members? •

The post Reshaping the current affairs landscape appeared first on Inside Story.

This means the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s report on digital platforms, released last week, is potentially one of the most important documents in our recent national history, with the potential to affect every area of life.

Whether it fulfils that potential will depend on the response of government, and of course the lobbying attempts of Google and Facebook, both of which will oppose much of the regulatory thrust despite this being the local version of inquiries and initiatives around the globe. Bringing these new and uniquely powerful players to heel will require an international lawmaking effort.

So far, media attention has focused on the business impacts of the report and the issues surrounding privacy. I want to focus here on what the report says about journalism. This, surely, is the aspect of the report that is most important to our role as citizens, the health of our democracy and the capacity of our political processes and system of government to meet the needs of the nation.

First, the ACCC reaffirms its view that journalism is a public good, important for democracy. It also confirms that journalism is in crisis, thanks largely to the flow of advertising revenue to the digital platforms.

Significantly, in a first for a government agency, the ACCC declares that despite the fact that most journalism is produced by private businesses, this is an appropriate area for government action.

The ACCC’s research for this inquiry confirms that the number of journalists employed in print and online businesses (traditionally the main employers) dropped by 20 per cent from 2014 to 2018. More than one hundred local and regional newspapers have closed over the past ten years, and as a result, twenty-one local government areas have no press coverage. Swathes of suburban and regional Australia are now news deserts.

The digital news business models reward those who provide international and national news. Local news falls through the cracks. It’s now generally easier to find out what Donald Trump did last night than it is to find out what’s happening at your local school, why a local property development has been approved or what the story is behind that column of smoke on the horizon.

The results of the dive in the number of employed journalists are real, according to the ACCC research. There are 26 per cent fewer articles on local government issues, 40 per cent fewer articles reporting on local courts, 30 per cent fewer articles on health issues and 42 per cent fewer articles on science.

The ACCC says its data didn’t allow it to assess the impact on investigative journalism and on detailed analyses of issues. Other research suggests that investigative work is holding up quite well so far — old media businesses have protected it and the new, digital-only players are also investing in it. But it would be wrong to be complacent given that the crisis in news media business models continues to roll on.

As for articles analysing issues in detail, it’s hardly necessary to do the research. A casual comparison of today’s mainstream news websites with their counterparts fifteen years ago suggests it’s much harder these days to gain a grasp of important issues, including who is running the country, and how well or badly they are doing it.

This is not a matter of the digital delivery mechanism. It’s about how many journalists are employed, and whether they have the time and support to seek out and curate the facts.

What does the ACCC recommend government do about this? First, it suggests a top-to-toe review of media regulation, which is long overdue and broader than my focus here. It proposes measures designed to combat fake news and increase media literacy.

It also recommends “stable and adequate” funding for the ABC and SBS. In this, the ACCC echoes every inquiry that has looked at this issue. It’s past time for governments to pay attention. The public broadcasters should not only get more, but the funding should also be on a longer cycle to guard against political interference.

The ACCC doesn’t quantify the amount of extra funding necessary. For this, we will have to await the public release of the Tonagh efficiency review, the results of which are currently with the public broadcasters but yet to be more widely released.

The ACCC then moves on to consider a number of measures proposed in submissions — including some in submissions I had a hand in writing as a board member of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative.

It comes down in favour of a system of direct grants to local news services — rural, regional and suburban — with an emphasis on reporting of local government and local courts. This, the ACCC’s research suggests, is the area of most urgent need, though it anticipates the scheme may need to be widened in the future.

This system of grants would replace the existing under-subscribed and politically tainted Regional and Small Publishers Jobs and Innovation Package, which was established as a sop to then senator Nick Xenophon in return for voting through the last round of media ownership deregulation.

That scheme didn’t work — partly because the eligibility criteria were designed to exclude certain publishers. The Guardian Australia has claimed it was “stiffed” for party political reasons. Other problems included overly complex processes and the scheme’s emphasis on technological innovation rather than the simple business of employing journalists.

The ACCC’s recommended replacement would offer $50 million in grants a year, to be administered at arm’s length from government, possibly by a new statutory authority called Journalism Australia. The dollar amount isn’t large, but it is an increase on the existing scheme. Its potential impact can also be judged in another way: the ACCC estimates the current total investment in full-time equivalent employees producing journalism in Australia is approximately $600 million a year.

The ACCC also recommends that philanthropic donations to not-for-profit journalism enterprises be made tax-deductible. Media organisations, or arms of media organisations, would be able to register as charities. In the United States, philanthropy has significantly aided public interest journalism. There have been nascent moves here, as well, but if the ACCC recommendation is adopted we can expect a helpful boost.

Sadly, though, the ACCC did not pick up one of the potentially most transformative measures recommended by submissions — that investment in public interest journalism attract a tax rebate. This would be similar to the schemes that led to a revival of the Australian film industry decades ago.

In my view, the ACCC rejected this idea without sufficient consideration. Usefully, it estimated that a 25 per cent tax rebate would provide a benefit to media businesses (and a cost to the budget) of around $150 million a year. The cost could be contained using caps or limits on eligibility.

The Public Interest Journalism Initiative had argued that such a scheme would immediately increase the number of journalists in Australia, and thus the amount and quality of journalism. The ACCC concluded it would be too difficult to ensure the money would be used for public interest journalism, which it defined as “journalism with the primary purpose of recording, investigating and explaining issues of public significance in order to engage citizens in public debate and inform democratic decision making at all levels of government.”

The comparable film industry schemes, the ACCC pointed out, are project-specific, rather than aimed simply at making more films. The PIJI has already signalled it thinks the tax rebate idea deserves more consideration and research.

So how should we regard the ACCC report, thinking about it as citizens? It’s groundbreaking in clearly making the case, from the point of view of a usually dry-as-dust business-related body, that journalism is a public good, that it matters, that we have a civic crisis under way, and that there is ample justification for government action.

The recommendations are welcome, but more work is needed. If we want to continue to be effective, informed citizens we should be doing our best to follow what happens from here on — and hope that there will be enough journalists around to allow us to assess progress. •

First published in the Conversation.

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There is the campaign you see via the mainstream media: on radio news and talkback; on television, still dominated by free-to-air channels; and in “legacy” newspapers, now commonly consulted via the web unless you’re taking a flight and have picked up a freebie. Through this lens, the campaign is a familiar-enough beast: indeed, in outward appearance, it hasn’t changed all that much in recent decades.

The candidates, along with a kind of mobile press gallery, travel here and there on buses and planes. Press conferences are held, high-vis vests are donned, streets are walked, hospitals, schools, pubs and shopping malls are visited. The selfies are a gesture to modern times, but the essential rituals would be recognisable to, say, a party leader from the 1970s. Having come back from a desert island, they might wonder what happened to Kerry Packer and the Bulletin, but the outlines would be more or less recognisable.

The second vantage point intersects with the mainstream media in all kinds of ways, but it also has a more or less independent existence. This is the campaign on social media. I don’t mean the formal campaigning that parties and other groups run via Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Rather, I mean the more informal exchanges between journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens. I am thinking especially of Twitter.

Twitter is both a democratic and a hierarchical medium of exchange. It is more democratic than old media in its lack of filters. Within the laws of defamation and the rules of Twitter itself, you can say whatever you like. It is a cross between the letters page of a newspaper and a toilet wall, with many features of the latter because no editors are selecting, editing and curating contributions. And sometimes neither the spelling nor the grammar are all that great.

But Twitter is also deeply hierarchical. Those with large numbers of followers have much more clout and status. Celebrity types will chat amiably with one another in public while ignoring the great unwashed. The medium has its “influencers,” those who, through their prestige and reach, are considered capable of shaping the tastes, opinions or behaviour of tens of thousands while the rest of us struggle to influence our kids to put down their mobile devices for a while and read a book.

Journalists themselves have a liminal status in this world. Most of them have much more capacity than the rest of us to attract followers. This is a fascinating and under-recognised way for the legacy media — especially the newspapers — to continue to exercise a wider influence over politics and culture. Here, even journalists of the third or fourth rank can have many thousands of Twitter followers, while those who have achieved a genuine celebrity status might have 100,000 or more.

A few examples will suffice. Leigh Sales, who presents the ABC’s 7.30, has 367,000 followers; 7.30 itself has just 162,000. Laura Tingle, also of 7.30, has 115,000 followers. Barrie Cassidy’s 130,000 is more than double that of the program he hosts, the ABC’s Insiders. Annabel Crabb, another ABC television personality, has a remarkable 480,000 followers; interestingly, her stock-in-trade is presenting the more civil and human side of our politicians. Leading Radio National presenters Fran Kelly (76,000), Patricia Karvelas (51,000) and Phillip Adams (35,000) are also popular Twitter identities.

At the commercials, the picture is pretty similar. Chris Uhlmann, formerly of the ABC and now political editor of Nine News, has 151,000 followers, David Speers at Sky 113,000 and Phillip Coorey at the Australian Financial Review 106,000. Nor do you have to work for a large media company if you have the profile, prestige and respect built up over the decades to help you along. Michelle Grattan (the Conversation) and Paul Bongiorno (the Saturday Paper) have well over 100,000 followers each.

In Murdochland, Chris Kenny of the Australian and Sky, who pops up frequently on Twitter if only to criticise it, is approaching 40,000. Miranda Devine of the tabloid Daily Telegraph has over 60,000 followers, and Sharri Markson, of the same paper, about half that number. But lower-profile journalists for publications such as the Australian, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age — those who would not normally be recognised in the street — will pick up 8000 to 16,000 followers if they are active on the platform. Old hands, such as Paul Kelly, can afford to stay off it entirely.

What does all of this mean? First, a number of journalists have been able to leverage a celebrity status of sorts in a way available to few others — with the notable exception of the politicians themselves. There was a time when very few journalists achieved anything like this kind of profile: think Alan Reid, Alan Ramsey, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan and Laurie Oakes.

Individual journalists have their own brand that is connected with, but also independent of, the media company for which they work. A good illustration of the phenomenon is Mike Carlton, who has not for some time worked for a major media company, and yet has 122,000 followers (and a very active account). When journalists cease to work for a big concern, they take their followers with them. Samantha Maiden, formerly of the Daily Telegraph and Sky, has over 100,000 followers, surely an asset for the smaller online outfit, the New Daily, that now employs her.

This is the upside for your average journalist. You can use the platform to build up individual profile, draw attention to your own stories, disseminate opinion, promote a book, and bond with or abuse other members of your craft. Journalists also sometimes draw on Twitter for material and sources. But there is a downside, too.

Best known is the abuse and trolling. Journalists are not the only targets, of course, but they are vulnerable to it, especially if they are also female. There’s a lot of hate out there in the age of Trump. This abuse can be vicious and frightening.

But Twitter also discomforts journalists in other ways. It allows their readers to provide a running commentary on their performance. And it is easy enough to see why this might be so frustrating.

This is an industry in what now seems to be a permanent state of crisis. It is struggling to evolve a business model that will preserve what’s most important in journalism while also turning a profit. The elite might be well paid and secure, but life is harder for others, some of whom are churning out thousands of words a week while shouty op-ed columnists, who don’t have to chase stories or even get basic facts right, attract the fame and the money.

Journalists were on the receiving end of a Twitter pile-on during the Barnaby Joyce affair of 2018, when many tweeters came round to the view that mainstream reporters had conspired to keep the matter under wraps. Certainly, some aspects of the matter had done the rounds on Twitter and on some small independent news sites well before the Daily Telegraph’s front-page story announced open season. But this pattern was not unusual even before the age of the internet and social media. Britain’s Profumo affair of 1963 — the most famous political sex scandal of them all — came to light in a low-circulation Westminster newsletter before it made its way into the headlines of newspapers around the world.

The present election campaign is generating similar complaints. The recent focus has been on “Watergate,” a controversy about the sale of water to the government by a company registered in the Cayman Islands with which energy minister Angus Taylor has had a previous association. Taylor’s evasive answers to questioning about the matter have not helped his or the government’s case that there is nothing to see here. The frequent complaint on Twitter is that mainstream media have shown insufficient interest in the matter. This is part of a more general complaint that Scott Morrison is getting an easy run from the media than Bill Shorten is, and that the media concerns itself with campaign trivia rather than policy substance.

Such complaints are sometimes misplaced. Individual journalists receive criticism for what is seen as a wider failing of the media as a whole. Critics can have precious little understanding of defamation law, the code of ethics, the need for careful corroboration, or the constraints of time and resources. Journalists on the prime minister’s campaign bus have been condemned for being co-opted, rather as journalists in the press gallery are often seen to be too close to politicians and their staffers — as if it were not the very function of the gallery to facilitate such contact. Patricia Karvelas was even criticised for receiving a text message from Barnaby Joyce while she was on Insiders, as if there was something sinister about a politician having the mobile number of a journalist and vice versa.

All the same, it is absurd for journalists to take the substantial benefits from a platform like Twitter while making too much of the brickbats. There is nothing more ridiculous than a high-profile figure with thousands of followers using Twitter to ridicule Twitter — for instance, as unrepresentative of wider bodies of opinion, or as notably lacking in consistency or self-awareness (failings not unknown in politics and journalism).

I’m not sure, either, why anyone should expect a toning down of partisanship on social media, least of all in an election campaign. We might all like more civility, as well as a greater willingness to see the strengths in one another’s arguments. But we also need to be realistic about how much of this we are going to get. There is already too little civility in public discourse more generally, as well as a declining respect for either evidence or expertise, including among some who call themselves journalists.

Appearances matter. Media defensiveness can come across as condescending and elitist. The ordinary camaraderie among fellow members of a profession can, to an outsider, look masonic. (We academics understand this only too well — journalists have even been known to resort to intemperate abuse of dwellers in the ivory tower.) Ordinary human feeling between journalists, politicians and staffers who share a workplace can look like an exclusive and insular club, especially when accompanied by the use of matey nicknames.

But if you are going to accept the celebrity status, however minor, and the pleasures and benefits that come with it — the show on which many of them appear is called Insiders, for God’s sake — best be aware that you might be seen by those outside the tent as a little too cosily placed within it. And the reality is that some journalists are indeed too cosy in there. A few are essentially players rather than analysts, enjoying their role in factional power plays and making their reputations by publishing the titbits provided by their “contacts” who then deploy their stories as guided missiles in party warfare.

Public suspicion is hardly surprising at a time when research tells us that people’s trust in politics and politicians is at a very low ebb. The state of the media as a whole — quite apart from the actions of any individual journalist — has given ordinary voters good reason to be suspicious. The Nine–Fairfax merger brings a former federal Coalition treasurer to the chairmanship of the board of the combined company. News Corp no longer even feigns fairness or balance and is campaigning aggressively for the Coalition. Stories circulate about the role of media magnates in the overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull. And the ABC has been subjected to a bitter and unrelenting campaign of intimidation by the government, supported by the ever-helpful Murdoch press. Ordinary citizens can be forgiven for thinking that there is now more minding of p’s and q’s than is healthy in a public broadcaster.

Twitter has changed the landscape for political reporting, and this is something that journalists have to suck up, whether they like it or not. That — or stay off the platform entirely, an option very few have so far shown any inclination to take up. If journalists want the profile that Twitter both delivers and measures, they have to deal with the reality that they will not always be showered with empathy or understanding, let alone the bouquets of an adoring public. Democracy has many virtues — including its premium on freedom of expression — but no one has ever claimed that it is always fair. •

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Over the past couple of years the ABC’s coverage of two sensitive topics, Australia–China relations and the Chinese influence debate, has been uneven and lacklustre and has certainly fallen short of what would expected of a national broadcaster. While this latest appointment to Beijing raises hopes of improvement, much of what needs to be done lies outside Ferguson’s responsibility.

It’s important to emphasise that the low score for the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage doesn’t generalise to some of the myriad magazine-style programs that populate Radio National. In-depth discussions and debates about China and Australia–China relations can be found on RN programs such as Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra and Paul Barclay’s Big Ideas. In August last year, RN’s China in Focus series offered a stunning array of nuanced discussions of various aspects of China. It is ABC programs such as this that carry on the best of the ABC’s journalistic legacy and do most of the broadcaster’s heavy lifting in informing the public about a wide range of issues.

Over the past few years, the “China influence” narrative, which manifests in a multitude of political, social and cultural issues, has grown to dominate the Australian news media’s coverage of China. In this context, the ABC has conspicuously failed to set a broader agenda — a role it played in the Australian media landscape until relatively recently. Instead, it has mainly responded to and followed the agenda set by the commercial media.

Some may object to this claim, citing the Four Corners report “Power and Influence,” which screened in September 2016, as an example of a highly influential investigation — in this case, into political donations by Chinese nationals and Chinese Australians. Indeed, the program provided a timely and much-needed exposé of an area that is ripe for reform, and not just in relation to donations from foreign nationals. But the program’s framing of these issues also featured journalistic practices that continue to afflict the China-influence narrative, including what I call “insinuative journalism” and what ex-ABC reporter Peter Manning calls “access journalism” and what might be called “suggestive reporting,” mostly free of hard evidence.

If you asked a range of defence, security and intelligence policy thinkers in this country to rate that Four Corners episode, it would receive ten out of ten. But if you asked the diplomatic community, the university sector and, not least, the business community, the score would be much lower. Not to mention the fact that the program inflicted collateral damage on the 204,000 or so Chinese students and around 1.2 million people of Chinese ancestry living in Australia, many of whom have been scratching their heads wondering why they should be distrusted based on the dealings of a couple of billionaires.

As a joint production of the ABC and Fairfax, “Power and Influence” also embodies another serious problem that has plagued the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage of the Chinese influence debate and Australia–China relations: it seems to have allowed itself to be influenced by the news values and news-making practices of commercial outlets.

Of course, the ABC doesn’t resort to rampant sensationalism, as some of the local Chinese-language news websites do; nor can it be accused of blatant fear-mongering, unlike some of the major commercial media outlets. But it is increasingly failing to play the leadership role we should expect from the national public broadcaster. Some of the ABC’s current affairs programs, such as RN Breakfast with Fran Kelly, do make an effort to ask fair questions and reflect a range of different views and opinions, but its topics mostly seem to be chosen in response to what has already been reported about the Chinese influence or Australia–China relations elsewhere.

The ABC is aware that it needs to do better in crossing the language divide. Its Chinese Service, for instance, now offers a selection of the ABC’s news translated into simplified Chinese. Judging by how this China-related content is circulated among Chinese Australians via the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat, though, it seems that this initiative is something of a double-edged sword. It does make ABC content more accessible to Mandarin-speaking Chinese-Australian audiences, but it also brings home to these communities the fact that the mainstream media’s viewpoint on China is mostly indeed just that — mainstream — and seldom reflects these communities’ perspectives and interests. Indeed, this mainstream viewpoint often borders on being somewhat irrelevant to their lives, and as a consequence is potentially alienating.

It is also significant that the ABC’s online news and current affairs content now includes contributions from a few Mandarin-speaking reporters with Chinese cultural backgrounds. This can only be a good thing: hiring linguistically and ethnically diverse staff has frequently been recommended by reports on the challenges facing Australia’s media. But it would be naive to assume that diversity in perspectives and framing can be achieved simply by hiring reporters with an ethnic background.

Judging by the online news content produced by the ABC over the past year or so, though, junior reporters with a Chinese background seem to be demonstrating their professional chops by selecting and framing stories that don’t upset the views of the senior editors who will be reviewing their work, rather than breaking stories that go beyond or challenge those perspectives.

Achieving diversity in terms of names and appearance is easy, but attaining diversity in viewpoint and narrative framework is a hard slog, especially in a nation that still lives largely within a monocultural mindset, despite being one of the most multicultural countries on the planet. So far, there is little evidence that the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage of Australia–China relations and issues related to China’s influence has broken new ground.

For China-based foreign correspondents, the task of reporting is riddled with difficulties, perhaps the most obvious of which is dealing with suspicious and uncooperative Chinese officials. Too often these journalists’ attempts to get closer to the action are thwarted by local officials set on censoring or at least closely scrutinising their investigative processes. The original story is frequently derailed, and we end up reading more about the correspondent’s heroic battle than about the story itself. While ABC’s foreign correspondents mostly do a reasonably good job in covering China, there is a need to broaden its coverage of censorship and human rights to present a more complex picture of the challenges and opportunities that a rising China brings to Australians.

We need more stories about the impact of economic reforms within China, and how they have led to unprecedented social inequality, economic injustice and environmental degradation, and adversely affected the vast number of ordinary Chinese people who are doing what most Australians are doing: trying to get on with leading a decent life.

One excellent example of such reporting is the coverage by ABC China correspondent Bill Birtles — both in an episode of Foreign Correspondent and in his news reports — of China’s egregious environmental practices, which came in the wake of its decision to ban the import of garbage from Australia.

It has also become increasingly clear that reporting by the ABC’s foreign correspondents represents only a small proportion of the ABC’s entire reporting efforts in relation to China — as is also the case in other media outlets. The exponentially increasing significance of China to Australia means that Australia-based journalists — many of whom have no intimate knowledge of China and no language competence — produce the bulk of the content that is related to both Australia-China relations and issues within the Chinese influence narrative. So far, there has not been much China literacy on display in this reporting, including any knowledge of whom to approach for expert analysis.

In spite of funding cuts, the ABC continues to deliver high-quality content that deserves the money and support of taxpayers. But it’s time for the national broadcaster to lift its game in reporting on China and Australia–China relations. There, it needs to adopt a calmer, more rational and evidence-based approach and move beyond a narrow security and intelligence focus — much of which is informed by Australian perceptions of the US position on China.

China is too important to us to get it wrong. Australians deserve more reporting with depth and from a wider perspective than one we currently have to make do with. •

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This year’s winner of the Man Booker prize, Anna Burns, will soon need ready answers to the kind of query posed in Craig Brown’s imaginary Q&A with Shakespeare following the first night of Hamlet. The Irish novelist’s life changed at 10pm on Tuesday when the ceremony in London’s lavish Guildhall concluded with the announcement that Milkman, her fourth work, was the judges’ choice over the favourites, Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.

Within minutes of her stunned reaction and tremulous thanks to publishers and editors, the Belfast-born writer was pitched into a round of speed dates with deadline-pressed journalists. The first mention of Brexit can’t be far off. [Stop press, 03.00 GMT: Burns’s interview reference to her book as also being about “barriers, barricades, and the dreaded ‘other’” is seen as underscoring its relevance to Brexit.]

The award to Burns’s cryptic first-person illumination of a Catholic girl in a claustrophobic urban district during Northern Ireland’s 1970s heaviness is welcome if unexpected. The shortlist looked thinner when two kinetic works, Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, failed to make the cut. Powers’s tree-centric embrace of deep time, Edugyan’s epic of a freed slave, Daisy Johnson’s rural English mythos, Rachel Kushner’s tale of a mother’s survival in a California prison, and Robin Robertson’s transatlantic verse-journey all had their champions, while Private Eye’s description of an “earnest and overly issue-driven shortlist” might be truer of several recent years. In the end Milkman, with its nameless characters, immersive fears, experimental diction, stream-of-consciousness portraits, and powerful sense of a collective subject, draws the reader into its genuinely imagined world.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYU philosopher who chaired the judging panel, had earlier offered a few portentous words about the “dizzying array of human imagination” on offer from the six finalists, which “speak to our moment,” while admitting that — in the Booker tradition of last-minute tussles — even he “didn’t know this morning” who would take the prize.

Everyone, in short, did their level best by what is still regarded as Britain’s most prestigious literary title, its £50,000 (A$92,000) value to the recipient not incidental. (“Pay off my debts,” was Burns’s sensible answer when BBC’s Rebecca Jones asked about her plans.) A big rise came in 2002 when the Man Group, an investment management firm, took over the sponsorship, wisely choosing to keep the older name, with its happy assonance, as part of a new branding.

The baton now is returned to the publishers, booksellers, publicists, agents, feature writers and re-reviewers, whose next busy weeks aim to put author and work into the heads and hands of as many readers as possible. At the max, the “Booker bounce” can deliver great benefits, shared by the other novels who have made the long- and shortlists.

Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, for example, catapulted from 13,000 to over 191,000 sales in 2016 (even excluding audio and ebooks), while George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, last year’s winner, jumped from 10,000 to 62,000: the smallest boost on record, yet still one to die for. The success of these sons of Los Angeles and Amarillo was made possible by the sponsor-led opening-up in 2014 to any novel published in English in the United Kingdom, regardless of the author’s home country, a departure from the Booker’s historical “confinement” to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth. The closing words of Appiah’s announcement, “we read all these authors without ever asking for their passports,” might be seen as a coded endorsement of that decision — or rebuke to the British government over its now colder house for immigrants?

In this respect, it will be interesting to track the latest iteration of what publishers yearningly call the Man Booker’s halo effect. Anna Burns’s award will surely also deflect persistent criticism of that international (read: American) outreach, made on the grounds that the prize’s distinct character will be eroded, as well as an overlapping unease over a sequence of four awards to male writers since Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries won in 2013.

The Booker race, famously landed with the term “posh bingo” by Julian Barnes, whose The Sense of an Ending won in 2011, ostensibly seeks to make readers of punters and gawpers. Yet the compulsive social thrills of such events — the odds and inside dope, the personas and backstories — seem ever to turn the literary pleasures into also-rans.

To see how BBC television and, marginally less so, radio treat the annual Man Booker is to encounter a willing collaborator possessed of bags of complaisant smiliness but no intellectual or moral rigour. That at least is the gravamen of its two pre-Booker programs, the first of which was a thirty-minute, Friday night edition of its Front Row Late arts series. In a live event at Birmingham’s literary festival, inevitably fronted by Mary Beard, a three-person panel discussed publicity, reviews and the boom in literary prizes and festivals.

In a recorded segment, industry figures agreeably shared trade customs: dispensing proofs to “influencers,” maximising the “personal element” of meet-the-author and signed copies. Fortuitously transformative notices were also given their due. Pru Rowlandson, publicity director at Granta, recalled Margaret Atwood’s review of Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, and James Daunt, managing director of the flagship Waterstone’s chain, cited Ian McEwan’s live BBC Radio encomium to John Williams’s Stoner, which propelled the neglected work to 130,000 sales.

There was little revelatory in any of this, though Beard — having read “1.5” of the Booker shortlist — expressed worry about the “packaging” and “language” just voiced. Kate Mosse, founding director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, explained her rationale (“prizes matter because they give a reason for works of quality to stay on the shelf”), while the journalist and Birmingham curator Sathnam Sanghera championed more local, diverse and soulful events against expensive ones “in fields and tents, for posh white people.”

Dreda Say Mitchell, a crime writer and digital evangelist, was already way beyond. She lamented both the hard copies on show (“In a world where books have gone digital, I would expect to see Kobo or Kindle”) and the “very narrow voices of corporate traditional publishing,” instead praising online commenters, crime readers’ clubs and “the power of digital to give writers a living.” She then took aim at Sanghera’s dismissal of many Amazon reviews as “rubbish,” citing a single star for Hamlet: “Why shouldn’t they give Shakespeare one star? At the end of the day I’m a writer. I want people to buy my books. The most powerful persons to me are the people who read my books. How do you define an expert? What is an expert?”

Mary signed off with the obligatory BBC plug: following the last “hugely successful adaptation” of John le Carré, here’s a “taster” of the next, “which starts on BBC1 later this month.” Then the credits, which listed twenty-two names complicit in this mess of pottage. Though to be fair, it was enlivened by Dreda’s sorted and fearless presence. And even if the Man Booker link had proved vestigial, the professionals’ insight into the machinery driving today’s “prose factory” (the title of D.J. Taylor’s rich history of England’s post-1918 literary life) was of real interest.

An absorbing current illustration, given the author’s established status, is the pre-marketing for Jonathan Coe’s forthcoming novel Middle England, published in early November but circulated well before then among key influencers. The bucolic heritage-style cover announces its inevitable choice as a BBC Radio 4 “book of the week,” while blurbs have long circulated framing the work as the landmark post-Brexit novel (notwithstanding the genre’s busy post-2016 output). Most remarkable of all in the months up to publication is Coe’s enticing drip-feed to his followers of lines from the novel.

These literary slivers slot into place alongside Coe’s one-track political commentary in what might be termed Tribal Coeland. “England felt like a calm and settled place tonight: a country at ease with itself.” “‘It’s a shop, Dad. It’s a Marks and Spencer. They don’t make cars here any more.’ ‘Where do they make the cars, then?’ That was a good question.” “‘Luckily, there are still a lot of loyal, sensible Conservatives who appreciate the benefits of EU membership. I believe you’re sleeping with one of them.’” And so on.

The book’s high-end endorsers include Ben Elton (“An astute, enlightened and enlightening journey into the heart of our current national identity crisis. Both moving and funny”); Nigella Lawson (“magisterial”); Sanghera, Coe’s fellow Brummie (“fantastic… the first great Brexit novel”); and India Knight (“This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics”). The Guardian’s John Crace even turns market pitcher to roll up the crowds: “Let me add to the chorus of praise for Jonathan Coe’s new book Middle England.”

Middle England’s buzz-building — a coalescing of author, publisher, festivals, friends, fans, and the politically like-minded — is a case study in literary manufacture, a topic raised, but no more, in Front Row Late. If such processes were brought fully into the light, and considered in an inquiring, eclectic spirit, not just the world of books but the common good might be well served. The chance of that being tried on the BBC is less than zero.

The second program, broadcast on BBC Four on the eve of the Man Booker ceremony, was a one-hour survey of the prize’s half-century, inevitably guided by the BBC panjandrum Kirsty Wark, with a title — Barneys, Books and Bust-Ups — sampling from the corporation’s millennial trademark: patronising populism.

Again, to be fair, the endless milling shots of big-night luminaries — filling for the lack of relevant visuals — were a bracing rapid-fire test, and insiders were again good value: the late publisher Tom Maschler, who took the idea from France’s Prix Goncourt (“I set it up because England is backward in terms of literary appreciation”); double recipient Peter Carey, on how the prize “brought new voices from beyond the metropole” before becoming a “literary juggernaut”; and the scholar Hermione Lee contextualising a clip of Penelope Fitzgerald, winner in 1979 with Offshore, being cut down on the BBC’s The Book Programme by disdainful host Robert Robinson and fellow guest Susan Hill soon after her sweet moment.

If the latter was excruciating, and a hapless TV presenter’s buttonholing of judges Angela Carter and Fay Weldon in 1983 equally so, Anthony Burgess’s reaction when beaten by William Golding in 1980 (“a small, parochial prize suitable for small, parochial novels”) was cowardly, and his feint to the Nobel, which Golding would also shortly receive, indicative of a cosmic humour at work.

Familiar rivalries and incidents were retold: Brian Aldiss and Malcolm Bradbury’s attempt to stop Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 (it was also chosen as the “best of…” after the Booker’s twenty-fifth and fortieth years); John Berger handing his prize money (“as a revolutionary writer”) to the Black Panthers in 1972 on account of parent company Booker-McConnell’s historic links to Caribbean sugar plantations; Alan Taylor’s counter-coup in 1994, which installed James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late over Alan Hollinghurst or Jill Paton Walsh. Kirsty’s anecdotal heap vaguely prompted the old joke that to find England’s real bloodsport, the place to look is the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement. But there was plenty of mulch too — Beryl Bainbridge’s backache, Val McDermid ploughing through the longlist while cooking, P.H. Newby’s sister watching people bet on the outcome in 1969 when she secretly knew he had won, Anne Enright being denied a visit to the loo — before it perked up with Fay Weldon’s agent being punched.

There were omissions, such as Nicholas Mosley resigning as a judge in 1991 because he wanted a novel of “ideas” not of “style” to win. That decision was made to look sound after Ben Okri’s overblown The Famished Road was selected, a rival to Keri Hulme’s The Bone People in 1985 as the prize’s nadir. More immediately, there was a hint of recent controversies over the Booker’s expansion, but no mention of the various extractive spin-offs (such as the convoluted process that in 2018 ended by delivering a Golden Man Booker to Michael Ondaatje for his 1992 winner, The English Patient). The sponsors’ interests and priorities were tangibly out of bounds.

In editorial terms both these programs, as so often on the BBC, had no governing theme: no solidity or coherence, above all no guiding intelligence. In the end — and this can be intuited of a clear majority of BBC TV’s so-called factual output — all they aspire to do is, fundamentally, fill space. Typical here is the aural blancmange of Kirsty Wark’s script: the Booker’s “annual awards ceremony unfolds early in October in an opulent London venue,” it is “always a magnet for scandal, with backbiting and bitchiness ever present,” though “as well as amusing literary spats, [the prize] also uncovered some major new writers,” “from humble beginnings the annual award ceremony has cemented itself as the go-to literary event of the year.” And so, witlessly, on.

This week’s Bagehot column in the Economist draws a lesson from the veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time — an intelligent, long-running Radio 4 discussion program about pretty much everything under the sun. The lesson, hard as it would be to take forward, goes well beyond the BBC, but fits the limited ground examined here:

[In Our Time’s] success is testimony to the power of curiosity. Rather than being sick of experts, people are desperate to hear their reports from the frontiers of knowledge… There is nothing inegalitarian about catering to this curiosity, just as there is nothing egalitarian about doling out dumbed-down drivel… BBC producers churn out formulaic products aimed at the imaginary median viewer… Institutions like the BBC need to rediscover their cultural self-confidence.

Such words, clearly, are the beginning of an argument not its conclusion. In its large context, two forgettable BBC programs around the Man Booker prize scarcely matter. Yet the world exists in grains of sand, and (pace Walter Bagehot on the House of Lords) the cure for admiring the BBC is to look at it closely — then also look through it, to society and this moment’s needs. For the time being, Anna Burns’s narrator in Milkman nails those: “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, to be present, be adult.” •

The post Anna Burns, a Booker with soul appeared first on Inside Story.

Quoting Menzies at a Liberal government is always a good tactic, so here’s more from the founding father, from April 1939:

I have become convinced that, in the Pacific, Australia must regard herself as a principal, providing herself with her own information and maintaining her own diplomatic contacts with foreign powers… It is true that we are not a numerous people, but we have our vigour, intelligence and resource, and I see no reason why we should not play not only an adult, but an effective part in the affairs of the Pacific.

Menzies offers an enduring truth while stating the bleeding obvious. Over the decades since then, though, Australia has ceased using media power to play an intelligent and effective part in the affairs of our region. As one former senior ABC staffer puts it, our programming for regional audiences is simply “risible.”

To be clear, “broadcasting” is a catch-all covering a lot of ground: analogue to digital to satellite, Facebook to FM. Content converges: radio and TV become video and audio and text. Broadcasting is publishing. TV and radio are reborn online. The digital age both unites and atomises.

When the Abbott government axed the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV in 2014, just a year after it began, a communications minister named Malcolm Turnbull argued that there was no need for the Oz voice in a crowded regional arena. If people wanted international stuff, Turnbull said, they could go to the BBC or CNN.

The ghost of Menzies would have raised both eyebrows, because Menzies said the purpose of getting close to great and powerful friends was to bolster our interests, not hand ’em over — insurance policy, not giving away the store. During his three years as prime minister, the same Malcolm Turnbull came round to the “speak for ourselves” viewpoint.

In a key foreign policy speech last year, he reflected on the digital revolution:

Technology has connected local aspirations and grievances with global movements.

Hyper-connectivity has amplified the reach and power of non-state actors, forcing us to reassess how we, as nation states, assert and defend our sovereign interest…

Now, in this brave new world we cannot rely on great powers to safeguard our interests. We have to take responsibility for our own security and prosperity while recognising we are stronger when sharing the burden of collective leadership with trusted partners and friends.

The gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability are signals for all of us to play more active roles in protecting and shaping the future of this region.

Take responsibility. Don’t expect the great powers to safeguard our interests. Act to shape the future of the region. Menzies would nod at this description of the value of a powerful Australian voice — and the need to speak for ourselves.

And yet, these are the worst of days for Australian international TV, which is twenty-five years old this year. And they are the hardest days for Radio Australia, which reaches its eightieth birthday next year. They are gasping, limping shadows. The cash drips slowly; much life has departed.

In 2010, the ABC spent $36 million on international services (about $42 million in today’s dollars). These days, a guesstimate of the international broadcasting spend is $11 million. The ABC is vague about the exact figure; perhaps it’s an embarrassed reticence. Yet tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

To remake Australia’s international media thinking, the government and the ABC will have to separate domestic bickering from foreign policy. The government can overturn poor decisions that have damaged our international voice if it wants to, and the ABC has the capacity to recover its role as an international broadcaster, a core charter responsibility that Aunty has been shedding.

Surveying international broadcasting’s decline means picking through the ruins of past decisions by government and the ABC. The debris still remains from the Abbott government’s decision to axe the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV just a year after it began. That was a sad example of Australia’s international interests being trampled by domestic argy-bargy driven by deeply entrenched hang-ups about the ABC. The Liberal Party’s fear of the ABC was succinctly expressed long ago by John Howard’s consigliore Graham Morris: “The ABC is our enemy talking to our friends.”

The enemy–friends tension is a backhanded tribute to the ABC’s influence across Australian society. For many decades, ABC power also reached beyond our borders; domestic political arguments have obscured the ABC’s traditional role as a major media voice in our neighbourhood. It discarded its South Pacific audience by reducing electricity to its shortwave broadcast towers, degrading the signal and cutting off listeners, and then announced there was no longer a shortwave audience. The broadcaster decided what it was prepared to give, not what the South Pacific required.

A broadcasting recovery involves listening to what the Islands say they need, rather than telling them what they’ll get. Reviving South Pacific shortwave should be part of a bigger project: to restore the ABC as an international broadcaster and create a twenty-first-century Australian voice across the Asia-Pacific.

For its part, Canberra stopped thinking about what good journalism could do for the region, and for Australia’s vital interests. The fashionable chatter was all about new technology and soft power, losing sight of deep truths about the role of journalism. Soft power trumped hard news.

Discarding our journalistic heritage in our region is poor history, lousy policy and appalling judgement — and it meant that lots of old media agendas became fresh headaches for Australia. Propaganda and polluted facts are back, rebadged as fake news. Canberra laments challenges to the rules-based system in a tone tinged with a bewildered sense that things shouldn’t be like this. A media rethink can start with putting in the journalistic vision so lacking in last year’s foreign policy white paper.

The paper was happy to talk about “media” (fourteen instances) but didn’t once mention “journalism” or “broadcasting.” This was strange, given that the final chapter, “Partnerships and Soft Power,” stressed the “vital” need for persuasive Australian soft power to influence the behaviour or thinking of others. The closest reference to journos was a domestic tick for Australia’s “robust independent media.”

“Global governance is becoming harder,” the white paper judged, and the international order is contested by “measures short of war,” including “economic coercion, cyber attacks, misinformation and media manipulation.” The paper fretted that Australia must be ready to “dispel misconceptions and ensure our voice is heard when new and traditional media are used to sow misinformation or misrepresent Australian policies.”

The “ensure our voice is heard” line was where I expected to find journalism. Instead, the answer to the “voice” conundrum was lots of soft power and digital engagement — a reasonable start, not a full answer. Australia needs to rediscover the power of hard news as the sharp edge of our soft power.

For twenty-five years, Australia’s international TV voice has been a political plaything and a broadcasting afterthought, constantly facing chops and changes. This history of chop, change and political spasm is evident in the eight changes of identity and ownership over that quarter-decade:

1. First came Australia Television, or ATV, in 1993, when the Keating Labor government gave the ABC start-up funding. Unlike the rest of the ABC, though, ATV carried commercials. Canberra wanted it, but didn’t want to pay for it.

2. Channel 7 was given control in 1998 (twice — once with news, then as a pure shopping channel). The commercial network made a hash of it, didn’t make any money and lost interest. So…

3. In 2001, it went back to the ABC as ABC Television International.

4. A year later, it was rebranded as ABC Asia Pacific.

5. Then, in 2006, came another name change: the Australia Network.

6. In the 2014 budget, the Coalition cut all funding to the Australia Network. It closed, to be replaced by a drastically cutdown operation.

7. The Australia Network’s replacement, Australia Plus, started in September 2014.

8. From 1 July 2018, the network has been renamed ABC Australia.

Neither side of politics emerges with much credit from this zigzag. Canberra’s level of interest has been as changeable as the name.

The moment of creation under Labor illustrates recurring themes of limited attention, political crosscurrents, and plenty of vision but little money. Launching ATV to broadcast to the Asia-Pacific, the Keating government boasted of its significance for regional engagement and interests, ranging from media and education to business and foreign policy. Confident talk wasn’t matched by cash or commitment.

The ABC sought to establish an international version of its domestic service, but couldn’t devote proper resources to ATV, not least because the government didn’t want to pay for what Australia needed. Programming suffered because the ABC had domestic copyright to broadcast programs but didn’t own international rights. The Keating government knew ATV was worthwhile, but wouldn’t give anything more than start-up funding for the satellite service. Once established, it would have to pay its own way with advertising.

The refusal to launch ATV as a fully funded public broadcasting service (like the rest of the ABC) was telling. A hybrid design — part ABC, part commercial — was the half-arsed response of a half-hearted government. That half-in, half-out problem continued.

Domestic politics too often derails discussion of international TV. The Keating cabinet’s debates about establishing ATV veered off into rant-and-rave sessions about how ABC domestic reporting was hurting the government. Much bile was directed at ABC managing director David Hill, who’d fought budget cuts with a famous campaign proclaiming the ABC cost each Australian only “eight cents a day.”

A couple of times when ATV was on the cabinet agenda, Hill came to Canberra to support the idea. Having the ebullient ABC head in the cabinet anteroom was a disastrous provocation. After navigating past Hill, ministers would have another ABC hate session, then defer decision.

Themes from the creation story recur over the twenty-five years:

Politics overturns policy: Each change of federal government — Keating to Howard to Rudd to Abbott — has been a chop-change moment for international TV. The Liberal–Labor foreign policy consensus has never translated into agreement on the worth of our broadcasting service to the regions. (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are different regions with different audiences.) Thus…

The gap between big interests and little cash: The high rhetoric of Asia-Pacific engagement is negated by low commitment of dollars.

The ABC as problem and solution: All federal governments come to fear/distrust/hate ABC reporting on them; that perennial rant-and-rave problem obscures a clear understanding of what public broadcasting can do for Australia in the Asia-Pacific. The problem has a funny dimension: politicians know the power of the ABC, but they’re not willing to use that power to serve our international interests.

International ABC can’t be domestic ABC: The ABC’s domestic programming is vital to the international service, but that’s the start, not the finish. Reaching and holding audiences in Asia and the South Pacific is about talking with, not just talking to. Diverse audiences have different needs. Programming has to be for them, not just rebroadcast from Oz.

Chop and change hurts: International broadcasting is expensive and complex because a lot of power is in play. Australia’s constant and growing interests in the Asia-Pacific demand a constant and growing broadcast conversation, using all converging media.

A strong, consistent voice in our region serves Australian foreign policy. Get the zigzag pattern off the screen and adjust the international TV picture.

The wrack and roil afflicting the international system matches the digital disruption of news media. The rules and norms of the foreign policy game and media world shake, shift and suffer.

Australia frets about threats to the rules-based system as the tectonic plates of geopolitics and geoeconomics crunch. Not least of those truths is the one to be found at the heart of seven Australian defence white papers over forty years: geography matters.

Traditionally, Australia wanted a strong international broadcasting voice in what defence-speak calls our region of primary strategic interest: Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. That broadcasting tradition is looking very modern. Geography is back. Or, more accurately, the demands of geography never went away — we’re just feeling the weight with fresh force.

In the foreign policy game, the word “influence” stands besides “interests” at the calculating, cerebral end of the field. But influence and interests must always be within shouting distance of values and beliefs, which tend to reside in the heart and hearth part of the arena.

The qualities of good journalism — “reliable,” “independent,” “factual” — are exactly the same as are needed in the foreign policy of a country seeking to persuade others, protect interests, project influence and promote values.

Amid all the disruption, there’s a perfect media instrument ready to serve as Australia’s voice in the Asia-Pacific, to do journalism that’ll serve our interests and values. Well-tested by history, with a proud heritage of great journalism and a prescient charter, that instrument is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Simple as ABC, really.

Or it should be. To illustrate the ABC problem, come into my anecdotage while I recall a previous life as an ABC correspondent. Two decades ago, a sardonic line rattled around ABC executive ranks: “A peasant in Longreach is more important than a peasant in Lombok.” The bitter point of the comparison — central Queensland versus an Indonesian island — was that the ABC must devote scarce cash to its domestic users, not its potential international audience. Axing South Pacific shortwave last year affirmed that old corporate view.

But power politics zoom back, the digital revolution rages and Australia’s foreign policy dilemmas demand that the ABC get back into the international journalism game, bigger and better.

Three distinct decision strands must combine for the back-bigger-and-better conclusion to be realised. Strands one and two reside in Canberra: first, political and policy consensus; second, the shift from agreement to action.

Canberra’s troubled consensus: In international affairs, tectonic plates are crunching and lava is melting the rules-based system. Canberra’s agreement on how nasty things are looking is expressed in the 2016 defence white paper, the 2017 intelligence review and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

The defence white paper frets about fraying international rules: the word “rules” is used sixty-four times — forty-eight of these in the formulation “rules-based global order.” The stress on rules expresses the fear of what’s failing. “Rules-based global order” is a big phrase to cover such disparate forces as jihadism and China’s rise. Mostly, though, it’s about China.

The intelligence review identified three big trends: fundamental changes in the international system, extremism with global reach, and accelerating technological change. And the foreign policy paper got a lot into one stark sentence: “Today, China is challenging America’s position.”

The Canberra consensus fuels the substantial Liberal–Labor unity ticket on foreign policy. The ticket is tacit but important. As always, argument rages about whether the government or opposition will do a better job on China or the US alliance or in the South Pacific. What’s not disputed is the trouble in the trends. Beneath the usual politics, there’s a shared sense of foreboding.

From description to prescription: It’s always tough moving from anxiety to action. What can/should/must we do?

A strong broadcast voice in the Asia-Pacific, based on the ABC, is part of the answer to regional challenges. Australia must move from the agreed description of problems in strand one to a new Canberra consensus on the use of the ABC to support our interests, influence and values in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond.

We must rebuild a powerful and consistent broadcasting voice so we can rejoin regional conversations and contests. Tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

Canberra has to agree on the prescription, set the policy response and do the budget numbers for a sustained media commitment.

ABC changes: Recent decades show that the ABC will always choose Longreach. ABC priorities are domestic, not international. The institutional response is logical, yet it fails to serve Australia beyond our shores. We need a future ABC that can do what Australia needs for Lombok and Lautoka and Lae.

The domestic–international tensions inherent in the ABC charter must be resolved. The international responsibility must be more than a declining division of the ABC — it must become a new planet in the Australian policy universe. That planet must be created by the ABC and draw on its values and resources.

To serve Australia’s interests, influence and values in the Asia-Pacific, we need an Australian International Broadcasting Corporation, or AIBC. The AIBC would resolve the domestic–international tensions in the ABC charter, giving proper expression to the charter’s international dimension.

The charter is at the heart of the 1983 Act that remade the ABC from a Commission to a Corporation. In the charter’s foundational clause, the law gives equal weight to the ABC’s domestic and international responsibilities.

Domestically, the ABC must produce innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard — programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community, with a specific mention of “programs of an educational nature.”

Internationally, it must transmit news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural programs that will “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs; and enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs.”

The habit of rebroadcasting domestic fare has been maintained in the relaunch of the Asia-Pacific TV service, rebranded as ABC Australia. The ABC says the service “will deliver distinctive content to culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences and to Australian expatriates, encouraging international awareness and understanding of Australia and Australian attitudes.” Fine words, but the ABC’s reach falls short of its grasp.

The programming offers rebroadcasts of ABC news programs, “slice of home” shows and Australian Rules football. For an expat, an excellent menu. But for forty countries of the Asia-Pacific — those “culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences” — this is lots of Oz attitudes, about Oz for Oz.

Australian content is necessary but not sufficient for an Asia-Pacific service. Australian content needs to be the start, whereas at the moment it’s the finish.

To do more will need cash and commitment from Canberra — and the AIBC to deliver the focus. The aim is to talk with neighbours, not merely broadcast to neighbours; that supposes media conversation of many types, not just an oration from Oz.

Atop the excellent foundation of good ABC shows, the AIBC must offer reporting that matters in the lives of Lombok or Lautoka or Lae. The new organisation should be born of the ABC, reflect ABC traditions and standards, and draw on ABC resources — but it must have its own corporate identity as an expression of its distinct, international purpose.

The AIBC would have its own chair and board and its own separate budget. The deputy chair of the ABC and the ABC managing director should be on the board of the AIBC, but so should the head of the Special Broadcasting Corporation.

Replicating the successful ABC model, the board should have a staff-elected member, and then gather board members with international experience from business, diplomacy, aid and one of the major generators of Oz soft power in the years ahead, the universities.

Under its Act, the ABC can establish subsidiary companies, so in theory no new legislation is required. But in line with my argument that Canberra must pay for what Canberra wants, the AIBC must have its own budget allocation. Don’t leave it to the ABC. Aunty can’t pay for what Australian foreign policy demands.

The AIBC must have a separate identity so the international effort doesn’t get drawn into the domestic fights that are a natural part of the ABC’s existence. Like the ABC, it must be a fully funded, independent public broadcaster — not a state broadcaster.

Give the AIBC the right to seek partners where it sees a natural fit in such realms as development aid, philanthropy and universities. Its core, though, is as a public broadcaster.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Australia can have an important foreign policy instrument on the cheap. If the AIBC is going to have heft, it must be richly funded by Canberra; the ABC doesn’t have a lazy $30 million to redirect to Oz foreign policy, much less $50 million or $75 million.

Canberra has to see the need and fund the instrument. Australian interests, influence and values demand an Australian voice in the Asia-Pacific. •

The post The sharp edge of soft power appeared first on Inside Story.

This person — X — has consented to have this much information shared because, after two weeks of controversy, the Department of Communications and the Arts has just informed the information commissioner that it has changed its mind and doesn’t intend to release the identity of recommended candidates for the ABC board. And this is even though X is quite happy for their name to be released and has twice told the department so.

X doesn’t want to be named in isolation in a news story like this, but would be happy to be publicly identified, with others, under freedom-of-information disclosure.

But let’s back up a bit. All this follows my now year-old freedom-of-information request seeking information about appointees to the ABC board, as reported in Inside Story last week. I was made aware of X’s identity after that story.

It is hard to imagine a better-suited applicant. X had long experience with the ABC at multiple levels. As well, X had contributed to the media industry over thirty years, served in CEO roles in relevant institutions and was an experienced board member of a number of important cultural organisations. Not surprisingly, the independent nomination panel recommended to the minister, Mitch Fifield, that X be appointed to the ABC board.

The minister rejected or ignored that recommendation, and instead appointed Donny Walford and Kirstin Ferguson, the woman acting as chair of the board following Justin Milne’s resignation.

Donny Walford was a South Australian company director with no media experience. She had not bothered to apply for the job, and thus had not been through the application process. Yet, according to Senator Fifield’s media release, she had been “identified by the government as having the requisite skills.”

Last week, a member of the nomination panel, former Liberal MP Neil Brown, criticised Walford’s appointment, saying she “came from nowhere.” Indeed. But until now, I didn’t know who missed out — or rather, whom we, the Australian public, missed out on.

Ferguson, at least, had been through the process and was shortlisted, though she withdrew before recommendations were made. We now know that she was persuaded to change her mind and throw her name into the ring again by then nomination panel member Janet Albrechtsen, who unloaded on her last week.

But back to X. Undeterred by the minister’s rejection, X made another attempt when the call for applicants to join the ABC board went out again in 2017. Again, not surprisingly, they were recommended for appointment by the nomination panel.

And again, Senator Fifield ignored the recommendation and made another captain’s pick. This time it was Vanessa Guthrie, despite her not having been recommended and having no media experience. And once again the minister’s media release said she “was identified by the government as having the requisite skills.” Until then, Guthrie was best known as chair of the Minerals Council of Australia and an outspoken advocate for the coal industry.

The other 2017 appointee, Georgie Somerset, had at least been recommended for appointment — along with X.

So why this story now?

As reported last week, I have had a freedom-of-information request in for a year seeking the identity of those who were recommended for the ABC board in 2017. It was refused by the department and is on appeal to the information commissioner, an independent statutory officer.

After last week’s article was published, two things happened.

First, I was introduced to X. Second, after months of silence, the Office of the Information Commissioner got in touch and told me the department was considering changing its mind and releasing the information to me. Apparently, the department notified the commissioner of this in July.

The deadline for this reconsideration of the request was today, Tuesday 9 October.

And guess what. Today I received another email from the information commissioner telling me that the department decided last week that it hadn’t changed its mind. It would not release the information; rather, it would continue to claim that the information was exempt under the cabinet documents and personal privacy exemptions.

The timing, of course, invites cynicism. The digging-in can only be a result of the controversies of the last fortnight. What would once have been a tiny news story would now be a major political storm.

Trust me, the comparison between X’s qualifications and those of Walford and Guthrie would provoke extremely pointed questions about political interference in the ABC.

So the information commissioner is now grinding into action to look at the documents and consider whether they are properly claimed to be exempt. The department has been given a fortnight to cough up the documents to the commissioner. After that, I will be consulted and so will the department.

It’s a good thing I haven’t been holding my breath. What’s the betting the Wentworth by-election will have come and gone before a decision is made?

Meanwhile, if any other “X’s” — recommended applicants for ABC board positions — wish to get in touch, my email address is below. •

margaret@margaretsimons.com.au

The post The ABC’s X factor appeared first on Inside Story.

Last year, it appears, an independent process considered eighteen people for appointment to the ABC board. Some of them were recommended to communications minister Mitch Fifield, but he instead appointed his own pick. Of the rejected ones, two don’t object to their identities being known, yet the department won’t reveal even their names. I say to all eighteen: time to speak up, people! We want to know who you are.

How do I know these bare facts? The answer is an exemplar of how freedom-of-information laws are failing to ensure transparency when governments misbehave.

The arm’s-length appointment process for ABC and SBS board members was created by the Rudd government with the aim of bringing an end to decades of stacking by both sides of politics. A nomination panel was set up to identify potential candidates, assess them against criteria and make recommendations to the minister.

But since the Coalition took power, the process has been trashed. First, the Abbott government nobbled the panel by appointing News Corp columnist Janet Albrechtsen and former Liberal minister Neil Brown. As the Australia Institute observed in a recent report on the process, both were “highly questionable appointments.” Albrechtsen, a former ABC board member, had made her hostility to the ABC clear, and Brown had told the Australian that if it were up to him he would “scrap the ABC and start over.”

Thankfully, appointments last year created a more balanced nomination panel. Chaired by former Treasury secretary and Westpac chair Ted Evans, the panel doubtless does its work diligently. But that hardly matters, because it is ignored. It meets and makes recommendations, and then the minister appoints other people entirely.

Three of the ABC’s current seven board members were appointed by Fifield despite not having been recommended by the nomination panel. They are Vanessa Guthrie (no relation to Michelle), Donny Walford and the most recent appointee, Joseph Gersh.

Another, current acting chair Kirstin Ferguson, was highly rated by the panel but withdrew before she was recommended. She was later persuaded by Fifield to accept appointment, and joined the board in 2015. Strictly speaking, she too is a direct ministerial appointment.

So who missed out — or rather, who did we, the Australian public, miss out on?

Almost exactly a year ago — on 4 October 2017 — I made a freedom-of-information request to the Department of Communications and the Arts asking for the nomination panel’s list of recommendations for the appointments made in February 2017, the round in which Vanessa Guthrie was given the gig despite not being recommended.

At that time, the minister’s press release said that while Guthrie had not been recommended, she “was identified by the government as having the requisite skills.” Oh yes? Guthrie had no media experience whatsoever, but her political views were well known. The year before her appointment, she had told the Australian Financial Review that “inner-city smashed avocado eaters” were unfairly targeting coal and the minerals industry. At the time, the ABC was facing constant government criticism over its reporting on the coalmining industry and energy security.

But so much for the appointee. Who missed out? A year after lodging my request, I still don’t know.

First, the department threatened to refuse my request because it would “involve substantial and unreasonable diversion of departmental resources.” In the negotiation process that followed, it emerged that this was because the documents included the curriculum vitaes of all those expressing interest in the appointment (not just those recommended, which is what I had asked for). I told the department I didn’t need the CVs. That’s what LinkedIn is for, I thought to myself. And I reiterated that I only wanted to know about the recommended applicants.

All that took until November. Then the department told me that I would have to pay for the request, so I sent the requested deposit of $160.96.

Then they told me they needed an extra thirty days for “third party consultations” with the people named in the documents. Eighteen people were involved, they told me. These, I assume, include the two who were appointed — Georgie Somerset, who had apparently been recommended by the nomination panel, and Vanessa Guthrie, who wasn’t. That left sixteen others, some of them recommended by the panel but rejected in Guthrie’s favour by the minister.

Six of the eighteen people apparently objected to information being released about them. Two did not. Another ten didn’t reply to the department’s letter asking their views.

By now it was nearly Christmas, and the department asked for another extension due to the Christmas shutdown. Then another extension. Then another.

Finally, on 16 February this year, the department refused my request, saying the documents were cabinet documents, that releasing them would breach personal privacy, and that the public interest did not outweigh these considerations.

A list of the ten documents not released was attached. It included three ministerial submissions, four cabinet briefs, two emails from the department to the minister’s office and — hey presto — the board nomination panel report, which was what I really wanted.

At the end of February I appealed against the department’s refusal to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, a theoretically independent statutory agency with the job of deciding freedom-of-information appeals, among other things. Not all the documents were cabinet documents, I wrote. In particular the board nomination report was created not for cabinet but for the minister.

I also argued that personal privacy in this case was surely outweighed by public interest:

ABC board positions are important public roles, and in this case the minister appointed a person not recommended by the panel. The only personal information that would be revealed is the fact that certain people applied and were recommended by the appointments panel. This is a low level of personal information and concerns only a public process.

That was at the end of February this year. The request then entered a deep black hole.

In August I got an email  from the information commissioner’s office asking if I was still happy to exclude the CVs from my request. Yes, I said, breathing deeply.

And that’s the last I heard.

Is it too much to hope that after the events of the past week, the information commissioner might get round to my request? And might it be that the public interest considerations are now amply apparent?

A couple of days ago, meanwhile, the Australia Institute released a report on this trashed ABC board appointment process and recommended ways it could be made more transparent. It’s worth a read. And Fairfax Media reports today that parliament will consider another process for appointing the board. •

The post Who missed out on the ABC board? appeared first on Inside Story.

But we would be very wrong to think that her departure is a good thing for Australia’s most important cultural institution. It leaves the ABC vulnerable and destabilised and highlights longer-term issues that seriously weaken the organisation. For this, Guthrie and the board share responsibility, as does the federal government.

As a result, at a peak in the ever-present culture wars, the ABC does not have a constructive conversation with government, or with the opposition likely to be the incoming government, or with the Australian people, or with its own staff.

That is the consequence of a poor recruiting decision and a chair and a board apparently incapable of constructively managing the result.

So what went wrong? Today’s announcement resulted from a combination of long-term issues and short-term problems.

For more than a year, serious tensions have existed between the ABC chair, Justin Milne, and Guthrie. These are the main reason for her departure.

Guthrie was perceived to be too hands-off and not sufficiently engaged in running the business. People speak, for example, of her frequent travel. Milne, for his part, was increasingly taking the front foot. He was the one talking about Project Jetstream, a big, costly digital database to carry all ABC content in anticipation of a day when conventional broadcasting disappeared.

I am told there is precious little on paper about exactly what Project Jetstream is — and even less in the way of a funding plan. Within the ABC there are still post-traumatic memories of the last big digital infrastructure project, the Web Content Management System, which held the organisation in stasis for years before delivering something that was already out of date. Guthrie was a Jetstream sceptic, doubting the organisation’s ability to persuade the government to fund it and preferring to focus the ABC’s tightened budget on content.

But the real issue, as the ABC is saying, was her “style,” which is code for the perception that Guthrie was not sufficiently present and not up to the job. Last week, her absence during much of an off-site management meeting at the Opera House was noted and remarked on. People observed that it was as though Milne was the managing director, dealing with the nitty-gritty, and Guthrie was the chair of the board. Relations between them were becoming increasingly difficult.

But Milne didn’t enjoy the unqualified liking or support of the rest of the board, either. In fact, some of them dislike him more than they are cool on Guthrie. In the last few months, though, that balance changed — which brings us to the short-term issue.

I am told that as the ABC annual report was being prepared over the last couple of months, two financial issues came to light. Neither was disastrous — the first was a cost overrun, the second has variously been described as a cash flow problem or an accounting issue — but they came as a surprise to the board and were seen as being embarrassing. Most of all, the board was angry at what it saw as Guthrie’s sanguine approach to the issue. It added to a view of her as insufficiently across the detail of the organisation.

Others remark that former chief financial officer David Pendleton — much resented when he was in the job because of his iron hold over the money — is now missed. Pendleton was one of the internal candidates for managing director but was perceived as not having the breadth necessary. He left after failing to get an interview.

While I am told the auditor-general and KPMG signed off on the accounts without demur, the perception was that there would be an embarrassing line item in the accounts. At the same time, the accounts will also reveal a big redundancy bill, brought to book from the beginning of Guthrie’s era.

Another part of the background is that Guthrie was not enjoying the job. Recruited in 2015 from managing Google’s Asia-Pacific operation, she was a surprise choice. From earliest days it was clear that she was not a strong communicator and at sea in the public and political elements of the job. At times she even denied that there was a political element.

She told people shortly after arrival that she would serve only one term and hoped for a longer-term future in Australia as a board director. The ABC was a way of getting back to her home country in the first place, and lifting her profile at the same time. On any analysis, that has gone badly wrong.

In a statement released today, Guthrie says she is considering her legal options. Any settlement will cost the organisation millions, but no cash will repair her profile.

I understand that negotiations were under way for the last few weeks at least with a view to easing her out. If those had gone well, there would have been an announcement of her voluntary departure, nice things said all round and tightly spun media management. But that all fell apart badly in the last twenty-four hours. Board members blame Guthrie for this. She dug her heels in, they say, and made it impossible to manage the exit. Guthrie herself did not return calls asking for comment. The situation became untenable and she was sacked.

Both sides are now lawyering up and reaching for the spin doctors. Guthrie has employed Andrew Butcher of Bespoke Approach, formerly personal spokesperson for Rupert Murdoch. Milne has reached for Andrew Maiden, former head of the pay television lobby and now “very much in the building,” according to my sources at ABC Ultimo headquarters.

What happens from here? David Anderson has been made acting managing director. That is no surprise, and the feeling from a few people is that the board should simply appoint him to the job. But I am told there will be a full appointment and the job will be advertised. He was the leading internal candidate when Guthrie was appointed — and, in a recruitment process that almost nobody defends, he and Guthrie were the only people interviewed by the whole board.

Anderson was formerly in charge of television, and in the restructure late last year got the title of “director entertainment and specialist,” which I said at the time could be described as the “everything else” division after news and current affairs and radio have been taken out. He was perceived as Guthrie’s most likely successor.

The board turnover since Guthrie was appointed has been near total, but there is a strong feeling among the incumbents that Anderson would have been a better pick. But the make-up of the board itself is part of the longer-term problem.

Labor’s communications minister, Stephen Conroy, set up an arm’s-length selection process to get rid of the worst of the political stacking. It worked — kind of. We now have a board made up of similar corporate types, none of whom, other than staff-elected director Jane Connors, have experience of and understanding of content.

Then the current communications minister, Mitch Fifield, failed to follow the new process for the board appointments announced in February 2017. He appointed Vanessa Guthrie, a Western Australian company director with a background in the mining industry, instead of the nomination panel’s recommendation.

So who missed out? Or rather, whom did we miss out on? I lodged a freedom-of-information request for that information close on a year ago, but it was refused by the government. It is currently on appeal with the federal information commissioner.

Meantime, when Justin Milne was appointed chair in 2017 one of his perceived strengths was his friendship with Malcolm Turnbull. Not only did that relationship fail to deliver visible benefits, but the calling card has relatively quickly expired.

Under former managing director Mark Scott, the ABC chair and the managing director would tour the Canberra corridors together, singing from the same song sheet. This did not happen at any time when Guthrie was in the job. •

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Recent events in Parliamentalia, which Chan could hardly have anticipated at the time of writing, provided a grotesque illustration of her theme. Amid the voices that dominate the airwaves, striving to shout each other down and cut each other off, how are we to hear the voices of the people they are supposed to represent? For Hugh Martin, head of distribution for the ABC’s regional and local division, this is a question of central importance.

Martin was an early convert to the digital revolution in news media. From the mid nineties, he was convinced of its “phenomenal” potential as a means of promoting audience engagement and gathering stories from regional and remote locations. Before joining the ABC, he had worked as an online editor for the Age and then spent six years setting up the digital arm of APN News and Media in regional New South Wales and Queensland.

With his metropolitan background, he found himself on a steep learning curve, he says, especially in Queensland, where the concentration of population and resources outside the major cities and strong local cultures created different ground rules for communication. “You can’t do business on the phone,” he says. “You have to go and sit with people, talk to them and understand what their concerns are.” In his current role, presiding over the Connecting Communities project, which involves an expansion of ABC regional operations through forty-eight bureaus across the country, he sees the work of communication as very much a two-way process.

“One of the things we need to do is articulate the value of public broadcasting for Australians in the twenty-first century,” he says. “A lot was done to address what it was for the later twentieth century, but the environment has changed.”

When ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie spoke about the lift in regional coverage at a Friends of the ABC dinner last year, she affirmed her commitment to maintaining the role of the national broadcaster as “Australia’s most important cultural institution” and a vital link between past, present and future.

One of the project’s most interesting and genuinely transformative aspects is its rethinking of the temporal frameworks of broadcasting. Places distant from the capital cities also allow for some distance from the tyranny of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for “breaking news.” Past, present and future are deeply interwoven.

The expansion itself has been implemented with some speed. Since the middle of last year, Martin has been involved in appointing staff to eighty new positions. Sixteen of the larger bureaus now have their own dedicated chief of staff, formerly a role combined with program-making responsibilities. They act as the editorial head of the local office, fielding the range of news coming in, listing stories for the state news desk and serving as representatives of the ABC in their communities.

Where regional stations were once seen as training grounds and stepping stones for journalists and producers, the new staff have been chosen with the expectation that they will make their careers locally. Being there for the long haul makes possible a different approach to news-gathering, drawing on deeper familiarities with a place and its people, tapping into “what lives under the surface of communities.”

This “slow news” experiment is in its early stages, Martin stresses, and the groundwork takes some time to establish. With funds to send journalists to remoter communities whose stories can’t be told on a fly-in-fly-out basis, he found that higher levels of trust were called for. In one case, the mayor of an Aboriginal town was uneasy about the proposal to send a reporter in for a ten-day residence — not surprising from a historical and political point of view, as Martin says.

It’s a question of how the ABC can go about winning trust, convincing community leaders that the aim is not to make invasive raids for news and information but to give voice to people who might not otherwise be heard. That means working through land councils and other peak bodies who might help build trusting relationships. “It struck me as a conversation that had never happened before. We don’t spend time revisiting stories, trying to do more considered and thoughtful coverage.”

But might this lead to some serious ethical dilemmas? Isolated communities can have ugly problems, and journalists are not necessarily the best people to help in a crisis. What may be a chronic and deeply distressing situation for residents may have nothing more than “breaking news” value for national audiences. I pushed Martin on this question. Did he envisage having to make some tricky judgements about what might be in the best interests of the local people and what might be regarded as “in the public interest”?

It’s important to distinguish between what is in the public interest and what is interesting to the public, he responded, citing the model of Back Roads, where reporters are free of the “public interest” imperative dominating news reportage and can adapt their focus to accord with local perspectives and concerns. In some cases, the interests of the community and those of a news organisation converge quite easily, providing that attention can be trained on a situation in a way that may assist in its resolution.

Martin gives the example of a residents’ campaign to keep the police station open in Alpurrurulam, west of Mount Isa. The police presence had reduced problems of violence associated with alcohol abuse in the township, a dry community in which the elders have struggled to make long-term gains in social wellbeing. In video journalist Lucy Murray’s report, the voices of the elders come through, and it is their concerns that frame the narrative. But wider issues are also covered. Alpurrurulam was one of eighteen remote locations where temporary police posts were established as part of the Northern Territory intervention. Plans to shift to a “remote patrol model” make sense in terms of police logistics and resourcing, but the human impact needs to be recognised.

Larger regional towns generate other kinds of controversy that also call for nuanced ethical judgement. Here, Martin is interested in the relationship between councils and residents. “I think local government is potentially a great power for good,” he says. “It is hugely important in people’s lives, but councils don’t always attract the best representatives. Perhaps the ABC can be a conduit for community ideas and questions that may not be getting through to councils.” He is participating in a Melbourne University research project developing the Australian National Development Index, which documents the aspirations Australians have for themselves, their communities and their country. “With all our radio stations across the country, we can be talking about the issues this project wants to cover. It tends to be the loudest voices that get heard, but there are lots of quieter voices that have really important things to say.”

Some of the regional bureaus are experimenting with a “community commissioning” approach to storytelling. “Simply put,” Martin says, “it’s a way of asking the audience what stories they want to see covered, voting for the most popular idea, and then putting a reporter to work alongside the person who proposed it.” A recent suite of stories from the Kimberley illustrates the diversity of ways in which people interest themselves in the places and landscapes they call home. There are tales of a cache of diamonds lost in the outback during the second world war, of the curious migration of boab trees from Madagascar to the Kimberley, and of how planetary movements create the massive tidal influxes in Talbot Bay.

Martin envisages future changes in the ABC’s role not in technological terms but “as a positive influence in Australian social and democratic life.”

“It’s worth a shot,” he reflects, “because so many other things don’t seem to be working. I’ve always tried to take calculated risks with a view to getting something achieved — new types of audience content, new forms, new ways of telling stories. That’s our opportunity.”

Martin’s opportunity may only push at the edges of the massive communications divide that is the subject of Gabrielle Chan’s book, but cultural change happens through a confluence of energy from many directions. “Localism” is an agenda too easily derailed under the steerage of those who occupy Parliamentalia and whose idea of acknowledging the great wide land they govern is to wear it as an emblem on their lapel pins. If the future of the nation can be wrested from their control, who knows what transformative changes might occur? •

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On one occasion he assured an on-air personality — Andrew Bolt, I think, perhaps when he was still on Channel 10 — that he shared the worldview of News Corp rather than the ABC. It’s the kind of statement that would be harmless if Bolt’s viewers were its only audience, but naturally it ricocheted around the internet and into mainstream media, where it could be witnessed by the politically disengaged hordes.

Most Australians will have heard of Rupert Murdoch, fewer would know what News Corp is, and probably only a small minority could tell you which organs of media are owned by that organisation. But everybody knows the ABC. And, to the consternation of conservative warriors, survey after survey suggests that the majority of voters are quite attached to it.

The members of our major parties are more extreme than their MPs, and last weekend the Liberal Party’s annual federal council indulged in a bit of feelgoodery by passing a motion to privatise the ABC. The timing could have been worse — it could have been this time next month, with the 28 July by-elections days rather than weeks away. But it was extremely unhelpful to the Turnbull government and left ministers scrambling to assure the country they have no such plans.

Naturally enough, the motion’s proviso — “except for services into regional areas” — was barely reported.

(Another motion passed by the council, to follow the United States’ lead and move our embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, would be met by utter indifference by about 95 per cent of the electorate.)

Some issues have greater potential impact on election results than others. Party strategists have ways of measuring this “salience,” but much of it is guesswork. Would a government that promised to sell the ABC necessarily lose an election? It would depend what else was at stake. But political parties loathe taking chances, and none would be reckless enough to take such a policy to the electorate.

A by-election is a different beast. Because it’s not about who will run the country, it can come to be about something else, which usually involves sending a message to the government not to take voters for granted. And “don’t privatise the ABC” is a wonderful potential by-election theme.

There will be five by-elections on 28 July. The two Western Australian ones, in Perth and Fremantle, will be won by Labor (the latter, at a big stretch, by the Greens). Elsewhere, ReachTEL surveys have had the Liberals ahead in the Tasmanian seat of Braddon (54–46 two-party preferred) and the Queensland seat of Longman (52–48).

According to election guru William Bowe, ReachTEL’s most recent robopoll asked, “If a by-election in the federal electorate of X were to be held today…?” That’s better wording than the pollster’s first outing for Longman several weeks ago, “If an election were held today,” which also had the Liberals ahead; but perhaps not much better.

Something else the political class tends to forget about the hoi polloi is that they don’t necessarily know there’s a by-election on the way, and in some cases don’t know what a by-election is.

In the case of by-elections, I reckon the poll question described in this tweet, while wordier, is superior:

We do not yet know the full list of candidates, but as things stand now, who do you think you will vote for (give your number 1 preference to) in the upcoming by-election in Mayo?

But it’s still more than five weeks until polling day, and only in the final couple of weeks will the surveys become better predictors. And even then they can be hit-and-miss.

The two WA seats aside, Mayo, in South Australia, is the closest to a sure thing. Two polls now have the Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie with double-digit leads over Liberal Georgina Downer. In what is the most personality-based of the five — without Sharkie, the Centre Alliance (Centre what?) would struggle to reach double-digit support — these surveys bode very badly for Downer, even allowing for lack of clarity among respondents about the question they’re answering.

The Liberal candidate’s cause has not been helped by her past utterances on workplace relations (let’s abolish penalty rates and the minimum wage!) and, less electorally important, global warming (it’s a hoax!).

Downer has worked for the Institute of Public Affairs, after all. Has she expressed an opinion on ownership of the ABC? Remember, privatisation is IPA policy.

According to media reports, the results in the by-elections will help determine whether the general election is held this year or next. That doesn’t really make sense, but party strategists do move in mysterious ways.

Thanks to the Liberal Party’s federal council, an election in early 2019 rather than this year is looking more likely than it was a week ago. ●

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At different times over its history the ABC has tried both. Yet the determinant of success has never been the big-picture organisational chart; it’s been the internal communications, leadership culture and strategic vision.

This means that ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie’s big announcement yesterday, in which she opts firmly for organisation by genre, is probably not quite as important as it looks. The restructure might be a big change, but by itself it tells us little about her vision for public broadcasting, nor about her capacity to achieve it.

And, of course, restructures are necessarily disruptive and risky. The risk is that the organisation becomes so focused on its internals — dealing with entirely new lines of authority and ways of operating — that it loses its focus on audiences.

Having said all that, the core idea behind this restructure — that genres matter more in the new media world than platforms — has a compelling logic.

Not that it’s a new idea: in late 2011 and early 2012, Guthrie’s predecessor Mark Scott was considering just such a shake-up as part of a review called “Project 21,” which was examining how the organisation could remain relevant over the decade ahead.

By 2021, the review concluded, the ABC executive should be structured around a series of “hilltops” representing genres of content on which the ABC wanted to stake its continued claim to the public purse. Radio National would form the basis of an “ideas” hilltop, for example. Current affairs shows would be part of a “national conversation” hilltop, and so on.

Scott didn’t go ahead with the plan, although he largely agreed with it. Choosing the right moment in what was seen as a ten-year project was part of the problem, and weighing in the balance was the trenchant opposition of the existing content division heads, including radio director Kate Dundas and television director Kim Dalton.

Others among his executive were frustrated by his lack of action, and there was a general recognition when the baton passed to Guthrie that this was a difficult job still to be done.

We can see the remnants of the Project 21 thinking in Guthrie’s announcement, although she has chosen a much steeper organisational hierarchy, with just three big content divisions. This is in line with what most of the world’s broadcasters are doing, and it makes sense at a time when audiences access video and audio on televisions, computers and mobile phones without much caring whether it is a broadcast, a stream or a download.

There are also arguments against this kind of structure. Producing content for television and radio still involves specific and different skill sets. If your principal organisational structure is genre, then each area will presumably have to have a team further down the tree that holds those skills, or you will need a service division somewhere that shares its skills out. At the time of writing, the ABC has not released that level of detail.

Then you have to make it all work, and ensure that somebody is keeping an eye on your ratings and reach, communications between the divisions, your budget, the politics and your key editorial content decisions.

Once you think it all through, what might seem conceptually right and logical becomes much more complicated, and the benefits of one organisational model over another less clear.

So, having said all that, what will the newly structured ABC look like?

The ABC is using the word “teams” to describe the three big content-related organisational units in the new structure — a much cuddlier word than departments or divisions. It is also aspirational.

The success of this restructure depends on whether the “teams” live up to the term. Talk to any ABC insider and you will know that the fights between the old platform “silos” of radio, television and news have for many years epitomised the ABC at its worst, as everyone scrambled for scarce resources. “Seagulls fighting over a cup of chips at the beach,” as one former executive describes it. It’s nice to think that the restructure would fix that; but probably also naive.

The first new team is News, Analysis and Investigations. Given that the news and current affairs division has been creating content for all platforms for years, it will be the least disrupted part of the ABC under its existing head, the innovative and savvy Gaven Morris.

Guthrie also said that the recruitment of forty regional reporters, producers and presenters, announced in March this year, will be sped up. Pushing more reporters out into the regions is politically smart and right in principle. It is local and regional journalism that is suffering most as a result of the crisis in media business models. Addressing shortcomings in the commercial media is one of the reasons for the ABC’s claim on the taxpayer dollar.

But it will take more than a few junior graduates from journalism courses sitting in regional offices to alter the Sydney-centric culture of our national broadcaster. Under the structure currently in place, Fiona Reynolds as director of regional sits at the executive table with a specific remit to look after the regions. Reynolds will leave, with the current director of radio, Michael Mason, to head the second big team — Regional and Local — which includes “rural and regional teams, capital city and regional productions.” In other words, he will run everything that isn’t national, including local radio across the nation. It’s massive.

Mason’s job will still be largely about overseeing radio, since that is where the bulk of regional and local staff work — although presumably some promising but limply executed Mark Scott initiatives like ABC Open, in which producers are sent to the regions to help people tell their own stories, will also come under his remit.

The third team, and the most disrupted, is “Entertainment and Specialist.” It might as well be called the “everything else” division. It will include children’s content, music and creative development, factual and entertainment, drama, comedy and Indigenous programming. It will be headed up by the current director of television, David Anderson.

Anderson was one of a number of internal applicants for the job of managing director, and he and Michelle Guthrie were the only two to be interviewed at the last stage of the selection process. Incredibly, major talents such as Kate Dundas, former director of radio, were passed over without full interview. Anderson is a favourite of the board, and both his track record and his enormous new portfolio make him a man to watch.

And how will it actually work? Who will make the key decisions on Monday night television, for example, where the ABC has a line-up of news and current events shows like no other? Who will keep an eye on the ratings for Foreign Correspondent, and decide the budget? Who will decide whether to purchase Peppa Pig and manage the contracts and the schedule?

I understand there is to be a “distribution head” in each of the organisational units — a “fat controller” type, as one source described them — who will be in charge of pushing content out across the platforms and watching reach and impact.

There will also be a new Content Ideas Lab, responsible for experimentation. Over the past fifteen years, divisions called variously “Innovation,” “Digital Network” and other names du jour have repeatedly been either broken out to allow focus on change and experiment, or returned to the platform-based organisation units to encourage ownership and cohesion.

Guthrie’s announcement says the Content Ideas Lab will be responsible for “incubating initiatives to introduce ABC content to new audiences.” That could mean almost anything. And how will it work with the other genres?

To sum up, Guthrie is not wrong to reorganise. Something like this has been coming for a very long while. The test will be in the execution. More importantly, is she going to be a good managing director for the ABC? Incredibly, more than eighteen months after she took the top job, it is still too soon to say. She has yet to communicate either internally or externally what she is trying to achieve, or what she thinks publicly funded media should be doing in the decades ahead.

We know she wants the ABC to reach audiences who are not current ABC users. But to what purpose? How does it all fit together in the new media world, and why should future governments continue to invest?

Guthrie’s answers to these questions remain unclear, and today’s announcement doesn’t change that. ●

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At the ABC, which in so many respects mirrors the BBC, a similar range of scrambled corporate imperatives is being rolled out. In programming areas where our own national broadcaster purports to do best, like current affairs and investigative journalism, the quest to find “more ways of doing less of it better” is the order of the day. Or so it would seem, going on managing director Michelle Guthrie’s speech to the Friends of the ABC last week.

Yes, Lateline is finishing, and 7.30 is moving from its prime-time slot to… some time later than 7.30. Production staff on both programs were cut back earlier this year but, as Guthrie stressed, these and other efficiencies have enabled the broadcaster to create eighty new “content positions” in regional broadcasting, a “content investment fund,” and the Great Ideas Grant. When she announced these funding initiatives in March, Guthrie said she anticipated fierce competition for them, wanted to capitalise on the very best ideas, and would “love a creative solution that gives us a strong lead-in to the all-important 7pm ABC news program.”

All this sounds very much like something out of W1A, where everything is driven by the mandatory enthusiasms triggered by keywords like “content,” “audiences,” and “diversity.” And, of course, “ideas”: not any old ideas, but ideas that are new, great, exciting, brilliant, creative.

W1A’s PR specialist, Siobhan Sharpe, brings in a dour German consultancy team to stimulate the production of Great Ideas through the introduction of compulsory Fun Breaks. Brilliantly, she and her team solve the problems of content, audiences and diversity in one fell swoop by proposing “BBC ME,” a YouTube platform that allows viewers to post their own videos. As she explains to stunned colleagues on the charter renewal committee, “It’s your voice, but also the voice of the BBC.”

Like the ABC’s Utopia, W1A shows how management groupthink can displace normal human intelligence. While the stripping back of news and current affairs at the ABC certainly raises political questions, the real enemy may be this strange anthropological phenomenon of institutionally mandated cognitive evacuation.

Guthrie’s speech to the Friends of the ABC was a perplexing and at times disarming blend of sense and nonsense. There was a sensible corrective to those whose focus was only on Lateline: “I say look at the ABC’s commitment to the core mission of investigative journalism, not on the brand label. Too often, our stakeholders, and I include some of our journalists in that category, get trapped in the mystique of programs, seeing their longevity as trench lines in a ‘war’ against management.” Guthrie also spoke out against looming legislation designed to further a vendetta by politicians hostile to scrutiny.

Lateline, as she acknowledged, is a program with a proud heritage, but heritage preservation is not the business of ABC management. Guthrie’s “overarching ambition” was to make the ABC relevant to her children and grandchildren, and in doing so “to link the past, the present and the future.” This might work as a slogan, but if the goal is to forge a path to the future through intelligent links with the past, rather than arbitrary breaks, it’s worth looking back at the program’s beginnings.

When Kerry O’Brien first welcomed viewers to Lateline twenty-seven years ago, he promised a program that would deal in-depth with a single topic each night. Behind the scenes was a small team of producers and reporters “dedicated to reflection on and discussion of big ideas.” The program was unique, O’Brien reflected last week, in responding to a hunger for serious treatment of major issues. Doesn’t all this sound rather like something that might be pitched for Guthrie’s new Great Ideas Grant?

Over time, though, the program lost its momentum and its sense of mission. Too many compromises were made. Like 7.30, it became an assemblage of topics and interviews responding somewhat haphazardly to the dominant stories in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The courage to probe a single issue disappeared, though perhaps — as the news media skitter in all directions, mesmerised by their own forms of compulsive repetition — an extended focus is exactly what we need now.

Take, for example, Lateline’s interview with Nick Xenophon last Friday, which followed his announcement that he would leave the Senate and run for office in South Australia. His encounter with Matt Wordsworth ran for just over nine minutes, about a third of the program.

Xenophon began by stressing the gravity and urgency of the situation that prompted his decision. State politics, he said, “is fundamentally broken,” and the political scene in his home state of South Australia has become dysfunctional. While he sought to elaborate by mentioning a lack of accountability, the misuse of taxpayers’ money, falling population and rising unemployment, Wordsworth kept deflecting to the federal picture. Wasn’t Xenophon risking some hard-won Senate seats? He’d held the balance of power, so how did that demonstrate his capacity to make a difference? Towards the end of the interview, Wordsworth pushed hard on the headline question: was the move driven by an ambition to be premier?

Wordsworth is a skilled interviewer, and they weren’t bad questions, but ultimately they did nothing to break out of the recycled narratives of political power play. Here was an opportunity to focus on some of the larger issues of regional government and policy. What does it mean to say that a system of government is “fundamentally broken”?

What, indeed, does Xenophon stand for? He has called himself a centrist, but “centrism” is often embraced by those who have neither the intellectual energy nor the political courage to break out of the prevailing neoliberal ideology. Ralph Nader, whom Xenophon refers to in passing as “my hero,” would certainly have no truck with the compromises in which centrists in the current environment are happy to involve themselves.

Guthrie may have a point about ABC staff and their supporters getting “trapped in the mystique of programs,” but conversely, it is too easy to equate changes of program with some kind of advancement in vision and insight. By all means let us have new programs, and new people to produce and present them. If ABC management want to go out on a recruiting drive along the highways and byways of regional Australia, let us give them our blessing.

Provided, that is, they can convince us they really know what they are about. Who will be appointed to these eighty new “content positions”? Where and how will suitably skilled and experienced people be found? What will they be doing, and why will they be doing it?

Where current affairs broadcasting is concerned, experience is of the essence. In an interview earlier this week with Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of Britain and leader of the Liberal Democrats, Emma Alberici was able to refer back to the critical moment when he and Conservative leader David Cameron announced their intention to form a coalition government. “I was the European correspondent in 2010 and was in that Rose Garden… Five years later, you went from fifty-seven seats in the parliament to just eight and this year you lost your seat. Do you regret having gone into that coalition with the Conservatives?”

For those who chase stories, political losers seem hardly worth talking to, but for those in pursuit of insights, much can be learned from players who have had to throw in their hand. Clegg made some honest and interesting observations about the role of minor parties, and offered some cogent views on the ongoing crisis of Brexit, but a nine-minute interview can barely scratch the surface of such topics.

We are in a cultural environment in which media owners and managers suffer from an almost manic determination to ride the wave of technological transformation. They are obsessed with changing media platforms, changing audiences and, of course, the drying up of income streams. W1A’s Siobhan Sharpe, with her vision of BBC ME and her strident pronouncements that television is over — “over, guys, get it?” — is their apotheosis. Proposals like Guthrie’s Great Ideas Grant create the kind of atmosphere in which Sharpe would thrive. They are no substitute for real planning and real programs made by people who really do know what they are doing. ●

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Or is it that, after nearly two decades of being under intermittent and at times savage attack, ABC staff and their supporters have, in the words of a certain over-quoted senator, had it up to here with their tolerance? Could it be that the current sense of crisis is overblown? What should we make of a Twitter flurry complaining of inadequate attention to the Brandis affair on 7.30 and ABC News, or the continued rumblings about Chris Uhlmann’s views on renewable energy and the South Australian blackout? As always with complaints of political bias, within or against the ABC, moods and impressions feed into the account. The more you drill down for evidence, the harder it is to nail.

If members of the Coalition government are convinced that the ABC’s default setting is on the left of the dial, there is a growing chorus of opinion that the dial has been switched firmly to the right, and that Guthrie’s recent suite of cuts and changes are a clear sign of it. Cuts to ABC infrastructure include the loss of its fact-checking unit, the transcript service and The Drum’s online commentary, all of which were part of an invaluable contribution to public knowledge and the public record of current affairs. In changes to ABC radio programming – introduced in a manner both arbitrary and unheralded – former News Corp CEO Kim Williams will present the discussion program What Keeps Me Awake? and Tom Switzer, an adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and an internationally published journalist, will take over as host of Sunday Extra.

To present the case for the defence, the cutting and rearranging of programs is nothing new at the ABC. There was an outcry when Geraldine Doogue was installed as host of Saturday Extra in 2005, in a program merger that saw the end of Alan Saunders’s highly regarded The Comfort Zone, but Doogue has made a brilliant success of the revised format, and Saunders continued to make his mark as a key presenter at ABC RN until his sudden death in 2012. Both Switzer and Williams are eminently qualified to provide cogent and knowledgeable perspectives on current issues, and neither are doctrinaire right-wingers. John Cleary, who brought exceptional flair and breadth of vision as presenter of the religion and ethics series Sunday Nights, is to go, but ABC talent has a habit of surfacing elsewhere after it has been displaced. Though Jonathan Green loses his place on Sunday Extra to Switzer, he will be presenter of Blueprint for Living on Saturday mornings.

Cuts to RN music programs will see the end of The Daily Planet, The Inside Sleeve, The Live Set, Rhythm Divine and Jazztrack, each of which plays a role in fostering distinctive forms and trends in Australian music. In response to an open letter from musicians and industry professionals protesting that the decision “ignores the complexities and depth of our Australian music industry,” Chris Scaddan (head of music) and Judith Whelan (head of spoken content) affirmed that there was compensating accommodation for “new sounds and artists” in the new plan, and that the ABC would “keep listening and talking to the Australian community about getting the balance right.”

But ABC staff and their supporters are not to be so easily placated. A motion of no confidence in Guthrie passed by Radio National staff on 24 November cited “the continuing erosion of specialist programming in music, features and religion” as “a serious breach of the ABC charter.”

A week later, the rhetoric had risen to white heat over cuts to science broadcasting. Distinguished science journalist Robyn Williams delivered a scathing response to the announcement that Catalyst was to be axed. The decision, he said, came from a management that was “morally and spiritually bankrupt,” prepared to disband a team of irreplaceable professionals “with not a farewell, a handshake or a stale biscuit.” To do science requires “a critical mass of people who’ve got a stable presence, learn their complicated skills, support each other, and last.”

Catalyst reporter Mark Horstman released a statement saying:

I’m gutted. For my fifteen colleagues, that their incredible skills and dedication are not valued by the ABC. And gutted that our warehouse of unique experience in science communication is trashed in one fell swoop. As a true believer in the role of the public broadcaster, I always trusted that science was at the core of what the ABC made.

Fallout continues on social media. The video of Williams’s speech on the Friends of the ABC site has had half a million views. Horstman’s statement, on his own Facebook site, has had over 220,000, with 6000 shares and more than 2500 comments. Many draw links with recent reports of how Australia is falling behind the rest of the world in science, technology, engineering and maths education, or STEM, though the prevailing message is that the cuts are politically motivated. “The LNP are hell-bent on dumbing down Australia.” “The government’s agenda is controlled by ignorance.” “There is little public endeavour that neoconservative governments will not emasculate for the benefit of the few who so strenuously object to paying taxes.” “Turnbull has done what Abbott couldn’t – got rid of science, innovation and agility from Australian TV.” “Murdochisation continues.” And “a win for the hard political right, the anti-vaxers, the anti-climate changers… who see science and reason as the enemy.”

Might all this be seen in retrospect as something of a psychodrama, in an institution prone to crisis and staffed by exceptionally articulate and committed people? Or is the sense of having had it up to here with their tolerance a very real turning point in the culture of the organisation, and one that reflects a turning point in the wider political culture?

The present situation has a long and intense pre-history, in which the most turbulent phase was the nineteen months between March 2000 and December 2001, widely known as “the ABC of turmoil,” when Jonathan Shier was managing director. Shier, described by staff as a “megalomaniac,” was accused of instituting a culture of bullying and intimidation. During his short reign, he oversaw a total of 390 redundancies, removed the heads of all departments responsible for program content, and subjected the assembled staff in the news and current affairs division to a ninety-minute dressing down, the purport of which, in the words of its then director Max Uechtritz, was “to disparage, demean, harangue and threaten.”

All this is documented by Ken Inglis in Whose ABC? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1983–2006, the second of his ABC histories, and by Margaret Simons in a lead essay, “Fear and Loathing at the ABC,” in the Monthly in May 2005. Inglis provides a forensic examination of the charges and counter-charges of political bias through a period of Labor and then Coalition governments, tracing the tensions back to when a newly re-elected Bob Hawke declared in 1985 that there was “a pattern of bias in the ABC,” and the conservative activist Bob Santamaria then used his Point of View segment on Kerry Packer’s Channel 9 to up the ante. “With few exceptions,” he said, “the public affairs programs of the ABC emerge as extreme left-wing in politics and as protagonists of aberrant sexual practices.”

Labor appointments to the ABC board included pollster Rod Cameron and former premier John Bannon, though, as Inglis says, there was no expectation that he would “behave politically.” A strong convention decreed that those entering board meetings would “park their guns at the door.” But the convention was breached decisively during the Howard years, when ministerial interference from Richard Alston took on an unprecedented degree of antagonism.

During a single month in 2003, Alston filed sixty-eight complaints of bias against the ABC. The board was stacked with overtly political appointments: Victorian Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger, Marxist-turned-conservative historian Keith Windschuttle, the zealous right-wing columnist Janet Albrechtsen. Kroger made it clear from the outset that he would not be parking his gun at the door, stating in a 2002 Lateline interview that he did not think ABC news and current affairs reporting was balanced, and that he intended to keep saying that “at the board meetings and outside.”

In an interview with Mark Colvin for ABC Radio’s PM, Inglis described Windschuttle as a “provocative” choice because he had made a public statement that the ABC should be privatised in order “to break its Marxist culture.” Albrechtsen, who (apparently by managerial decree) made appearances on Q&A, published virulent attacks on the program in her column in the Australian. All three have associations with the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs: Kroger and Albrechtsen as directors, and Windschuttle as a favoured speaker and writer.

If Inglis is circumspect about the evidence for political victimisation of the ABC, Simons offers a more forthright view. The ABC – as she saw it when she spent a month “stooging round the atriums” in the aftermath of the Shier/Alston period – was still haunted by the purges. “The ghost walks,” as one staff member put it. Some were speculating that the damage done in the Howard era would in the long run prove fatal, despite the fact that 1996 funding levels were largely restored under Shier’s successor, Russell Balding. And, to an extent, cuts alone can be dealt with. Kerry O’Brien describes a regime of stringent corner-cutting on The 7.30 Report, but admits that the loss of a third of the editorial staff left the program with perhaps the best team it had ever had. It was the sense of relentless domineering oversight that left the spirit of the organisation “like that of a whipped dog.”

In her conclusion, Simons wondered how the ABC would look in ten years’ time. Would Four Corners still exist? Would the ABC still be able to commission drama and documentaries? If, ten years after the publication of her article, we can answer in the affirmative to both those questions, it may be because the whipped dog has learned to show its teeth again.

Guthrie is no Jonathan Shier. Her personal style is, by all accounts, quiet and courteous. In a profile written by Simons for the Monthly in September this year, she comes across as personable and dedicated. She has been crossing the country, visiting regional stations, asking questions and listening. There is no trace of suggestion that she is a bully or inquisitor. Yet if alarms are going off and the dogs are barking, it may be because she is seen as an enabler for those who are both those things.

Widely reported as “Turnbull’s pick,” Guthrie has held senior positions in News Corp subsidiaries. With Switzer and Kim Williams as her own picks, and as replacements for ABC Radio presenters who have a very strong personal following, the concentration of News Corp influence is not a good look.

Of more serious concern is the continuing influence of the IPA, which has played the role of attack dog in relation to the ABC since Kroger’s time as a key operator in both organisations. Presumption of guilt as a pretext for political correction is a highly questionable ploy, and that is the game the IPA is playing.

In 2014, it commissioned a report on coverage of the energy sector in news and current affairs programs, from which it drew a trenchant conclusion. “As a taxpayer funded broadcaster, the ABC is required to be impartial, balanced and objective. The ABC’s coverage of energy policy issues fails that test.” The statement was issued by the IPA’s then communications director James Paterson (now a Liberal senator), who laid much stress on the “independent analysis” by media monitors iSentia. The findings of bias were based on tables showing that ABC coverage of renewable energy was predominantly favourable, that its reportage of the coal mining and coal-seam gas industries was predominantly unfavourable, and that environmental concerns took precedence over recognition of benefits from industry and investment. This, Paterson concluded, was proof of a “systemic” and “endemic” problem at the national broadcaster, which could only be solved through privatisation.

Given that the IPA’s backers include Gina Rinehart and that much of its funding comes from the mining industry, this is an extraordinary piece of hubris. In the eyes of those with a bias hard-wired towards their own interests, everything outside their own propaganda bubble is going to look distorted. The real scandal arises if this kind of influence is allowed to permeate a publicly funded national broadcaster with responsibilities to provide perspectives that have some kind of ethical bottom line.

In an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014, Paterson renewed the attack, calling again for the privatisation of the “tone deaf, left-leaning” ABC, which, he said, was “not a welcome home for conservatives or classical liberals – particularly among its salaried employees.”

And yet members of the IPA are routinely invited onto The Drum, Insiders, Q&A and other news and current affairs programs. Although the IPA badges itself as a think tank, not a lot of thinking seems to go on in front of the camera. There is, rather, a sense of a prepared agenda, in which stridency is a replacement for cogency. If the bullying style is no longer pervading the ABC from the top, it is still allowed to infiltrate through these “guest appearances,” and there are real grounds for concern that the privatisation agenda may be behind Guthrie’s most recent round of cutting.

Some insiders allege the existence of a management culture hostile to in-house programming. Staff journalists and reporters are seen as a burden on the budget and an impediment to management-driven change. Shifting to a practice of buying in programs made by independent companies (as SBS did last year, when it dispensed with the in-house production team for Dateline) increases executive control. This also enables politics to come into the decision-making more directly. For those who do not like the ABC and see it as an unwarranted form of government expenditure, the outsourcing of programs may be a first step towards disbanding the whole organisation.

Of course, programs should be subject to change and review. New ideas should be feeding in constantly, and sometimes these must entail changes of personnel. There should be ongoing arguments about approach and direction. But these should all be led by those who actually make the programs. Staff of the ABC Science Unit (or the vestiges of that once-vibrant hub) had prepared detailed proposals for change and revitalisation of Catalyst, but these were ignored.

In tailoring, “bias cutting” is a technique used to create ease of movement and a flowing line. There is some irony in the metaphor. Where the ABC is concerned, cutting on the bias can produce nothing but rigidity and constraint. It is typically accompanied by platitudinous statements about creativity and innovation, but it is the death of creativity. The human mind just does not thrive within narrow, and constantly narrowing, parameters. Since the 1980s, cutting – under the guise of economic imperative – has become a staple technique of managers in public institutions of all kinds, and it’s time to call it out for what it is: an indicator of lazy, inadequate performance on the part of the managers themselves, and of any government that fails to maintain funding for essential public resources. Meanwhile, as reporting of the ABC cuts has continued to make headlines on a daily basis, there have been rolling reports of companies (mining companies especially) paying little or no tax.

Community response to these recent cuts, and the loss of the Catalyst team in particular, reflects the scale and intensity of a broader change in the cultural landscape. The shock of the Trump victory in the United States and the Brexit vote in Britain has heightened anxieties about the consequences of wilful ignorance and deliberate misinformation. An increasingly raucous minority – and Trump’s supporters, it must be remembered, constitute less than 50 per cent of the less than 60 per cent of the electorate who voted – are trying to badge all forms of serious knowledge and investigation as a preoccupation of “the elite,” but a majority of us hold to certain inalienable truths, and public broadcasting has a critical role to play in that tenure.

A public broadcaster is public property, part of the creative commons that knits together the fabric of society and fosters communal intelligence. With a new urgency attached to the defence of such common property, we need to change the rhetoric. It doesn’t help to refer to the ABC as a national treasure. We should stop being precious about it. And we should stop calling it “Aunty.” It’s a working organisation, engaged in contemporary issues in ways that are tough, pugnacious and necessary. •

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The anniversary of the massacre was widely reported in Australia and ly. In the week leading up to the signing, it received generous coverage in the ABC’s English-language media. And yet the Chinese-language web pages of ABC International programming were conspicuously silent on this subject. That silence launched a new era for the ABC’s Chinese-language programming. “Your ABC” apparently no longer had room for general news, current affairs reporting or any commentary in Chinese likely to give offence to the Chinese Communist Party.

This shift in the ABC’s practice was exposed by research on Beijing’s growing control of offshore Chinese community newspapers, control exercised through the Central Propaganda Bureau’s media arm, China Radio International. That research found that on 4 June 2014 a majority of Australian Chinese-language newspapers loyally refrained from mentioning the anniversary. Logging onto ABC Chinese programming revealed that the ABC’s coverage was identical to the media bought out by China Radio International. There was no coverage of the anniversary.

Had the ABC yielded to Chinese demands for censorship when it signed the 4 June agreement?

The Australian media’s commitment to fair, honest and open reporting is vital for keeping markets informed, politicians honest, and the public in touch with current affairs – not least about China. China’s media responds to different imperatives. Newspapers, magazines, television stations and digital platforms operate at the discretion of the Central Propaganda Bureau and in the service of the government.

The Propaganda Bureau has a long reach, extending well beyond China’s border. In Hong Kong and Thailand, it has recently been involved in the abduction of five publishers associated with Hong Kong’s Mighty Current Publishing House. By closing down one publisher, Beijing succeeded in intimidating others: Hong Kong’s Open Publishing Company is reported to have told prominent liberal critic Yu Jie that it can no longer honour its agreement to publish his completed manuscript on China’s president Xi Jinping.

Beijing’s grip on the media in Hong Kong is replicated elsewhere. Reuters reports that China Radio International exercises substantial control over Chinese community media throughout North America. The same applies in Australia: Chinese-language news and commentary produced in Beijing is rebroadcast through commercial radio stations and other media in Australia that have been acquired by businesses acting on behalf of Beijing. Other voices are silenced. All up, according to the Reuters investigation, China Radio International has bought “at least thirty-three radio stations in fourteen countries.” In Australia one of the networks it influences is Tommy Jiang’s Austar Media, which has Chinese-language programming and newspapers in several capitals.

China Radio International prepackages its own content for placement in local media outlets, and excludes alternative news sources. It tolerates no criticism of the Chinese government in the Australian radio and press networks it controls. Chinese Australians are now being lectured, monitored and policed within Australia as never before, on instructions from Beijing.

The ABC used to offer a Chinese-language alternative. Over the years leading up to the signing of the ABC agreement with China, Radio Australia’s Chinese-language website carried a variety of news and commentary on its home page and in two drop-down sections, “Newsletter” and “China in Foreign Media” (my translations). Ten or more news items were uploaded each day in Chinese. In 2012 these included claims that Chinese industry did not own all of the intellectual property for the high-speed rail systems it was marketing abroad. In 2013 the website carried Hong Kong media reports about how president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign had failed to target top officials. Early in 2014, the website reported that Japanese fighter planes had challenged China’s recently declared air-defence zone in the China Sea, and drew attention to reports by Bloomberg and the New York Times on the unexplained wealth of China’s top Party leaders. It referred to newsworthy articles published by path-breaking journals in China, including Yanhuang Chunqiu, shut down by Beijing authorities shortly afterwards.

One of the last news reports to appear on the ABC Chinese site before the 4 June agreement forewarned of the perils of online media in China:

The New York Times reports that distinguishing fact from fiction on the internet is a challenging task anywhere in the world. In China the problem is especially acute because of the relative lack of reliable information, particularly in news touching on government. The Times reports that in recent years Chinese authorities have often published false information in order to conceal the truth from the public, resulting in the rapid spread of rumours. These arise because people are groping to know the truth. In light of official lies, coupled with rumours countering them, distinguishing fact from fiction and especially authenticating statements on the web has become more difficult than ever (my translation).

This prescient warning was all but the final peep out of the ABC’s web-based Chinese-language news service before it surrendered to the knife. Some months later, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre, the ABC Chinese-language site presented news articles on the revival of Confucian costume and on racism in Australian sport.

The new ABC China site was finally launched in Shanghai on 9 April 2015. By then, the ABC had closed its web-based Radio Australia Chinese service in favour of the new platform, based inside the Chinese firewall at australiaplus.cn. These parallel moves marked the end of all general news and current affairs on ABC Chinese-language platforms, both in China and in Australia.

This was not how it was meant to be. The CEO of ABC International, Lynley Marshall, explained at the time of signing that the 4 June Shanghai agreement was designed to “enable us to put the full range of Australia Network programming and content from other Australian media into China and for China to connect more closely with our media.” Yet since the launch of australiaplus.cn, listeners and readers connecting to ABC International’s Chinese-language services have been directed away from the ABC site in Australia to a domain in China that describes itself as an information “service tool” approved by the government of China. It does not claim to offer news or current affairs in Chinese, because it doesn’t. The new site’s content is largely confined to stories and advertisements covering culture, education, tourism and business opportunities in Australia.

Click on its Chinese-language connection to ABC Australia and there are no news or current affairs programs available in Chinese in Australia either. Australiaplus.cn not only fails to offer news and current affairs, it also supports China’s higher strategic purpose of eliminating reliable sources of news and information once broadcast through the ABC International Chinese service from Australia.

The China site is unique in the stable of variants of the ABC’s Australia Plus websites targeting Asian communities in their own languages. Australia Plus programming in Burmese, Khmer, Indonesian and Vietnamese carry general news and current affairs. The Chinese-language site was singled out for special treatment.

The question is, why?

One possible explanation is that China would periodically block ABC International news and current affairs programming in Chinese from entering Chinese airspace. As China was identified as ABC International’s target country, news blocked before hitting its target was presumably news wasted. Still, complying with China’s demand for news silence meant ignoring the other sixty million Chinese speakers outside China, in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia itself.

Second, news and current affairs are expensive. The ABC has absorbed funding cuts that have flowed through to ABC International, but an ABC platform based in Shanghai is not affected by the prohibition applying to ABC advertising on programs broadcast from within Australia. The new China site carries advertisements for airlines, universities, schools and so on.

Third, market research doubtless indicated significant demand for information services of the kind that the Chinese version of Australia Plus could provide, assuming it was based in China, which in turn assumed it carried nothing that could alert censorship officers there.

Fourth, the ABC board was trying to secure landing rights in China around that time – the right to have ABC shown in hotel lobbies and airports and the like. Initially, this involved going through the well-connected guanxi impresario Sheri Yan. When Sheri Yan’s networks failed to land a breakthrough deal – she now languishes in a New York jail for allegedly bribing a senior UN official – the new ABC board turned to the Shanghai Media Group to secure a different deal. Something was perhaps better than nothing.

Whatever the explanation, the outcome is not something Australians can be proud of.

We can hardly blame the Chinese Communist leadership for trying to control media platforms at home and abroad. Leninist party organisations are programmed to mount deceptive public propaganda campaigns while operating clandestinely to seize and exercise control over independent agencies targeted for penetration.

Nor can Chinese-Australian media owners be held to account. They may have become rich on the revenue earned through sale of their local media assets to Chinese government–backed entities, but there is no law against that.

It is another matter when national public institutions – like the billion-dollar-a-year, taxpayer-funded ABC – endorse and encourage Beijing’s efforts to silence critical voices at home and abroad. Everyday compromises by our national institutions betray not just Chinese Australians, but the rest of us as well.

There is a larger problem still. In the absence of a national strategy for managing relations with China, we encourage our agencies and employees to do whatever it takes to engage with the Chinese market, even if this means surrendering the values we profess to uphold. Something is amiss at the level of national strategy when compromises that betray these values are celebrated as major national achievements.

The national broadcaster’s dealings with China signal to the world that our commitment to values and core interests is negotiable.

When I raised these concerns in an earlier version of this article in the Australian Financial Review last week, the ABC issued a strong statement taking issue with my argument. But rather than addressing the specific criticisms made in the article, the statement focused on points I didn’t make.

The broadcaster denied, for example, that the ABC entered into an agreement with the Chinese government to censor content; the article didn’t suggest that it did so. The ABC denied that it discontinued its Mandarin radio service to focus on australiaplus.cn; the article didn’t refer to the Mandarin radio service, which closed in 2013, but rather to events in 2014 when the ABC ceased to publish its online Chinese-language news service (its written, not spoken Chinese service, that is), shortly before opening australiaplus.cn. The ABC refuted the claim that australiaplus.cn has no links to other ABC news sites; but again, the article made no such claim.

It is widely acknowledged that foreign media seeking success in China must silence news and current affairs that might cause offence to the Party, especially news and commentary in the Chinese language. This is not something open to negotiation or spelled out in a contract. To the extent that australiaplus.cn is operating successfully in China as an Australian information platform, it is predicated on the ABC’s removing Chinese-language news and current affairs programming online.

The ABC response fails to address the specific claims made in the article, and the underlying claim that the operation of australiaplus.cn, including its links to ABC Australia, is conditional on the ABC’s removing all Chinese-language news content unfavourable to the Chinese Communist Party from its web pages. The ABC has not seen fit to do the same with other Asian-language services on its broader Australia Plus platform. •

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Jane Goodall is Inside Story’s TV writer. Her books include Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin and Stage Presence. Her review of Bill Shorten on Q&A and Malcolm Turnbull on 7.30 is here.

Stephen Mills is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Government at the University of Sydney and a former speechwriter for prime minister Bob Hawke. His latest book is The Professionals: Strategy, Money and the Rise of the Political Campaigner in Australia (Black Inc.).

Peter Clarke’s discussion of political interviewing, “The Interview: A Hollow Dance Looking for New Moves,” appears in Australian Journalism Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Interviews mentioned in this podcast

• Christopher Pyne on 7.30, May 2014
• Christopher Pyne’s “Fixer” interview in March 2015
• Tony Abbott on 7.30, 9 September 2015
• Bill Shorten on Q&A, 21 September 2015
• Malcolm Turnbull on 7.30, 21 September 2015
• Scott Morrison on 7.30, 23 September 2015
• Malcolm Turnbull on the BBC’s Hard Talk
• Sarah Ferguson’s A.N. Smith Lecture

Commentary

• Columnist Greg Jericho’s analysis of the Scott Morrison interview
• Jeremy Corbyn and the political interview

The post Spin control appeared first on Inside Story.

For a media that enjoys raiding the past as a means of domesticating the present, the traveller’s return (“just passing through,” he tells me) is a welcome opportunity to reprise parallels with former battles over class, nation and ideology in the United Kingdom. For a political cadre on unfamiliar post-election ground (Conservatives dominant, Labour bewildered, Scottish National Party buoyant, Liberal Democrats near invisible), the earlier era offers a useful reference point. For both, it is the high tide of Thatcherism in the 1980s that transmits the loudest signals to the present, although they see plenty of overlaps with the tempestuous 1970s too.

Take the BBC, whose future has jostled its way to near the top of the political agenda since the 7 May poll, with remarkable speed against stiff competition. This is not entirely unexpected: the ten-year requirement for renewal of the organisation’s “royal charter” –which defines its remit and governance – becomes due at the start of 2017, and was always going to include a long lead-up. The Conservative manifesto promised (or threatened?) “a comprehensive review” of the charter, “ensuring it delivers value for money for the licence fee payer.” The annual fee itself – currently £145.50 (A$307), exacted from every TV-owning household, amounting to £3.72 billion (A$7.8 billion) in 2013–14 – would continue to be frozen and “top-sliced” for digital infrastructure.

The bare commitment sounded a touch ritualistic. During the campaign, a renewal of the party’s coalition with the Liberal Democrats (who were pledging to “protect the independence of the BBC”) seemed more likely than an outright Tory win. That could mean unhappy compromise. After the miracle –a majority of twelve in the 650-seat House of Commons – the Tories’ glint turned towards the glass palace on Portland Place, London W1. The chill in Broadcasting House, “the iconic home of the BBC reinvented for the digital future,” was palpable.

The post-election lull was a chance to reflect on the fundamental issue. The BBC’s mission, as defined in 1926 by its founder John Reith, was to “enrich people’s lives with programs and services that inform, educate and entertain.” The aim has long attracted perfunctory agreement; but in serving it today, is the BBC – with its nine TV channels, ten radio stations and vast online presence, its College of Journalism and Future of News projects, its 7000 journalists among 17,000 staff – the right size and shape? If not, what is, and how to get there?

Never was a space to think so precious. For July brought an astonishing blizzard of reports and proposals, editorials and advertorials on the topic. Together they form a pulsating overture to the coming duel.

Days after the election, the new culture secretary John Whittingdale – who served for a decade as chair of the Commons’ select committee on culture, media and sport – announced that a “green paper” on the BBC would soon be published. On 16 July, after two months’ gestation, Whittingdale, a sharp brain behind a ponderous facade, was as good as his word. It was a time for “hard questions” about how the BBC should “evolve,” among them “whether the BBC should try to be all things to all people, to serve everyone across every platform or whether it should have a more precisely targeted mission.”

Behind the scenes, some decisions were already being made. A deal had been announced on 6 July whereby the BBC agreed to pay (gradually, from 2018–19) for the free television licences given to over-seventy-fives, an exemption introduced by the then Labour chancellor Gordon Brown in 2001. The annual cost in 2013–14 was £608 million (A$1.28 million), about 12 per cent of the BBC’s annual income of £4.8 billion ($10.1 billion), but that will soar to 20 per cent by 2018 in line with an ageing population. The quid pro quois a licence-fee increase to match inflation and a phased end to BBC funding of the government’s broadband program (goodbye, manifesto), as well as possible payment for catch-up services such as iPlayer. Tony (Lord) Hall, the BBC’s director-general had been bounced, but was upbeat. The agreement “gives us room for investment in the first two years of that charter. This will help us to manage the transition we all know is coming to an online world.”

Many were unhappy at the over-seventy-fives fix, on the grounds that it set the bad precedent of the BBC being made to deliver government’s social policy. That is radical indeed, though arguably (as few recalled), no less so than the exemption itself, both deeply political and a gash across the canvas of universality. How, after all, can the licence fee be justified in a context of multiple ways to deliver and access content, and the disassembling of audiences that makes universality more conceit than reality?

Whittingdale’s other démarche had come on 12 July with the appointment of a panel to “provide expertise, innovation and advice for the process and policy” of the charter review. Its eight members include Dawn Airey, former head of the commercial Channel 5; Colette Bowe, former chair of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom; Ashley Highfield of the local newspaper group Johnston Press; and Stewart Purvis, former chief editor and executive at the news provider ITN. Its composition will do little to allay BBC fears. Chris (Lord) Patten, former chair of the BBC Trust and himself the very definition of a panjandrum, called the panel “a team of assistant gravediggers” who would help “bury the BBC that we love.”

The pendulum then swung the other way when, on 14 July, Hall delivered a notably sharp speech at the launch of the BBC’s annual report. “I believe the BBC should continue to make programs for everyone… The great majority are happy to pay the licence fee. The BBC belongs to this country. The public are our shareholders.” And, referring to an expensive, shallow mega-project of the early New Labour years: “The last time politicians got creative, we ended up with the Millennium Dome.” Hall continued, “There’s a clash between two very different views of the BBC. There is an alternative view that prefers a much-diminished BBC. I don’t support this view. Nor does the British public.”

The themes were reprised in a Guardian interview, during which Hall warned, “Let’s not be dominated by commercial interests and what they say about the BBC” (a remark the paper said was aimed “at the BBC’s critics in the right-wing media”). In the corporation’s defence he also invoked a vast shadow army: “the people who pay for us, people who love us, the 97 per cent of people who use us each week; there are forty-six million people who use us every day.”

The next day, 15 July, brought further evidence that this time, the BBC too would be playing hardball. A letter championing the BBC, signed by twenty-nine of its top “talent” – from Judy Dench to J.K. Rowling, David Attenborough to Michael Palin – appeared in the Telegraph and was then reported and broadcast widely. “The BBC is trusted and loved at home by British audiences and is the envy of the world abroad… [N]othing should be done to diminish the BBC or turn it into a narrowly focused market-failure broadcaster.” And again that, by now, teeth-grinding word: “A diminished BBC would simply mean a diminished Britain.”

The BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen, was soon revealed as the orchestrator and drafter of the missive. The same day, an expensive self-promotional corporate advertorial in the approved oleaginous style (coated, naturally, in a friendly “regional” accent) began to appear on all formats, interlacing clever shots of the BBC’s top presenters and shows with a maudlin homily of insinuating schmaltz. The BBC is for our “hopes and dreams… for not just watching but living too… for all the days of our lives… for all of us.”

The BBC Trust, the corporation’s oversight body, was itself stung into action on 15 July. It demanded “clear boundaries” for the government’s role in BBC affairs, a fixed eleven-year period between charter reviews, and legal safeguards (including public consultation) before any future change to the licence fee. Striking a now familiar note, Rona Fairhead, chair of the doomed body, said, “It is the people’s BBC, not the politicians’ BBC.” The corporation should remain a “universal and independent broadcaster, which aims to provide something for everyone… [W]e see no evidence whatsoever that the licence-fee payer wants a small BBC.”

The extraordinary war of position continued with the green paper’s publication. It announced a “process of consultation that will inform our decisions about the future of the BBC,” set to conclude on 8 October. The “vast choice that audiences now have” makes a case “that the BBC might become more focused on a narrower, core set of services.” The paper discussed governance issues (including an external regulator, possibly Ofcom, to replace the BBC Trust, which itself replaced the former Board of Governors) and raised the prospect of selling the lucrative BBC Worldwide, where the corporation’s real commercial action is. On funding, it outlined five potential models: advertising and general taxation (which it rejected), a reformed licence fee, a universal household levy (following Germany’s reform of 2013, which covers online and on-demand as well as TV and radio), and a mix of public funding and subscription (for example, adding a top-up for premium content or a paid-for iPlayer).

The pace remained frenetic. So much so that the publication – also on 16 July – of an independent report under the lawyer David Perry, which supported prolonging the “sanctions regime” that makes non-payment of the licence fee a criminal offence, passed with barely a mention or comment. By this stage, even the most dedicated fulminators against the BBC – the Mail, Telegraph, Sun and Times (the last two part of Rupert Murdoch’s stable) –had a whiff of being maxed out.

The BBC’s counterattack on the green paper came on 18 July. First, an artful defence of the corporation as part of the national brand. “The BBC is a creative and economic powerhouse for Britain. The starting point for any debate should be, how can a strong BBC benefit Britain even more at home and abroad?” Then, a confirmation that it will make its audience and its history weapons in the fight. “[This] green paper would appear to herald a much diminished, less popular, BBC. That would be bad for Britain and would not be the BBC that the public has known and loved for over ninety years. It is important that we hear what the public want.”

The choreography around this shadow play – or was it just the market’s invisible hand? – was so dizzying that suspicion fell even on the presumed innocent. Diane Coyle, an economist and former vice-chair of the BBC Trust, questioned the premise of much of the debate in a Financial Times article on 18 July. The BBC’s pivotal role in Britain’s creative industries (as purchaser of output and platform for talent), its competitive benefits and export success, its training and educational contributions, were all vital. “The debate we should be having is whether to increase its size not whether to diminish it.”

That proposition will not persuade the government, whose chancellor George Osborne had said on 5 July that the BBC was “becoming a bit more imperial in its ambitions” (referring specifically to the website, which costs £174 million per year, and its effect on diversity in news provision). Nor will it even rouse many BBC supporters. But it’s made with vigour and invites thought. Compare Whittingdale’s Labour shadow Chris Bryant, who has long played BBC cheerleader with default histrionics. “Would it not be profoundly unpatriotic to seek to diminish the BBC and thereby diminish Britain?” he squawked on 18 July. And, in another phrase flogged from TV studio to Commons’ chamber: “The BBC is our nation’s cultural NHS [National Health Service] and the golden thread through it all is that it provides something for everyone.” Seeking to link the sentimental aura of two flawed public institutions and enrol them in the Labour Party cause was routine hucksterism, though few were looking.

Make that three flawed institutions: in the midst of its self-destructive leadership contest, the third – Labour – has almost nothing to say about the future (of the BBC or anything else). While Conservatives vs BBC is top billing, Labour is left playing far away in some draughty hall, the equivalent of the one-legged tap-dancer in Broadway Danny Rose.

The time–space traveller is looking restless. “There’s something wrong with your story,” he says, blinking with distaste at the cover of the Radio Times, the BBC’s listings magazine. “That looks nothing like me. And I hear he’s Scottish. Which reminds me. After that ad I need a whisky – and a bucket!”

The problem, he continues, is that “it’s always been as you described. When was the BBC not under fire from government? It’s the way things are in Britain, and – as long as checks and balances are in place, and people are on solid ground – not necessarily a bad thing. What’s more, compared to the last time I passed through, these skirmishes look pretty minor. It’s hardly the Spanish inquisition, is it?”

I glance nervously at the door, and ponder his words. It’s true that since the 1960s, there have been many spats involving the BBC, more or less constant criticism from the press, periodic disputes over management and money, and intermittent eruptions from the government of the day over perceived bias or disloyalty, irreverence or profanity. That represents well over half the BBC’s life since its formation as the British Broadcasting Company in 1922 (and “Corporation” in 1926). Even in the radio days of the 1930s–40s there had been complaints about stuffiness and censorship, and the coming of its brash commercial rival ITV in 1955 made the BBC look staid to the first mass generation of television watchers.

A brief “satire boom” in the early 1960s, when sharp young graduates mocked complacent establishment figures on the late-night revue show That Was the Week That Was, caused apoplexy. It was more a stink bomb than a grenade, though its greatest achievement – the fortnightly Private Eye, founded in 1960 – retains a singular pungency. The decade’s social revolution, though it spread far more slowly and unevenly than media-popular memory allows, had a friend in the BBC’s director-general Hugh Carleton Greene, whose liberal instincts found an adamantine adversary in the moralising campaigner Mary Whitehouse.

That put the BBC at the heart of Britain’s incipient culture wars. For many involved, including in the innovative drama of the period – notably The Wednesday Play– that heart beat strongly and on the left, and wore the petty outrage of its opponents as an emblem. A war-tempered generation’s patrician liberalism and its successor’s fiery radicalism briefly aligned and fed each other’s self-belief. (The sparks were even brighter on the commercial channel ITV, whose federative structure and comparative lack of deference incubated a golden period of regionally produced current-affairs programs such as This Week, First Tuesday and World in Action, the last from Sidney Bernstein’s “Republic of Granadaland,” radiating from Manchester.)

The Labour moderniser Harold Wilson – the “optimist in a raincoat” who ended the Conservatives’ “thirteen wasted years” in 1964 – initially looked a good bet to surf the era’s waves, and won re-election in 1966. Soon, however, crisis and scandal, party division and personal suspicion made him look another of “yesterday’s men” – the title of a damning BBC documentary in 1971, a year after Labour went down to surprise defeat, which sparked a furious row between the broadcaster and the now opposition leader and his party.

But Wilson’s Tory replacement, Edward Heath, found his own modernising agenda (free-market rather than technocratic) vaporised by strikes and inflation, while his blundering policy in Northern Ireland exacerbated an already murderous conflict. It was here, in the terraced streets of Belfast and the hedgerows of south Armagh, that a low-level but unremitting three-way war (Irish Republican Army, “Loyalist” terrorists and British forces) would face both BBC and ITV with their gravest tests: to report and explain an intimate and ever-contested reality, but also to maintain independence from political pressure and censure.

Wilson and Labour’s return in 1974 carried none of the hopes of a decade earlier. An uneasy class compromise prevailed, and Scottish and Welsh nationalism put broadcasting devolution on the agenda. (Though, as Thomas Hajkowski shows in his book The BBC and National Identity in Britain, 1922–53, published in 2010, radio programs had celebrated these nations’ distinctiveness, albeit in “folkloric” terms, since the late 1920s.) Britain seemed both unstable and stuck, yet many recall this as a BBC golden age, not least in comedy (Fawlty Towers, Dad’s Army, The Good Life, Porridge, Morecambe & Wise and, on the “other” channel Rising Damp). Did the laughing have to stop? The avuncular James Callaghan, succeeding Wilson in 1976, projected a reassuring solidity that contrasted with the abrasive new Tory leader Margaret Thatcher. But he delayed calling an election until 1979, and lost. A possible future didn’t happen, and Britain took a sharp right turn. For its part, the BBC was exposed to a government that saw it as exemplifying the failed post-1945 consensus. This time, the moderniser seemed really to mean it.

Thatcher’s new government had political authority but lacked cultural depth. Its early “punk monetarism” (a coinage of Denis Healey, another of Labour’s lost leaders) was no remedy. Its luck was its enemies – the Argentine junta, Labour’s hapless Michael Foot, a vainglorious coalminers’ boss, infirm and then reformist Soviet leaders. Each struggle was brutal, with the first, the brief Falkland Islands/Malvinas war of 1982, cementing Thatcher’s status as the “iron lady.” The victory, heralded by the prime minister and her followers as a moment of national rebirth, also put the BBC in her sights over its insufficiently patriotic coverage. Re-election in 1983 enhanced her power, which she used to install more amenable figures at the corporation. (“Is he one of us?” was the decade’s defining question.)

There were bitter rows over Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth. But the licence fee survived, as did John Cole as the BBC’s political editor (1981–92), a pained Ulsterman with Labour leanings and a strong journalistic background at the Guardian and Observer. So, too, until 1996, did security vetting of employees, a practice whose risks included poor research that blighted or at least skewed the careers of some free of what even MI5 on a bad day would regard as suspect affiliation. Isabel Hilton, a serious young multilingual journalist who had studied in China – just the sort of person to add lustre to the BBC when she started out in the 1970s – was one.

Ministers in Thatcher’s government were not all from the template of Yes Minister, the cherished comedy of her period. They facilitated the appearance of Channel 4 in 1982, a pathbreaking advance in broadcasting and cultural diversity. ITV’s factual coverage was often bolder than the BBC’s, a prime example being Thames TV’s Death on the Rock in 1988, which demolished the official account of the killing of three IRA members (on mission, but unarmed) in Gibraltar. It was this program that occasioned the most acute media quarrel of Thatcher’s reign.

High-tide Thatcherism was imperious in style, though again there were countervailing tendencies. A report on the BBC led by the market economist Alan Peacock in 1986 marshalled a strong case against the licence fee and for subscription but came out against immediate change. The founding of the literate, foreign-affairs-rich Independent newspaper in 1986 was another landmark media event. In the same year, Michael Leapman’s excellent book The Last Days of the Beeb, based on dozens of confidential interviews, documented a vessel afloat amid a decade’s sea of troubles.

The prime minister’s growing misjudgements were capped by the foolish poll tax to pay for local services (the BBC’s critics today apply the term to the licence fee), which led proximately to her replacement in 1990 by the emollient John Major. The BBC, like everyone else, breathed again, though was soon to undergo fresh trials under a new director-general, John Birt, whose managerialist passions and “producer choice” reforms proved divisive. After his election win, Major’s promise of a country “at ease with itself” turned to buyer’s remorse, internal Conservative disarray and a late (though not yet last) stand against 1960s liberalism. A fractious seven-year trudge ended in a landslide for Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” and the Major period entered history as an interregnum. By 1997, Britain knew it needed shaking up, and a moderniser with a “project” – New Labour’s vocabulary was sourced from IKEA – was just the ticket.

Blair’s political and cultural authority was off the scale. His early reforms – a settlement in Northern Ireland, devolution in Scotland and Wales, legislation on human rights and freedom of information – carried the BBC in their wake. The death of Princess Diana saw him conscript the monarchy into the spontaneous popular mourning, a stunning coup that again gave the BBC its narrative. Media management was never so controlled nor so welcome. But the corporation’s new order had its downsides. By the end of the 1990s, says the anthropologist Georgina Born in her singular study, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, changes at the BBC had contributed to “a risk-averse broadcast culture in which imitation, populism and sensationalism have become rife.”

The short war over Kosovo in 1999 was premonitory. It had all the ingredients of a modern media row: stiff opposition from left and right (the first outing for what would become a potent alliance), military blunders, and government criticism of the BBC’s man in Belgrade, the pompous John Simpson. Two years on, 9/11 pitched Blair, Britain and the BBC – to name only those – into a new world. The invasion of Afghanistan initially was popular and that of Iraq had majority support, but popular dismay at the terrible fallout helped pitch the BBC into both less credulous and (in parts of its output) less professional mode.

The consequences included a bitter dispute over reporting of the government’s case for war in Iraq, different aspects of which produced three independent inquiries or reviews (referred to by their lordly chairs – Hutton, Butler and Chilcot – with the last still ongoing). The first, in 2003–04, stemmed from an early morning report on Radio 4’s flagship Today program alleging political manipulation of intelligence. In tracking the chain of events that followed, including forceful intervention by the prime minister’s press spokesman and the suicide of the chemical-weapons expert who had been a source for the story, Hutton’s report severely criticised the BBC’s journalism and management. The corporation’s chair, Gavyn Davies, and director-general, Greg Dyke, resigned in its wake, in the latter case reluctantly.

“Hutton” became engraved on the BBC’s heart as a byword for carelessness and lack of oversight, and more broadly as signalling the way that a brasher, more confrontational style might compromise the journalistic authority on which the BBC’s reputation is ultimately founded. The establishment of the College of Journalism – part of the BBC Academy – was one result. Dyke himself, a Labour supporter (as was Davies) who had made his career in the commercial sector, never accepted any of this. His breezy egalitarianism, and his efforts to restore the BBC’s creative impulses post-Birt, had been popular among the staff (making them feel valued and himself accessible), though were inevitably coloured by the manner of his departure; despite being today installed in another top job, chair of England’s football association, he remains embittered and uncomprehending about the experience. (Stewart Purvis has three chapters on the BBC, including one on the Today mess, in his fine book When Reporters Cross the Line, co-written by Jeff Hulbert and published in 2013. These may have informed his selection to the new advisory panel; they certainly suggest he will play an important role on it.)

Mark Thompson, Dyke’s eventual replacement, brought internal stability while accelerating the BBC’s digital turn during his eight years in the post. Three years in, Blair gave way to Gordon Brown, who scuffed every chance as prime minister bar the biggest: looking the global financial crisis in the eye. But Brown’s period in office also proved convulsive for the BBC, as stories of high salaries, bloated pay-offs, celebrity excess, and waste (a “digital media initiative” cost £98 million before being abandoned in 2013) acquired added toxicity amid a squeeze on credit and living standards.

Much worse came towards the end of Thompson’s reign with confirmation that Jimmy Savile, whose decades as BBC DJ, television host, fundraiser and court jester to the elite gave him an odd status of licensed impunity, had been a pathological sexual abuser of countless young women and children. The BBC’s burden was reinforced by the late cancellation of a thorough exposure of Savile’s crimes by its topical analysis program Newsnight, two months after he died in October 2011 (even as it broadcast elsewhere two tributes to him), and compounded by ITV’s getting there first with an award-winning documentary on the subject.

The embarrassment to Newsnight, whose authority was further drained by staff departures and its crass libelling of a Tory politician, both amplified and fused the BBC’s multiple failures over Savile: of duty of care, judgement, oversight, management, accountability and journalism. In parallel, the abuse scandal mushroomed, with revelations about and trials of several former BBC stars, making the retrospective light cast on sections of the corporation even less flattering. The BBC is not alone in this: its sins of omission and commission are shared with many other institutions and authorities.

The transition from Mark Thompson’s reign proved messy. The long-term insider George Entwistle, promoted to director-general in September 2012, was soon caught up in Newsnight ‘s successive fiascos. He resigned after two months following hapless appearances at a parliamentary inquiry and on the Today program, receiving a pay-out of £450,000 (A$950,000). The episode brought the corporation even lower in public esteem, until Tony Hall (chief executive of the Royal Opera House, and before that head of news at the BBC for eight years) arrived to steady the ship. Now he too has caught the cabin fever evident in chief lieutenants such as Danny Cohen and director of strategy James Purnell (a former New Labour cabinet minister). The balanced media observer Steve Hewlett, freelance presenter of Radio 4’s excellent The Media Show, referred to Hall’s “unusually aggressive and combative performance” in rebutting the government’s proposals.

With inquiries ongoing and many testimonies still to be heard, a comprehensive reckoning of “Savile” awaits. Yet some might hope and others fear that by the time its moment arrives, the chance will already have gone – that all the horrific damage will have been refiled as unpleasant background noise and the thousands of victims left once more, as they have been for decades, to live with their pain. Amnesia is already the most powerful force in modern British society, made more so by the inexorable “presentism” of endlessly cascading 24/7 media. The BBC, which should be a prophylactic, is part of the onrush.

The traveller shifts uneasily in his comfy chair and looks pensive. “Dark matter, dear boy, dark matter,” he murmurs, and waves his empty glass. “There are some corners of the universe…” Then, “We always knew. But we didn’t want to know.”

On their own account, recent disputes and scandals around the BBC are serious enough. But a lethal edge is provided by the coincidental transformations in technology, finance, society and governance that make it ever harder for the BBC to go on operating in the old ways. In a world in which almost 60 per cent of British households already subscribe to commercial broadcasters such as Sky and Virgin, and with Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and other competitors seeking to increase their impact on the way consumers access and purchase content, the status quo is not an option; rather, the key decisions will be over how much and what kind of change the BBC should embrace, and how to achieve it. These are also political questions that will be answered through the engagement of leading players over the next year.

A collection edited by John Mair, Richard Tait and Richard Keeble – The BBC Today: Future Uncertain, to be published in September– promises a range of discriminating answers, its very title a reminder that the corporation’s turbulent modern course could be intuited from a select bibliography. Asa Briggs’s indispensable five volumes of official history, published between 1961 and 1995, end with Competition, 1955–74. Fear and Loathing at the BBC is the subtitle of Chris Horrie and Steve Clarke’s 1994 assault on “Birtism,” followed by Leapman’s The Last Days of the Beeb and, in 2004, Born’s Uncertain Vision. The right-leaning 2007 effort of Robin Aitken, Cole’s successor as political editor (1992–2000), was called Can We Still Trust the BBC? The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins has just delivered a lyrical portrait, This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC. Also this year, Jean Seaton’s Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation, 1974–1987 takes up Briggs’s baton. (A pacy read, the book is also unsound in method, indifferent to the wider broadcasting ecology, and littered with errors, as the historian David Elstein shows in a forensic and at times grimly hilarious review.)

Add to such resources numerous academic studies, memoirs and biographies, specialist forums and think-tank reports – one of the best being Truth Matters: The BBC and Our Need for It to Be Right by Financial Times journalist John Lloyd for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, published in December 2012 – and many of the ingredients exist for a healthy dialogue. Instead, much public discussion of the BBC’s future tends to be conducted in formulaic terms, with only slender reference to either its history or the world beyond. A particular trope of the corporation’s defenders – the stuff of a zillion columns – is to declare that the BBC is “the best public broadcaster in the world” (or a similarly grand phrase), cite Sherlock or The Great British Bake Off (or another current favourite) as a clincher, denounce nefarious commercial interests intent on destroying the BBC (the “Murdoch empire” featuring strongly), and conclude with a rousing call to arms in defence of the status quo. By that stage, any substantial change has been made unthinkable.

The mindset at work recalls a remark about the NHS by a Conservative chancellor of the Thatcher era, Nigel Lawson, that has found a secure niche in Britain’s political lexicon. The health service, he wrote in his memoirs, “is the closest thing the English have to a religion, with those who practise in it regarding themselves as a priesthood. This made it quite extraordinarily difficult to reform.” The same reverence hangs over the BBC, investing it with a transcendent quality that no failure, scandal or mere mundane reality can be allowed to tarnish.

The BBC is “a peerless institution: one that expresses and shapes our national temperament. It is envied all over the world. I always imagine it as a fragile golden bowl handed from generation to generation.” Jean Seaton’s conclusion well captures this strain of quasi-mysticism, as does Charlotte Higgins’s: “like a church, it must earn, and cannot wholly take for granted, the patience of the faithful,” and even the Mirror’s class warrior Brian Reade: “Lose it and we lose our identity.”

All this is understandable, if also alien to non-believers. After all, both the BBC and NHS are cradle-to-grave institutions with a powerful grip on English-British imaginaries. But the side effects can be bizarre. The papers are full of people saying they would die in a ditch for the licence fee and feel grateful for the privilege. Sometimes it’s hard not to see just about every episode of love-bombing in this country – the BBC, NHS, Scottish National Party, Corbynmania – in terms of the retreat of Christian belief. Or as the survival of an even older religion. The poet and critic Tom Paulin once said that the British instinct is to erect a totem pole and then dance around it.

This wicker-man world has its own logic. Take the regular, trump-card flourish that the BBC’s superiority is exemplified in its freedom from advertisements. That, like a lot of praise of the BBC, always reminds me of Walter Bagehot’s comment that the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it. For the BBC is wall-to-wall cross-promotion, both in-your-face and hope-you-don’t-notice, its operating slogan lifted from Norman Mailer: Advertisements for Myself. A single example can stand for, well, another zillion. Newsnight on 31 July featured a cosy chat to tie in with Life in Squares, a new and heavily trailed primetime series on the Bloomsbury Group’s lives and loves beginning on the same channel two days later. In any other context this would be called “product placement,” though from the BBC it goes completely unremarked. But what if your tastes run to serious, informed criticism of the work in question – as art, as history, as television? You must be joking.

(Deborah Ross, a smiling assassin, has already said of the first episode: “It is, in fact, quite a feat that a drama about a group of people who were meant to be so spirited could prove so entirely dispiriting… Hand-held cameras were employed, presumably to avoid that inert Downton look, but otherwise it was a box-ticking exercise. Over-exposed backgrounds? Tick. Soft filters to effect a misty miasma? Tick. Washed-out colours? Tick. Women talking while brushing out their hair? Tick. Plinky, tinkly piano? Tick, tick, tick. And also: tick.” But that was in the Mail, so it doesn’t count.)

The mind-numbing wasteland of standard BBC television drama and documentary – ostentatious sets and yacking mannequins, ponderous ideas and clunking scripts, manic presenters and pietistic voiceovers – does have to be seen to be believed. And yes, so vast and varied is the BBC that output of quality can readily be found. A riveting portrait of the Soviet spy George Blake in BBC2’s Storyville strand; the voice programs on the classical music station, Radio 3; journalists such as Jim Muir in Beirut or the Sydney-born Caroline Wyatt who report, not emote; the archival resources accessed via iPlayer and the Parliament channel; above all the exemplary World Service, still just breathing freely on The Fifth Floor of Broadcasting House – these would be among my own selections for any encomium. But a list of where the BBC falls short, or what it should be doing to meet the bloated claims made for it, and isn’t, would be far longer.

The problem really is structural. There are more good current affairs documentaries on Al Jazeera English in a month – on Syria and Iraq, on Egypt and Greece, on the Baltic states, on global migration and climate change – than are on the BBC in, well, years. That they dispense with presenters is half of it (cull the BBC’s arm-waving, vowel-strangling hams and its costs would plummet at a stroke). The Qatar-based station also has a walkover in covering a host of places, from Burundi to Guyana, that the BBC is too busy with petty sports, celebrity or royal stories to notice.

The critic Michael Church, in a scathing Independent article on his experience of watching the BBC News channel (formerly News 24), also sees Al Jazeera outpace the sluggish corporation:

To spend any length of time with the BBC’s rolling news is to be assailed… by a terrible creeping blandness, because BBC News has its comfort zones where it dwells whenever possible. It likes to go big on anniversaries, and it loves an excuse to put on mourning garb – viz those soporific miles of First World War coverage last year and the wall-to-wall coverage of the Churchill commemoration…[The] most serious weakness of BBC News is its parochialism. [Apart from flashpoints such as Ukraine, Syria and Iraq], other countries tend to be noticed only when Britons or Hollywood celebrities are involved.

Church sources the rot to the BBC’s “loss of nerve” following the Hutton inquiry, which led the corporation to become “pathologically risk-averse.” Editors are undercut, journalists constrained, investigations curbed. He quotes a director: “The BBC has become frightened of its own journalists and sees them as the enemy.”

The time-space traveller is pensive. “A wise empire adapts,” he muses. “That means a vehicle and a console. A sense of direction. A voice that can persuade. And companions to keep it honest. Which reminds me. I must be getting along.”

Any diagnosis has to recognise that the BBC’s predicament is not wholly of its own making. The corporation is buffeted by deep history’s tides – the same ones that are remaking Britain – as much as it is steering through them. Both economic and social forces, and changing landscapes of identity and allegiance have made the “nation” defined by the BBC more fragmented than ever, both as between its constituent parts and in terms of people’s cultures, tastes and outlooks.

The institutional response has included expansion to embrace new audiences (such as Asian and specialist radio stations, Welsh and Gaelic TV channels, and a BBC3 targeted at sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, though in face of protest this will become digital-only in 2016), as well as relocation of some services and staff outside London. These initiatives, welcome as they often are, serve more to highlight than to solve the BBC’s core strategic problems. In an age of particularities, a “universal” obligation involves a lot of fast running. But to what end? Today’s BBC is in the same position as the individual consumer faced with the plenitude of the archive: it will never be able to catch up with everything. The only option is to prioritise and focus.

The BBC is a long way from that, and believes the public is on its side. “Serving everybody with a range of content delivered in new ways” sets the tone of the annual report. Tony Hall himself, writing in the Spectator, wryly invokes James Bond: “world-renowned as a quintessential British cultural icon; an underappreciated force for good with his very special licence. Sound familiar?”

A battle for the future that recruits the nation’s brand leaders: that goes with the cultural grain, and nobody does it better than the BBC. But those who seek change might learn to play the same game. Regeneration, perhaps? •

The post BBC at a crossroads appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Mallah controversy, which has already produced two official inquiries, a mooted divisional reorganisation at the ABC, and a Coalition frontbench boycott, is how quickly the terms of the discussion shifted to suit the federal government’s long-running credibility war with the national broadcaster.

Tony Abbott accused the ABC of not being on Australia’s “side.” Other Coalition MPs suggested the ABC created a public safety risk by putting Mallah on air, and that his hate speech against prominent female journalists should have disqualified him from any media coverage at all. But the government’s take-home point, working as a master narrative underlying these criticisms, was that the Mallah incident revealed a systemic bias within the ABC, and that the broadcaster’s “error of judgement” was symptomatic of its sympathy for various left causes (a category now expanded to include Islamic extremism).

In his blunt but effective way, Abbott re-engineered the terms of the Mallah conversation to conform to his characterisation of the ABC as a “leftie lynch mob.” This was no surprise, given the distaste for the ABC expressed by most Coalition MPs, particularly those on the hard right of the party. While Abbott’s strategic thinking is clear, it is worth carefully scrutinising the justifications underlying these attacks, and the expectations placed on Q&A as a result.

To take the government at its word, this is a question of representation. Coalition MPs argue that Q&A fails in its mission to give voice to a diverse cross-section of community views, and that its microcosm of Australian political culture consistently over-represents the left. As Coalition senator James McGrath suggested during a Senate estimates hearing in May:

We have a flagship program here that consistently shows bias [against] those on the right or centre-right of politics. There will be someone from right of centre – on a good week two people who are centre or right of centre – and then three people who are clearly left of centre or clearly not supporters of the Coalition.

Abbott has made similar comments about Q&A’s “unrepresentative” nature, and the point has been echoed in public statements by many frontbenchers. But what does it mean to be representative or unrepresentative? What are the criteria against which this claim could fairly be judged?

There are at least two ways of thinking about representation as it applies to Q&A. The first is to assess representation in terms of how Q&A positions itself along a left–right spectrum and how adequately it gives voice to the political positions along this line. This is how the ABC’s inquiry, led by Ray Martin and Shaun Brown, is likely to approach the issue, using what media researchers call content analysis – counting guests, questions and time devoted to particular issues, designating them as left-leaning or right-leaning, and then arriving at some kind of determination of where Q&A lies on this spectrum.

This is a fairly impoverished way to think about representation. It relies on a static, one-dimensional model of politics, whose boundaries and centre are determined by the federal parliament of the day rather than by any sense of what matters to Australians. It also means that issues, particularly social policy issues, that don’t fit a ready-made left-to-right discourse struggle to be considered as properly political.

The assumption is that all Australians’ political views fall somewhere along the left-to-right axis, which is of course calibrated to the values of the major political parties. Within this context, the ABC is obliged to strive for a middle position, to occupy a “sensible centre” while giving some coverage to views positioned further (but not too far) in either direction.

The political strategy for both major parties is to try to shift the landscape so that their position appears closest to the centre. In the case of the Coalition’s response to Mallah, this means quarantining certain commonsense arguments – such as the suggestion that hard-line anti-terrorism rhetoric might be fuelling the recruiting efforts of ISIS and other groups – as beyond the bounds of the sayable. In the wake of the Q&A episode, this argument is now considered outrageous by virtue of the fact that it was aired by a disreputable and unpleasant individual. The real issue here is not so much Mallah’s right to be heard as how the boundaries of the political can conveniently be redrawn by such confected outrage.

The second way to think about representation is to ask how a program like Q&A might give voice to the political views of the population as a whole, as opposed to how it constructs a left–right discourse around the policy issues of the day. This is a difficult task, of course: it would require more complex and inventive approaches to audience and panel selection, topics and moderation. It is hard to see how Q&A’s usual audience (mainly made up of Young Liberal/Labor hacks, precocious students and partisan stakeholders) could reasonably constitute a nationally representative sample. But it is still a noble ideal, and one worth striving for.

Many other current affairs programs, including SBS’s Insight, try to do something along these lines. At the least, taking seriously this deeper notion of political representation would reveal that the narrow terrain of disagreement between Labor and Liberal that constitutes much of what passes for debate on Q&A does not represent anywhere near the extent of political culture in Australia.

Many Australians, for better or worse, struggle to see themselves anywhere on a left–right spectrum. As conceived in federal parliamentary politics, this spectrum is often dramatically out of alignment with the wider range of views in the Australian population, in terms both of the scope of debate and where the centre of gravity sits on particular issues. On asylum matters, for example, the difference between Liberal and Labor policies is now so slim as to be non-existent. On social policy issues like gay marriage, there is a yawning gulf between the politicians and the population. There are many other examples; the point is that to calibrate “representation” according to the positions of the major parties is to forego the possibility of a more far-reaching representation of the actual political views of the Australian population, whatever they may be.

Q&A, to its credit, does try hard to include a wider spectrum of opinion. Many of its most stimulating episodes feature interventions by speakers – including artists, activists and philosophers – from outside federal politics. The program is in the difficult position of having to juggle this idea-raising function with the tedious and unedifying spectacle of “balanced” coverage of Liberal–Labor disagreements. Its producers do a good job of managing the tensions, under very difficult circumstances.

But let’s not pretend that this constitutes meaningful political representation. If the ABC, and the government for that matter, were serious about wanting Q&A to “represent the views of the Australian population,” we’d have a different kind of program, one that spent considerably less time providing a space for Labor–Liberal policy disputes. But neither side of politics really wants to see that. •

The post Different questions for Q&A appeared first on Inside Story.

In a single week in October, US networks CBS and HBO both announced online-only subscription video services. CBS All Access launched immediately, allowing viewers to watch the network live online and individual programs on demand. HBO Now would let customers subscribe to a standalone HBO service without paying for a multichannel cable or satellite TV package. The New York Times declared a “new era of à la carte television [had] arrived – seemingly all at once.” This was “a watershed moment for web-delivered television,” a move by two titans who earned “billions of dollars in profits from the traditional system” that signalled “how rapidly the balance of power is shifting in the television landscape.”

In Australia, the TV market was very different, but online subscription video services seemed to be arriving “all at once” as well. Subscription TV operator Foxtel launched the Presto online movie service in March 2014, halved its price in August, brought in Seven West Media as a partner in December, and added TV programs to it in January 2015. Free-to-air TV rival Nine Entertainment joined with Fairfax Media in August 2014 to announce the online video service Stan, and launched it on Australia Day. Global operator Netflix ended the rumours in November, confirming it would start a service in Australia. On 24 March 2015, it did.

It was the last of these that seemed most significant. Like the arrival of TV itself in 1956, two decades after services began in Britain and Germany, Netflix would arrive in Australia fully formed, a successful global service with massive brand recognition. In the past, new TV services had been introduced to Australians mainly by local media incumbents. The first TV services were provided by the major newspaper publishers and the national radio broadcaster, the ABC. When commercial TV services in country areas were “equalised” in the late 1980s, it was the metropolitan networks that provided the new channels. Subscription TV was pioneered by a new entrant, Australis, in the mid 1990s, but soon consolidated into a venture controlled by media and telecommunications incumbents. Digital TV was put in the hands of the established TV networks in the 2000s.

The online era had made it much easier for services to be “born global.” YouTube, the giant of online video, was a globally accessible start-up, expanding from the ground up in Australia and elsewhere. Its brand and service were young but already well established when it was acquired by a powerful international company, Google.

In November 2014, Netflix was no start-up. It had more than fifty million streaming customers in the United States and overseas. These already included Australian-based customers for its US service, a reality that clearly helped galvanise local responses. The company’s first program commissions, House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, were well known as Netflix shows even when they were carried on other services in territories where Netflix was not yet officially available. This time, offering the next generation of TV services, Australia’s incumbents would be the start-ups trying to create awareness for new brands in their own backyards. The outsider, Netflix, was already at home.

And yet we had been hearing for a long time that television was finished. Twenty-five years ago, in Life After Television, George Gilder declared: “TV was a superb technology for its time… But now its time is over.” Since then, the medium has had at least two Golden Ages, according to some commentators. Introducing his decades-long study of American television, Tube of Plenty, also published in 1990, Erik Barnouw wrote: “Not for one moment … has the subject sat still for its portrait." In May 2015, Tim Wu wrote: “Over-estimating change in the television industry is a rookie mistake.”

Maybe change is just the norm for television? This year, 2015, might be special, but no more special than many other years before it – a big year certainly, but just one more chapter in the long history of a resilient, adaptable medium, a period that seemed overwhelming only in the fog of the present?

Twenty questions, twenty-five viewpoints

We decided to ask some people who should know. If television was changing so fundamentally, what might it look like in a year’s time, in a few years’ time and, say, a decade hence? We came up with twenty questions and put them to twenty-five people.

We wanted to hear what they thought might change and what might endure. We also wanted to find out how they had experienced and interpreted the recent past. What trends had surprised them? What had delighted them?

Settling them was hard, because different people would have different areas of specialised knowledge. But deciding which twenty-five people to interview was much harder. It couldn’t just be people working in what we have come to call “television.” There had to be people who worked in TV only some of the time, as well as people from other sectors that are supplementing, transforming, overtaking, bypassing or reinventing television. Even those right in the middle of the TV business shouldn’t necessarily have always worked there; they should include some recent arrivals and departures who knew the industry well but were not of it.

Our twenty-five interviewees include:

• six people who work for or represent Australian commercial and public free-to-air broadcasters;

• one each from a subscription TV (Foxtel) and IPTV (Fetch TV) operator, plus one from an international organisation, the BBC, that runs free-to-air services in its home country but now serves Australian audiences mainly through subscription channels;

• four from, or recently from, production companies that make programs for television and other media (Hoodlum Entertainment, ITV Studios Australia, Shine Group, Australian Children’s Television Foundation);

• three from the telecommunications and IT sector (Telstra, Broadcast Australia, Intel);

• two from online and social media companies (Yahoo!7, Twitter);

• one each from advertising (AOL Platforms), audience measurement (OzTAM) and a government funding agency (South Australian Film Corporation);

• a screenwriter, a media entrepreneur, a media strategy and measurement consultant, and a digital strategist and author.

Two of our interviewees are based overseas and one had recently returned, but most are based in Australia. This primary focus on small-screen media in Australia is not meant to be parochial, simply to acknowledge that TV has always been distinctive to its own part of the world. But TV has also, always, been a very international thing – American shows on commercial channels, British programs on the ABC, foreign language movies on SBS, international sport and news on Foxtel, videos from anywhere on YouTube. It is becoming more so – and so a lot of the questions and answers have an international flavour.

All interviewees were asked to give personal views, not necessarily those of their organisations. Most were interviewed face-to-face and were given the opportunity to check transcripts; a small number responded by email. A few chose not to answer particular questions that they thought were beyond their expertise or where they felt it was inappropriate for them to answer from their current positions.

Recent trends and highlights

We began by asking our twenty-five interviewees what had most surprised them about recent trends in television and video. Several said the resilience of linear free-to-air and subscription television, the rise and durability of reality formats, the strength of scripted drama and the increased attention paid to its screenwriters. One was struck by the opposite: the speed of the recent decline in audience numbers for regular free-to-air TV programs. Many mentioned the rapid growth of other platforms and devices – SVOD (subscription video on demand), OTT (over-the-top) services, tablets – and new forms of content on YouTube and other “non-traditional” outlets; one was surprised that a really strong “number 2” to YouTube had not yet emerged. One mentioned a rapid recent shift from the DVD format to online delivery of video programming to organisation-wide servers in schools.

Asked about their most interesting or satisfying recent personal experience with TV or video, many cited favourite shows, movies, websites or other content: Breaking Bad, Broad City, House of Cards, Jane the Virgin, Orphan Black, True Detective; two strikingly different Scarlett Johansson movies, Under the Skin and Lucy; the comic instructional site HowToBasic; a bunch of student films of exceptional storytelling and production quality. Others remarked on the new ways and times they are able to watch content, the launch of new services like Stan, the globalisation of event series like Game of Thrones and The Fall or services like Netflix, the rise of Netflix competitors like Amazon Prime, and a potentially game-changing transaction – advertising giant GroupM’s October 2014 “preferred partner” deal with YouTube.

Influencers, technologies, challenges

Unsurprisingly, many people mentioned the new streaming video or SVOD services launched in Australia – Netflix, Presto, Stan – when asked for the organisations or individuals that would have “a significant influence on the TV/video business in the next year.” Several thought these would consolidate, most likely into two: “Netflix and probably one other… [which] will be a great competitor because it will eventually have Seven, Nine, Ten, ABC, SBS, Foxtel all in one,” forecast Overture Management’s Ben Liebmann. Many also mentioned well-established incumbents of various kinds: telcos Telstra, Optus and the National Broadband Network – “The real future of TV will be decided by the telcos, not the traditional TV broadcasters,” said Fetch TV’s Scott Lorson – as well as the commercial free-to-air networks, the ABC and Foxtel. Others identified younger players: YouTube, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon Prime Studios and Minecraft creators Mojang.

Several interviewees resisted nominating a particular person who would have “a significant influence on the TV/video business in the next year.” Those prepared to chance their arm suggested Miranda Dear and Darren Dale of Blackfella Films, the makers of Redfern Now; Australian Football League chief executive Gillon McLachlan; ex-News Limited and Foxtel boss Kim Williams; Ynon Kreiz, the chief executive of Maker Studios; former Pixar animation director Saschka Unseld; Fox Networks Group CEO Peter Rice, who some think is being groomed to take over News Corporation from Rupert Murdoch; and “someone awesome at Alibaba or the Huayi Brothers in China.” Several mentioned communications minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Australian government, and one the ACCC: “They’re going to have at least a part of the future of our business in the palm of their hand,” said Seven West Media chief executive Tim Worner.

Technology trends that would be particularly significant in TV and video in the next few years? Mobile, mobile, mobile, smartphone, tablet… and the application of broadband to TV. Digital media consultant Gai Le Roy thought price as well as raw capability would make a big difference to mobile video consumption: “If mobile data packages change in Australia [which they did soon after we interviewed her] the consumption of, particularly out-of-home, video, phones, tablets etc, will completely take off.”

On the application of broadband to television, several people mentioned the impact of faster broadband speeds, especially delivered by Australia’s NBN, as well as HbbTV and applications like Apple TV and Google Chromecast that enable users to throw content from a device to a connected TV. “At some stage the free-to-air broadcasters are going to have to move to simultaneous streaming of their signals,” said Freeview’s Kim Dalton. “At the moment I’ve got to have a television with an aerial. That already feels on the edge of being old-fashioned to me.” Mitch Waters of AOL Platforms was interested in whether the young video streaming services would be able to stay subscription-focused rather than ad-focused, “or whether some of them would start adopting a hybrid model similar to Hulu in the US or Spotify here.”

Some thought the main technology trends would lie in user interfaces and experiences – changes in the discovery side of TV (Arul Baskaran, Yahoo!7); enabling shared experience (Tony Broderick, Twitter); personalisation (Richard Finlayson, ABC TV); immersive viewing (Courtney Gibson, Nine); “mixed reality” or digitally built worlds (Tawny Schlieski, Intel); interoperability of consumer devices (Rebekah Horne, Ten Network).

Our twenty-five interviewees were prominent people in positions to help shape the future but we wanted to know what they worry about. Many responded quickly and instinctively: cashflow, attracting and keeping great people, the small size of the local market and Australia’s place in the global market, where the next hit show might come from, how to convince telco people of the value of content, how to keep reminding public stakeholders of the value of a public broadcaster. Freeview’s Kim Dalton and Offspring co-creator and head writer Debra Oswald shared the Australian Children’s Television Foundation’s Jenny Buckland’s sentiment: “I know the audience is there but I have no idea how the high-quality drama programs we know they want are going to be funded.”

Evolving businesses: relationships, rules and business models

Most interviewees agreed that producers and distributors of content would work more closely together in the future: they would “become one,” or continue to consolidate under common ownership, or expand into each other’s terrain – producers by trying to go direct-to-consumer, distributors and TV networks by trying to own more of their content. But pursuing those opportunities would necessarily strain existing approaches to making and controlling content. Producers would have new places and ways to sell, but buyers might want more from them. Networks might want more territories and rights; consumers might want fewer constraints on the timing of releases and the ways they use and share digital content.

Models for owning and accessing content would need to be reimagined for the digital age, said Intel’s Tawny Schlieski: “How do the people who invest time and money in the creation of content get rewarded?”

For broadcast networks, these changes are profound. They “have to alter their business model,” said company director Deanne Weir. “Their businesses cannot sustain themselves in the same way and they’re all recognising that. This is not about some little addition to what Nine is doing, or what Seven is doing.” Ten’s Rebekah Horne agreed: “Ultimately you’ve got to be able to change the business model. You’ve got to be able to almost rewrite the rules across your own organisation, across how you interact with producers, what rights you want, how much you’re willing to pay.”

The changes are also significant for producers. Ben Liebmann said, “For producers, there’s a history with broadcasters. The new platforms don’t have that history, so there are new rules and paradigms. They are being driven by data, not by relationship. A potential shift in the ownership and control of rights has the power to fundamentally shift the production sector very quickly and to disrupt companies that have been built on creating and owning intellectual property that can be scaled, repeated, and rolled out internationally. The large production companies werenÆt built on the model of creating a piece of intellectual property and handing it over to somebody else.”

Interviewees agreed that windows, holdbacks and territorial rights trading would change, but they disagreed on how. Hoodlum’s Nathan Mayfield thought rights windows would be “obsolete.” The BBC’s Jon Penn said “being able to regulate content availability and pricing by market” would continue to be critical for makers of high-quality content. “A world where everything is available to everybody all over the world at the lowest price isn’t going to work for us and ultimately not for the consumer.”

Evolving audiences: control, content discovery and curation

Considering the evolution of audiences in the future, interviewees were asked if they thought that, as they aged, “millennials” would turn into their parents. Most agreed with OzTAM’s Doug Peiffer – “Life stage always impacts media usage” – but also with Intel’s Tawny Schlieski – that content-on-demand, not-time-bound, on-the-go, “ubiquitously accessible” were “new normals” that were here to stay. Foxtel’s Ross Crowley thought that as millennials form households and families, they “will move to big screens and shared viewing experiences, although more likely to fit around their own schedules.”

What role would social media play? “Peer-curated content will be the main source of an individual’s entertainment fix,” said Hoodlum’s Nathan Mayfield. Does that mean social media platforms will get more involved in creating and distributing long-form content? Telstra’s Ian Davis thought Facebook, for example, would “undoubtedly” find a way to play “more of a role,” but he didn’t expect it to become an “actual distributor.” Fetch TV’s Scott Lorson agreed: “Online audience does not translate to success in monetising long-form content.” The ABC’s Richard Finlayson drew an analogy with Amazon: “They started out as a place to buy books online, now they are suddenly able to sell anything and everything, including entertainment. Why wouldn’t Facebook do that?”

Shapes of things to come

Thinking forward to 2025, we asked our interviewees what aspects of the business they were most confident about. Telstra’s Ian Davis was “as positive as I can be of the significant rise of ‘what-I-want, where-I-want, when-I-want‘ consumption of television content.” Scott Lorson from Fetch TV still expected viewing behaviours to be strongly concentrated, like smartphone apps and online bookmarks: “people regularly explore, but core usage is very concentrated.” “The TV experience will be closer to an app experience than to the old projection, theatrical, scheduled sort of experience that TV took from cinema,” said Arul Baskaran from Yahoo!7. Former SBS managing director Malcolm Long thought “the thing that will endure is the big screen.”

Everyone agreed scripted drama would continue to be a big part of the business but the ways it is delivered and viewed would change and formats would evolve. “The hi-fi (expensive, professional, quality) and the lo-fi (amateur, shared) will endure,” said Nine’s Courtney Gibson. “The arse will fall out of the middle. It’s really the amateurs who pose the greatest threat to the professionals in our industry.” “TV won’t look like it looks today,” said AOL Platforms’ Mitch Waters, “but my opinion is it will still be there, and it will still be quite prominent. What will change – and I think we’re starting to see it – is the way TV is measured and how the data is used. We’ll see a big shake-up in that.”

Would the United States still be the dominant global screen culture in a decade? Yes, said many, but US content would change and, according to Nathan Mayfield, “the players will be different.” “US productions are more globally aware now than they were ten years ago,” said Arnold Worldwide’s Joshua Green, and the rise of strong African-American, Latin and Hispanic and LGBTQ audiences was already “driving demand for programming that not only looks different, but which comes from somewhere else.” No, said the BBC’s Jon Penn: “I think Asia’s probably the place to watch when it comes to dominant screen culture.” “The definition of domination will be reviewed,” said the SA Film Corporation’s Annabelle Sheehan.

What role would Australian programming be playing in a decade? “Australian content will be everywhere,” said Gai Le Roy. Taken as a whole, Australian audiovisual material “is braver, more interesting, and more compelling than the bulk of material produced in the US,” said Joshua Green. “It exports well, though mostly as formats and talent into the US.”

“Television” 2025

Finally, we asked our interviewees if, in 2025, there would there still be something we call “television.” “Yes – but I don’t know what it will be called!” said Fetch TV’s Scott Lorson. “Yes. But no,” said Hoodlum’s Nathan Mayfield. “The screen will serve multiple purposes. It will be meaningful as well as a utility.” Gai Le Roy thought, “That word ‘television‘ seems to be quite resilient. It seems to be winning.” Ten’s Russel Howcroft said, “It will still be called television, just like the phone is still called the phone, despite the fact that it’s got nothing to do with the phone.”

“Yes, of course there will be television,” said Nine Network’s Courtney Gibson. “There will continue to be large flat-screen televisions in every home; our watches, phones and iPads are TV screens, and there will be television content online. There will be more TVs and TV content than ever.” Freeview’s Kim Dalton agreed: “Absolutely. Isn’t television just getting better and better?” “Accepting there will be many platforms for delivery,” said Malcolm Long, “I think television will be around forever.”

ITV Australia’s Anita Jacoby was less sure: “I don’t know, I really don’t know, but there will always be content.” “TV for me is episodic content in our home,” said Intel’s Tawny Schlieski. “It’s a unique form that breaks away from the plays and movies that preceded it. It provides us with characters and continuity that we want to invite into our intimate spaces over and over again. That isn’t going anywhere.”

Joshua Green thought, “Television has trodden the edge of significant revolution its entire life. It has never been static. I think it’s got at least another decade in it.” “Consumers will still call it TV, but whether people in our industry will view it that way, I’m not sure,” said AOL Platforms’s Mitch Waters. “As a device and as a medium,” said Yahoo!7’s Arul Baskaran, “I think television as we know it is going to disappear.”

Offspring co-creator and head writer Debra Oswald wanted answers too: “What do you think is going to happen? Seriously what’s your best guess? I’m keen to know because I have to plan my career.” •

This is an extract from Television 2025: Rethinking Small-Screen Media in Australia – 20 Questions, 25 Viewpoints. The full report is available here.

The post TV streams into the future appeared first on Inside Story.

On 28 June this year, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, heads of state from the European Union countries came together at Ypres to commemorate the event that led to the outbreak of the first world war just thirty-seven days later. In Sarajevo, the mood was more turbulent, with demonstrations honouring Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who fired the fatal shots.

These events were duly reported in news bulletins on Australian television. But apart from that, any sense of occasion among the networks was remarkable for its absence. While ABC Radio National provided almost a whole weekend of dedicated programming, on ABC television it was business as usual. SBS picked up 37 Days, a three-part BBC dramatisation of the diplomatic crisis following the assassination, which was originally produced as part of the slate of anniversary programming described by director-general Tony Hall as “the biggest and most ambitious pan-BBC season ever undertaken.” Episodes were broadcast on SBS on 20 and 27 June and 3 July, but here there was no context for the series and nothing to set the tone for such a commemoration.

Part of the problem was the clash with SBS’s saturation coverage of the FIFA World Cup. In this celebratory atmosphere, it almost seemed that sport was taking over from war as the peak form of international engagement. But any such optimism was soon swept aside when news bulletins began covering Israeli attacks on Gaza and the Malaysian Airlines flight 17 crash in Eastern Ukraine.

Alexander Nekrassov, a former Russian presidential adviser, was asked on CNN whether he’d had “a Franz Ferdinand moment” when he heard about the shooting down of MH17. He was sure that quite a number of politicians were having such a moment, he said, and revealed that the Kremlin was getting ready for “some serious turbulence.”

Ironies abound, with significant implications for the programming decisions made by our public television networks. There’s no arguing with the priority given to FIFA, of course: aside from its importance as a global event, it makes for superb television. But the party spirit clashed badly with other reports on the daily news. One uncomfortable transition took viewers from footage of a bomb blast in a shopping plaza in Abuja, which killed twenty-one people during the match between Nigeria and Argentina, to the studio ambience of The Full Brazilian, with host Jimeoin drinking pina colada from a plastic pineapple and welcoming the Wiggles as commentators on the day’s proceedings.

No programmer can be blamed for this kind of misalignment. Nor can they be held to account for the timing of FIFA, which left them with a tricky call: to let the first world war centenary pass with token acknowledgement, or to run coverage in parallel with the soccer fiesta and set up bipolar shifts in the evening’s viewing. Nevertheless, given the amount of airtime SBS habitually devotes to remembering the second world war, the neglect of the centenary of the first was a stark anomaly.

Nothing will sideline the centenary of Gallipoli, however, and although this isn’t until April next year, the Anzac dramas are already being rolled out. The trailer for ABC’s Anzac Girls, scheduled for broadcast in August, features tearful exchanges and soulful looks, passionate embraces (five of them in the space of sixty seconds), a haughty matron who says “Anzac Day? Never heard of it!” and a graveside scene in which a bereft young woman declares, “We will remember them.” Stirring stuff, of a kind we know so well and have cried over so often.

The clips from this trailer, to the song “Forever Young,” are almost interchangeable with those promoting The War that Changed Us, a four-part ABC documentary series to commence on 19 August. Australians were young, innocent, in love with life and each other until… well, until some other reality came to get us, is the message, though that other reality does not and cannot gain any traction in the context of this kind of sentimental indulgence. Stories of heroism, individual and national, may make good television, but in the long run they do little to further a mature public understanding of complex and terrible historical events.

This is just what ABC Radio National set about doing, marking the start of the thirty-seven-day countdown with a whole weekend of special programs. Particularly impressive was The Contested Beginning, a sequence of talks and discussions, hosted by Geraldine Doogue, considering the question of how circumstances conspired to draw the major players into the Great War. Doogue and producer Annabelle Quince were undaunted by the complex perspectives offered by Paul Ham, John Langdon, Margaret MacMillan and Annika Mombauer, authors of major recent books analysing the state of European politics in 1914. They offered searching reflections on the long-term international tensions that are the continuing legacy of the conflict. It’s not easy to host such a discussion for the benefit of a general audience but Doogue managed it with fluency and acuteness.

It almost seems as if there is a cultural division within the ABC over its role in promoting public understanding of the Great War. Ten years ago, the broadcaster collaborated with Britain’s Channel Four on the making of a ten-part series, The First World War, which drew on a vast range of archival footage and claimed, with some justification, to be a “powerful, original and truly comprehensive” account. The ABC promoted it as a series that “demolishes myths and answers key questions from the origins of the war to its bitter end” – as a challenge to “ninety years of myopia” and a corrective to the tradition of portraying that conflict “through a veil of tears, seeing only a tragic waste of life in the mud of Flanders.” Current offerings suggest that the veil of tears is well and truly back in place.

With the centenary stretching across four years to 2018, it is yet to be seen how our public broadcasters stay the course. There are signs that SBS, at least, plans to drip-feed commemorative material. Churchill’s First World War goes to air on 1 August and a repeat of 37 Days begins on 4 August, the date that marks the conclusion of the countdown period. On first viewing, 37 Days came across as a rather arch costume drama, without any evident contemporary resonances. It needed the context of the BBC’s much-vaunted World War One season.

The repeat, though, carries with it another context. MH17 was shot down on 19 July, halfway through the period covered in the series, and the international diplomatic tensions arising from it have yet to play out. This time, though, Australia is on stage in scene one, seeking a major role in scripting UN resolutions and flirting with a high-risk proposal to send armed personnel into Ukraine to assist with the recovery of bodies. During the critical thirty-seven days of 1914, the fatal errors arose from grandstanding, the issuing of ultimatums, and nationalist opportunism. We really do need to take another look at all that. •

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We’re sitting on the grass in Matangi, a small group of houses on a small island at the southeastern extreme of the archipelago that makes up Vanuatu. “We rely a lot on Radio Australia when there’s a cyclone coming,” says Miranda, a member of the island’s Community Disaster Committee. “We have no telephone on this side of the island and we often can’t hear Radio Vanuatu.”

As Australia debates budgets, debt and deficits, we rarely hear the views of communities affected by planned cuts. Whether it’s the size of the aid budget or the resourcing of the services of the ABC our neighbours have little input into decisions that affect their lives.

The latest blow is the planned redundancy of eighty staff from ABC International following the Abbott government’s decision to take Australia Network television away from the ABC. Revoking the $250 million TV contract – with just ninety days’ notice – has had an impact well beyond television. Given the integration of TV, radio and online services within ABC International, the decision affects not only Australia Network but also the other services providing crucial information to the islands region.

ABC International has merged key functions of Radio Australia and Australia Network in recent years in expectation that its contract with the government would be honoured. With only $15 million of ABC funding to work with after the loss of $22.3 million this year from the contract, disentangling these services and activities will cause major problems. According to the ABC, it must find a way to operate “an converged media service with 60 per cent of the previous budget.” ABC management is still discussing the new service and its impact on staffing with affected employees, but it has revealed that “an approximate eighty staff will be made redundant.”

Last week, employees were given a fortnight to respond to forced redundancies and major cutbacks to services. “The new model has been designed to reach as much of our desired audience in the region as possible,” says an ABC spokesperson, “through a converged service based on radio, a limited television offering and digital means.” The broadcaster acknowledges that services will be cut, but says that it is “working very hard” to make sure that the impact on “audiences, partnerships and syndication is minimised as much as possible.”

Forced redundancies will have a disproportionate impact on Radio Australia services to the Pacific islands, however. “I can understand why my job has been eliminated,” observes veteran Pacific correspondent Sean Dorney, one of the casualties of the cuts. “I worked mostly for the Australia Network TV news service, which was funded under the Foreign Affairs contract. But I’m really feeling sorry for my colleagues at Radio Australia, who have become huge casualties of the reorganisation following this budget decision. Too few people in Australia understand how important Radio Australia has been in the Pacific.”

The government’s revocation of the Australia Network contract may be the original sin, but the gutting of Radio Australia suggests ABC management underestimates the importance of outreach into the Pacific. Whether it’s news, English language lessons, cyclone warnings or the latest cultural programs, there’s a significant audience for Radio Australia – especially in outlying islands and rural communities with limited access to the internet.

While there are alternative broadcast and internet services in the crowded Asian media market, the range of options in the small island states is much more limited (That’s not to say that the cuts to staffing in ABC International won’t seriously affect Asian programming. Three bureaus will close and the long running Asia-Pacific, Mornings and Asia Review are being axed.)

Many Pacific media organisations relay news and features from Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand International, providing a crucial window to the world that local media can’t hope to match. There are many excellent Pacific journalists working for private and government broadcasters across the region, but budgets are tight and resources for regional and global coverage hard to come by. Journalists in the region are often faced with government or military censorship, limited advertising, tough defamation laws and a complex cultural environment for investigative journalism; having stories broadcast by Australian or New Zealand media allows them to follow up issues that may otherwise be too hot to handle.

My concerns about the proposed changes to Radio Australia are based on thirty years of listening to Australian and New Zealand broadcasting in the islands. A decade ago, I also worked as a casual employee of Radio Australia, reporting for Pacific Beat – an experience that reaffirmed my belief in the importance of Australia’s capacity to broadcast radio, TV and internet into the region, and to carry voices from the Pacific into Australian debates.

The latest cuts fundamentally undermine this two-way process. Australia creates strategic problems for itself when key institutions – media, universities, non-government organisations and government departments – fail to allocate the resources needed to engage with a dynamic and complex region. The loss of experienced staff from ABC International will mean that the woeful coverage of the Pacific islands in the Australian media is further weakened. If the story doesn’t fit the paradigm of paradise (swaying palm trees, blue water, sandy beaches) or paradise lost (coups, corruption, climate change), voices from the islands rarely get a run.

According to current plans, the ABC will maintain one correspondent in Papua New Guinea and one in New Zealand, but lose its dedicated radio and TV correspondents for the Pacific islands. Pacific Beat will be retained, together with six hours of television broadcast into the islands region. “Radio Australia remains central to our broadcasting model and will continue to broadcast a 24/7 schedule,” says the ABC spokesperson. “The network will be delivered through deeper collaboration with ABC News and ABC Radio and through collaboration with SBS.”

But who will provide knowledgeable, accurate and timely content? The ABC’s domestic service has long relied on the expertise of reporters like Radio Australia’s Pacific correspondent Campbell Cooney, business reporter Jemima Garrett and Australia Network’s Sean Dorney. Dorney, who worked for many years in (and was deported from) Papua New Guinea, is one of Australia’s most experienced Pacific affairs reporters; in recent years, he has covered the region from Brisbane for Australia Network and ABC TV. Dorney believes that there’s a need for specialist reporting of a region that has vital importance for Australia: “I have often said that in the world outlook of most of the Australian media, Australia might as well be anchored somewhere between Ireland and North America rather than in the South Pacific.”

According to the proposed restructuring, Radio Australia’s English-language service is “not required,” and “English content will be sourced from ABC Radio and News in future.” The abolition of the English-language unit will be a major setback. In the past, Clement Paligaru, Heather Jarvis, Isabelle Genoux and other talented reporters have crafted radio series including Carving Out and Time to Talk (a twelve-part radio series and website on governance in the Pacific). Innovative content of this kind can only be produced by journalists with cultural understanding, personal relationships and a contact book developed through years of hard grind and travel across the region.

I doubt that the skills required for detailed coverage of the twenty-two countries in the islands region can easily be found in press gallery reporters who accompany Australian politicians on whirlwind visits to the islands. Add to this the fact that not one daily newspaper in Australia has a dedicated Pacific islands correspondent.

The cuts partly reflect a broader, but mistaken, view of technological change. A leaked summary of the federal government’s efficiency review of the ABC and SBS, which was headed by the former chief financial officer of Seven West Media, Peter Lewis, recommended shutting down Radio Australia’s shortwave broadcasting. “Noting shortwave is a largely superseded technology,” said the review, “discontinuing this service would release resources for other purposes.”

In reality, these broadcasts are a vital service for rural communities in neighbouring Melanesian nations like Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. Streaming internet into the islands region is not sufficient for the ABC to meet its charter responsibilities: in spite of broadband advances in urban centres and the spread of digital phones, the vast majority of Pacific islanders still rely on radio for their information, and any loss of shortwave and satellite rebroadcasting will be sorely felt.

There will be “reduced original content requirements” and fewer positions in RA’s foreign language section, with the Chinese-language service reduced to three staff, Indonesian to three and just one broadcaster each for Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia. Staff at the Tok Pisin service, which provides a vital service for our closest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, will be reduced to just two. “Language services in Tok Pisin will be delivered through a mix of reduced original content coupled with translated ABC content,” says the current restructuring proposal.

The loss of “original content” for our northern neighbour comes at a time when foreign minister Julie Bishop has spoken of her “long love affair with Papua New Guinea” dating back to when she wrote to penpals there as a fourteen-year-old. Radio Australia’s PNG service has been broadcasting since Bishop was a lovelorn teenager; in past decades, Pearson Vetuna, Carolyn Tiriman, Kenya Kala and other Australian-based Radio Australia broadcasters were treated like rock stars when they visited their homeland. Proposals simply to translate ABC News into Tok Pisin hardly meet the ABC’s charter obligation for innovative broadcasting.

The future of Radio Australia’s French-language service “remains under consideration” even as the French dependencies of New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna are building closer economic and political ties with Australia and the Pacific Islands Forum. New Caledonia is moving towards a referendum on self-determination in the next few years. Yet Australian audiences would be hard-pressed to find any coverage of last May’s elections, even though the incoming Congress will determine whether New Caledonia reaches a new political relationship with France before 2018. I was the only Australian journalist to travel to report on the elections from New Caledonia, and no newspapers in Australia published a report on the vote. (Ironically, Radio Australia was created during the second world war to complement Australia’s first diplomatic presence in the Asia-Pacific region: a consulate in New Caledonia established to support Gaullist efforts to overthrow the pro-Vichy governor.)

As I travelled around New Caledonia in May, a number of indigenous Kanaks mentioned items from Radio Australia’s French-language service that they’d heard or seen online. Australian broadcasting provides a crucial alternative in a media landscape dominated by French government media and a daily newspaper that campaigns against independence.

The ABC’s reporting of the region is not perfect, of course, and it’s not unknown for Pacific journalists to criticise the errors and cultural bias that are part and parcel of an under resourced organisation. But the loss of the Australia Network contract is part of a broader pattern that fatally damages Australian broadcasting to the islands region.

Even for a government that declares little love for the ABC, this short-sighted budget bushfire is yet another blow to Australia’s declining influence in the Pacific region. With cuts to the ABC, CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology and other institutions working with Pacific partners, the Australian government is weakening regional initiatives to respond to poverty, development and the climate emergency. The merger of the Australian Agency for International Development into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and multibillion dollar cuts to the overseas aid budget over the next four years have already unbalanced the institutions that implement policy in the region.

And what about the villagers in Futuna? There will be an increased diet of ABC reporting of the floods in Queensland, but less timely information about the next cyclone bearing down on them. Surely we can do better than this. •

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DESPITE what the treasurer and the foreign affairs minister might have tried to do on budget night, every national broadcaster has to think of itself as an international broadcaster. For the ABC, it just got $20 million a year harder.

A couple of days after the budget, the Communications and Media Law Association and the International Institute of Communications got people together in Sydney to talk about “public broadcasters.” The legal truth is that Australia doesn’t have any.

We used to have two kinds, but in 1992, the Broadcasting Services Act got rid of them both. Licensed “public broadcasters” became “community broadcasters.” That sector’s representative organisation, the PBAA, had to turn itself into the CBAA.

The other kind of public broadcaster, the kind we had gathered to talk about – “public service broadcasters” – became “national broadcasters.” At the time, I think this was mainly seen as a way to avoid confusion. If we were turning licensed “public broadcasters” into “community broadcasters,” it would be best to retire the term “public broadcaster” altogether. But it was also a revival of old terminology: the first Australian Broadcasting Act of 1942 articulated two sectors: the advertiser-supported licensed broadcasters were called the Commercial Service; the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Commission was called the National Service.

Fifty years on, we needed new language, but we actually revived some old language. The language we chose – “national broadcaster” and “national broadcasting” instead of “public broadcaster” and “public broadcasting” – brought with it more than we might have intended.

At the precise moment we chose to call the ABC and SBS “national broadcasters,” we were on the verge of a technological transformation: the Online Age. Until then, to broadcast internationally from Australia, you generally had to make a deliberate choice. Apart from the occasional lucky New Zealander who picked up 3LO or 4QG on a clear night, Australian broadcasters who wanted to reach overseas audiences had to erect shortwave transmitters, or buy satellite time, or make arrangements to relay their services though local terrestrial facilities, or – later – sell VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs.

Once broadcasters got websites, and broadcasting services could be streamed, or viewed on catch-up services or apps accessed via virtual private networks, or VPNs, the act of broadcasting to one nation became broadcasting to all of them. The technology of the age was simultaneously local, city-wide, state-wide, national… as well as regional and international. Every National Broadcaster was an International Broadcaster.

For the ABC and SBS, it was no longer just Radio Australia or the Australia Network that reached audiences outside Australia: it was all of ABC and SBS Online; every radio network or radio station that is streamed; everything available on iView or SBS On Demand or apps to overseas users prepared to take the risk with VPN access.

When Bob Mansfield took a close look at the ABC around this time – the mid 1990s – he thought you could eliminate the international bit, Radio Australia, and no one would notice, because Australian audiences weren’t able to listen to it. Now, the government thinks you can get rid of the Australia Network because the international audience can’t help but notice Australia’s ABC, especially if its News 24 service is made accessible online.

I don’t want to exaggerate the impact of internationalisation. National Broadcasters don’t stop being National Broadcasters just because so much of what they do is accessible to non-national audiences. Some broadcasters get much bigger international audiences than others; and some parts of broadcasters get bigger proportions of their audiences and users internationally than other parts. For example, Radio National cites very high overseas podcast numbers.

But the impact of internationalisation comes not just because each broadcaster reaches out to international audiences and users. It also comes because each broadcaster has to deal with every other broadcaster reaching in to its own domestic audience. So some of the distinctive role that national broadcasters once played in bringing certain kinds of overseas programming and services to the domestic audience is threatened.

Australia’s SBS used to brand its mission “Bringing the World Back Home.” As the world created new distribution channels to Australian homes, the SBS’s mission had to change.

Australia’s ABC used to be part of a global family of public service broadcasters that exchanged programs. The biggest and most significant was the BBC, and generations of Australian audiences got used to seeing the BBC’s dramas and David Attenborough’s nature documentaries on ABC TV, hearing Alastair Cooke’s Letter from America on ABC radio, and buying the DVDs and CDs in ABC shops.

But now the BBC deals with everyone. Top Gear was screened on the SBS, then the Nine Network, which also licensed the format to make an Australian version. Foxtel started buying some programs from the BBC, then some channels and finally entered into the kind of arrangement with the BBC that it used to have with its sibling, the ABC. The relationship will no doubt keep changing: the BBC will be assessing now whether the money it is receiving from partnering with a subscription TV service in Australia rather than free-to-air services is worth the loss of reach.

This shuffling recalls the earliest days of radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 30s, when the BBC and the broadcasting companies in Australia were very young. Over a period of just six or seven years, the BBC used at least four different models for dealing with Australian broadcasters.

Initially, following the arrangement it had arrived at for broadcasters in the United States, the BBC granted exclusive rights to retransmit particular programs in each overseas territory to the first broadcaster to apply within a month of the proposed broadcast. Then, not wanting to offend its emerging “opposite number” in Australia – the Australian Broadcasting Company – it changed its position to offer non-exclusive access to competing Australian broadcasters. Then, after the Australian Broadcasting Company became the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1932, the BBC awarded the ABC first-run rights for six months for a series of “Empire Recordings,” but sold second-run rights to a commercial network, AWA, for twelve months. A couple of years later, the BBC advised it would grant exclusive Australian rights to the ABC in future. The global “public broadcasting” family was in place.

These were baby “broadcasters,” manoeuvring around each other, crafting and recrafting the relationships that would mark the thing we call broadcasting.

Broadcasting came to be seen as a quintessential “national” task – indeed as a central part of the very process of defining states. State-owned broadcasters became synonymous with the nation states that founded them: the ABC, the BBC, the CBC, the NZBC, the SABC. But there, at its birth, the founders were thinking of broadcasting not just as a national medium, but also as an international one.

They still do, and in ways that are constantly evolving. For example, Australia exports the formats to shows like Rake and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, as well as the finished programs.

So it is curious that one of the products of that era of rising nationalism in the 1920s and 30s was a lively capacity to conceptualise broadcasting as a global activity; while today, in an era when globalisation is so present as to be a cliché, the government is asking our oldest “national broadcaster” to get back to its nation. The future for public broadcasters is going to need bigger thinking than that. •

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THE AUSTRALIA NETWORK, the ABC’s international television service, has been in the Coalition’s sights – and, not coincidentally, in the Murdoch press’s sights – since 2011. That was when the Gillard government awarded the ABC a ten-year contract to deliver international TV, bringing a definitive conclusion to a ludicrously mismanaged tender process.

So it came as no surprise when the Abbott government axed the network in Tuesday night’s budget. The decision came despite the fact that the ABC Act requires the national broadcaster to transmit news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural programs “to countries outside Australia” in order to “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs” and “enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs.”

The government hasn’t proposed changes to the Act to remove this requirement; rather, it has removed the financial means for the ABC to fulfil this role in television. It would obviously have been more honest and proper to seek a change in the ABC legislation rather than attempting to bypass parliament by administrative fiat.

The budget decision is the culmination of a sorry sequence of events. In his last great gift to the Coalition as foreign minister, Kevin Rudd decided to open the tender process for the international broadcaster to commercial broadcasters. With a single exception, no other country that broadcasts internationally outsources its service to the private sector. The exception was Australia under the Howard government. In July 1996, within months of its election and without warning, the government announced the intended privatisation of Australia Television, as it was then called. The decision, made without any preparatory work by any section of the bureaucracy, came as a complete shock to ABC management.

When a decision was announced in July 1997, Kerry Stokes’s Seven Network was the successful tenderer. But three years later Seven stopped the service because it couldn’t make a profit. When foreign minister Alexander Downer called for a fresh round of tenders, the ABC was not among the applicants. To his credit, Downer approached the national broadcaster, and it was ultimately awarded the contract.

But the idea of outsourcing international broadcasting was not dead. In Kevin Rudd’s tender process, the ABC faced competition from Sky News, whose owners are the same Seven Network that bailed out in the late nineties, and Rupert Murdoch, who in 1994 had removed the BBC’s news from his pay TV offering in China in order to please the Beijing regime.

Rudd’s assessment team preferred the Sky tender. Cabinet asked it to reconsider, and again it opted for Sky. (Its grounds for doing so have been kept secret under commercial-in-confidence provisions.) The Gillard cabinet intervened, handing carriage of the tender to communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy; then, seeking to lock in the national broadcaster’s position, it added a provision under which only the ABC or its associated companies could provide government-funded international services. As a result, amending legislation will be needed to allow Sky or any other commercial broadcaster to participate in a new tender process.

Sky News, which has become a valuable part of the Australian news mix, had every reason to feel aggrieved by Labor’s follies, and received a payment from the government as compensation.

The grounds on which Rudd’s committee decided in favour of Sky should now be made public. We might discover, for example, that some provisions were loaded against the ABC. It may be that one condition was for the tenderer to provide extra funds from elsewhere, but if the ABC diverted funding from elsewhere in its budget it would contravene its governing legislation. Similarly, the ABC would be wary of arrangements with other broadcasters that might compromise its editorial independence. We don’t know if such considerations were a factor, and that leaves a hole at the centre of this important episode.

But the botched process was clearly a turning point in Coalition attitudes. According to prime minister Abbott, “We’ve had for a long time very serious issues about the Australia Network tender process. Twice the tender process gave that particular operation to someone other than the ABC, and then, because of leadership problems inside the government, the decision was changed. And the Audit Office itself has said that the whole thing was badly done.”

IT ISN’T clear that the Australia Network could have done anything to redeem itself in the eyes of the new government. In 2014, the ABC won the most extensive access afforded to any Western broadcaster in China, with the Australia Network to be made available to the entire Chinese population. But even such an unprecedented achievement counted for nought.

As a selection of her recent comments shows, foreign minister Julie Bishop has been the most frequent critic of the broadcaster. “It is meant to be a tool of public diplomacy and I am concerned by the level of negative feedback I receive from overseas,” she said in one interview. “Given some of the recent incidents – for example, the Snowden allegations, and now these allegations about the navy’s treatment of asylum seekers – is the ABC fulfilling its contractual agreement?” It’s not a question of the ABC promoting its news programs in the region, she insists, “it’s actually meant to be fulfilling the Australian government’s foreign policy objectives.”

Her first line of criticism has been what she perceives as a lack of quality. When I see such criticisms I am reminded of Woody Allen’s quip that he first went to Hollywood in reply to an ad saying, “Wanted: boy, part-time, to direct Ben Hur.” The mismatch between impossibly high ideals and pathetically limited resources is not uncommon in the public sector. The Australia Network broadcasts every hour of the day, every week of the year. By my reckoning its contract of $20 million works out at around $2300 an hour, a pittance in TV broadcasting terms. It only survives because of synergies with the wider ABC, to which it pays a fee of $6 million to air its programming. In turn, it has three correspondents based in Asia whose work is available to domestic ABC news.

If perceptions of quality are notoriously subjective, then it is equally difficult to get objective measures of value for money. Even reliable ratings figures for international broadcasters in the Asia-Pacific are hard to find. According to a 2010 Lowy Institute report, internal ABC figures put the network’s total reach at over thirty-two million viewers. “After nine years of relatively stable funding levels, Australia Network has managed to achieve a penetration in the region (particularly in the Pacific) which positions it as a genuine challenger to its international counterparts,” the authors observed. The audience figure also needs to be assessed against a background of overseas students contributing more than $14 billion to the Australian economy last year, with tourism another big earner.

Bishop’s second line of criticism is that she wants the news coverage to conform more closely to the government’s policies. In 1980, in the Dix Inquiry into the ABC, departmental spokesman Kim Jones first articulated Foreign Affairs’s view that whatever temporary embarrassments may be caused by the ABC’s international broadcaster Radio Australia, maintaining its independence is the key to its credibility, and hence to its effectiveness. This has remained the department’s official view, even if individuals have sometimes been tempted to be less liberal. Terms such as public diplomacy and soft power have entered the international relations lexicon, but if the ABC’s international broadcasters are to play a fruitful role then editorial independence will be the indispensable precondition.

In 1989, following an inquiry into Radio Australia (of which I was a member), the ABC board affirmed that “Radio Australia should, through its own performance, show a nation which allows an open flow of information, which nurtures broad debate on policy and holds its government accountable through close and critical examination of its actions.” According to the board, “News and informational features should project a national broadcaster capable not only of independence from government, but also with standards of accuracy which bear constant examination.”

DISCUSSIONS about Australia’s national interest are often conducted in overly narrow terms. As a middle-level power, Australia’s scope for international influence is affected by its capacity to use transnational channels to project itself. Within the dynamic Asia-Pacific region, many of Australia’s comparative advantages lie in our high educational standards, the richness of our cultural life, our expertise in media and journalism, and the cosmopolitan and democratic nature of our society.

International broadcasting is a relatively cheap means of projecting these features and values. It may sometimes benefit Australia directly, by increasing trade in educational services, for example, but more often it will be indirectly, by making potential trade partners and customers more receptive to examining Australian options. Presumably, it also helps to give Australian values more resonance internationally.

It follows that serving the national interest in this way must not be compromised by any shortsighted pursuit of particular diplomatic or commercial goals. The credibility of an international broadcaster is hard-earned, but easily squandered. •

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A LENGTHY season of patriotic reflection has begun – the centenary of the first world war, the winding up of the Australian military engagement in Afghanistan and, next year, the anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign.

Unexpectedly, my own season of reflection began early and oddly.

Writing in the Australian in early March, Nick Cater linked me with a group he called the Anti-military Bohemian Collective. Cater believes the “Collective” operates within the Labor Party and my former employer, the ABC. Having come late upon the article, I found myself checking the date of publication. Could this really be topical? The events he describes – those in which I participated as acting general manager of the ABC’s international broadcasting service, Radio Australia – took place almost twenty-four years ago, just prior to the first Gulf war.

In the course of his article, Cater names just two former ABC employees and one current radio broadcaster (Jon Faine, host of 774 Melbourne’s morning program) to support his sweeping assertions about the corporation’s behaviour over five decades. Since the 1960s, he argues, “the ABC has proved to be a treacherous guide to public sentiment on defence matters” and “could not be trusted to provide a balanced picture of a modern military campaign.” Referring to a talkback segment on Faine’s program in 2011, Cater goes so far as to associate “this most treacherous category of cultural debate” with the activities of the Wobblies – those followers of the left-wing Industrial Workers of the World who agitated against conscription during the first world war and were eventually outlawed.

The Australian publishes so many stories critical of the ABC that it is tempting to dismiss them as a job lot. So concerted are their attacks that when the Australian accuses other media of systemic bias it verges on self-parody. Certainly Cater’s article – amid the overall confection – invited a here-we-go-again sigh.

But then it began to niggle.

Before Kuwait

For several decades after the end of the second world war, when the ABC took permanent control of Radio Australia, international broadcasting pricked political nerve-ends. Foreign governments didn’t always appreciate the broadcaster’s capacity to reach across borders with news and information presented in their local languages. Australian government ministers and bureaucrats made fitful attempts to influence program content in pursuit of foreign policy goals. In the 1960s, one external affairs minister, Paul Hasluck, even sought to gain the power to direct Radio Australia as to what news it should or should not broadcast. (He was unsuccessful.) These pressures made for a sometimes uneasy relationship, with the ABC trying to balance editorial rigour and cross-cultural and political sensitivities.

Over time, however, what might be described as the BBC model of international broadcasting (rather than the more pro-government American approach) became widely accepted. Radio Australia could most effectively project Australian values and exercise cultural diplomacy if audiences perceived it to be accurate, impartial and credible. By 1987, one of Hasluck’s successors, foreign minister Bill Hayden, argued that he would rather the government close down Radio Australia than try to use it for propaganda purposes. Two years later, a Foreign Affairs submission to an ABC review of Radio Australia made a similar cautious endorsement of editorial independence. “In the end,” it said, “Radio Australia’s independence, along with a record for accuracy, has been the source of its authority.”

Even so, the notion of independence and impartiality remained one of some delicacy. Officials from non-Western countries, for example, would often ask how it could be that Radio Australia was owned by the government, yet was not required to act as the mouthpiece of government. They were not readily convinced that the two were compatible.

At the time of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in August 1990, the international service was relying principally on shortwave radio transmitters to broadcast to particular geographical areas. Its endorsed priorities were multilingual services in the Pacific, Southeast and North Asia, and English-language content as far west as the Indian subcontinent. Broadcasters primarily sought to reach the citizens of those countries, with Australian expatriates a lesser priority except during times of crisis.

Using shortwave transmission, signals were beamed up and would then deflect off the ionosphere and “bounce” to earth – on target, it was hoped. Because they would continue bouncing to more distant points around the planet with rapidly depleting energy, people in Arabian Gulf countries might pick up signals from time to time, but not reliably and not in a way that could be monitored effectively.

In other words, Radio Australia had no reliable presence, significant profile or reputation in the Gulf region or the wider Middle East, prior to the invasion of Kuwait. In accordance with its legislative mandate and the policy consensus it shared with the government, the organisation operated independently of government. It was against this backdrop that the confrontation between the ABC and the Hawke Labor government took place in 1990–91.

Cater sees the incident as a result of the ABC’s clear “anti-military bias.” What he misses is the reality of how coincidence, emotion and ego can help escalate a political confrontation. Inasmuch as such events have enduring relevance, it is by way of illustrating how quickly public debates can go awry, especially when played out in a context of heightened patriotic sensitivity and politics. They also raise once again contested notions about the role of public broadcasting and its obligations to government.

Wobblies and bohemians

The affair in question became a significant matter of public interest on 22 January 1991, when the Senate adopted, without dissent (indeed, without specific debate), a resolution condemning the ABC for ceasing what was portrayed as a service for naval personnel in the Gulf.

The Senate had reconvened to debate the government’s decision to join a military coalition to expel Iraqi invasion forces from neighbouring Kuwait. The prelude to a UN-sanctioned counterattack had gone on for more than four months, for much of which period the Iraqis had detained thousands of foreign citizens, who had been visiting or working in Kuwait. The US-led Operation Desert Storm had commenced a few days before the Senate convened, on 17 January, and prime minister Bob Hawke had committed Australian troops before consulting parliament.

After two days of the special sitting, during which all but one senator spoke at length, the chamber supported the intervention, with only nine senators dissenting. Speakers highlighted the fact that 75 per cent of opinion poll respondents believed Australia should participate in the campaign – a figure that Cater would no doubt consider conclusive. Unlike “Wobblies and bohemians,” he wrote in March, the broader Australian population recognises the sterling military qualities of “discipline, self-sacrifice and professionalism.”

Those are undoubtedly qualities to be upheld and respected. (Incidentally, like many others, I am pleased to possess a lapel pin issued recently to the next-of-kin of defence personnel on deployment – in our case, to Afghanistan.) But patriotism – indeed, good citizenship – demands more of a person than to be a cheerleader or an unqualified supporter of the conduct of the military. And public sentiment alone is insufficient as a guide to the performance of any institution that can inform or influence public debate and the decisions of government.

Values, patriotic sentiment and historical experience certainly help frame community responses to a conflict like the war in the Gulf. But people receive specific information and analyses of issues from policy-making and opinion-leading elites, in particular from parliament and the news media.

In this respect, the mass media, in particular, don’t always serve the community well. Academic studies in the United States have reached conclusions that I suspect would be mirrored in Australia. They show that exposure to television coverage of hostile events tended to create anxiety and fear in the American viewing public, which could initiate a cycle of issue identification, public anxiety and political reaction.

Examining the years following the terrorist attacks of 2001, one study found that viewers discerned no qualitative difference in standards of fairness or accuracy between news stories presented in a neutral way and those employing patriotic language and symbolism. That is not because editorial tone lacks significance. By their nature, patriotic feelings tend to be held subjectively and uncritically. The authors argued this was important because uncritical patriotism underpinned the normative or values-based component of policy legitimacy. People are more likely to perceive examples of bias directed against, rather than in favour of, their own side. Emotion and subjectivity readily dominate.

At the same time, policy legitimacy requires government and its agencies to demonstrate, through their conduct and performance, the capacity and preparedness to achieve national objectives. So, while subjective feelings are understandable in the general community, they are not an adequate response from those in high office or privileged positions of public influence. It’s been argued, indeed, that “patriotic journalism” is dangerous because it denies people the information and detached perspective necessary for sound decision-making. The practices of policy-making and opinion-influencing journalism must reflect “from the outside in” – and communicate an issue in its overall context.

Yet so often players within the society – the politician, the editor and the citizen – tend to feed off one another. An incident begins with a dramatic moment. Momentum builds. Emotion kicks in. Perspective shifts. The politics redefine the issue. And that largely is how I came to be associated with the alleged Anti-military Bohemian Collective of the ABC.

Prelude to war

In December 1990, according to Nick Cater, Radio Australia “stopped its two-hour daily service of messages to Australian sailors in the Gulf.” It was this incident, and what followed, that won me the not-so-coveted place in the Collective.

The claim isn’t new, but it has always suffered a basic flaw. Radio Australia had not, in fact, established a messages service for naval sailors. Rather, it had responded to the plight of Australian civilians held hostage when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Iraqis used some 800 foreigners as human shields at strategic locations to discourage a counterattack. Many other expatriates suffered detention and isolation for as long as four-and-a-half months.

Via Australian diplomats in the region, Radio Australia learned that the hostages were experiencing mounting distress and lacked access to reliable information. Our response was twofold: to redirect certain shortwave transmitters to deliver English-language news and information programming to the Gulf; and to establish a daily program enabling families in Australia to send messages to the detainees to support them through the crisis. This response could be thought of as an international variant of the ABC’s important role as an emergency services broadcaster during domestic crises such as floods and bushfires.

A number of well-known professionals from outside the ABC agreed to be studio guests and help deliver the messages. They responded immediately and with enthusiasm, providing familiarity and warmth, day after day. Among them were entertainer Bert Newton and former AFL coach and player Ron Barassi. The latter talked about the business of coaching football teams as an oblique way of advising hostages on stress management techniques.

Over time, the service included a small number of messages sent from the families of other nationalities. It also attracted a proportionately small number addressed to Australian naval personnel in the Gulf.

Although this use of the international service was well-received, we had no funding of our own to sustain the effort. As a news editor once observed, Radio Australia was resourced to deal with anything but “news” – it ran tight rosters and basic services but had no provision to deal with exceptional events. The overwhelming bulk of operational funds were committed to staff salaries and routine transmission, and discretionary expense budgets were minimal. So we negotiated with Canberra to obtain temporary additional funding to support transmissions to the Gulf.

By November 1990, many of the hostages had been released, and others had been taken from Kuwait to Iraq. Australian diplomats reported that replacement batteries had become ever more scarce and fewer of those people still detained in Kuwait could power their shortwave radios. Moreover, the volume of messages received for broadcast had fallen sharply. In Canberra, the Department of Transport and Communications made clear its wish to discontinue the additional funding as soon as possible.

All Australian hostages had regained their liberty by 14 December 1990. Some messages continued to arrive from the families of naval personnel deployed in the Gulf. Advice from Canberra was that the Royal Australian Navy had an established system to enable family communication with sailors on deployment. The defence minister, Robert Ray, later told parliament the department had also established a twenty-four-hour telephone inquiry service for families.

On 21 December, I attended a meeting of the ABC executive committee in Sydney, chaired by managing director David Hill, and recommended that the Gulf service cease because its purpose in responding to the plight of Australian civilian hostages had been fulfilled. Radio Australia’s ongoing responsibility would be to report and analyse developments as accurately and fairly as the volatile situation allowed.

The executive group agreed. We also decided to keep the matter of Gulf broadcasts under review because Saddam Hussein still had several weeks to withdraw from Kuwait before the expiry of an ultimatum from the United Nations. War in the Gulf was not yet inevitable. Within hours, though, hostility would flare at home.

Coincidence, emotion and ego

We didn’t carry mobile phones in 1990 and it took me some hours to return from the executive committee meeting in Sydney to Radio Australia’s base in suburban Melbourne. Immediately I was called to speak with a voluble David Hill. What the hell was going on? Just hours ago the ABC executive had taken a decision on my recommendation; now he was being told everything had changed. What was I playing at?

At first I could only protest that I knew of nothing that had changed and that the recommendation stood. Soon enough, though, I would learn otherwise. An ABC senior executive, in Sydney, had taken a phone call from Canberra, that same day, probably while the executive committee was in session. The defence minister wanted the messages service to continue, having heard it while visiting an Australian warship in the Gulf. Although he had no functional relationship with Radio Australia, the executive in Sydney apparently reached an understanding with Canberra. He didn’t wait to speak to me and be briefed on the operational context. Whatever then occurred resulted in my short and stressful telephone conversation with an understandably agitated managing director.

As the saying goes, shit happens. And when it does, the big men fly. Like so many confrontations, this owed more to timing, crossed wires and contested power than it did to Nick Cater’s imagined rising of Wobblies and bohemians. It demonstrated again how potent the blend of politics, patriotic fervour and headlines can be.

As usual, David Hill played from the front, publicly defending the decision to end the service. He experienced increasing pressure from Canberra. But Hill was nothing if not a robust advocate for the ABC. When he had the political ball in his hands, he would run hard and argue articulately. He was not about to take direction from the defence minister, who was also a hard man.

Hill ordered me to write him a confidential briefing note to justify the ABC decision. The document presented the arguments for and against cessation of the service while, “on balance,” reiterating the decision and the agreement to keep the matter under review in case war did occur. Almost immediately, someone leaked the document to the press.

My briefing included the following statement, which provided a focal point for subsequent accusations of bias:

Editorial independence – real and perceived – is a delicate matter. It is one thing to identify with civilians caught suddenly in crisis. It may be another to respond to pressure seeking Radio Australia’s overt support for a government political/military endeavour.

In journalism it is not necessarily what you say but, to some extent, how you say it that can make a difference. The same can be said for the writing of confidential briefing notes.

Perhaps, for those inured to the shrill and adversarial tone of political debate in the Australia of the 2010s, it may seem quaint for editors to engage in nuanced decision-making such as that to which my note referred. Yet, even in the saturated contemporary environment of 24/7 “borderless” media, there are implications to consider when projecting the values of your own news service – which is, after all, a manufactured cultural product – into other cultures and systems where English is, at best, a second language. More than once, during my postings as an ABC foreign correspondent in South Asia and the Pacific, I had been challenged aggressively about the content or tone of news coverage. (The imprisonment in Egypt of Australian journalist Peter Greste and other journalists from Al Jazeera is a current and unsavoury manifestation of cross-border “sensitivities.”)

Although it was a well-regarded and longstanding presence in Asia and the Pacific, Radio Australia had no verifiable reputation or credibility in the Middle East. With war likely, I took the view that we were effectively a “new entrant” in the Gulf and should position the service carefully.

On matters of judgement, there are always choices to be made. The one we made to end the messages service was reasonable given its purpose and in the circumstances outlined above. Other persons in our place, in the same circumstances, may have arrived at a different conclusion.

Radio Australia’s general manager at the time, Richard Broinowski, who had been on leave, later went on the record supporting the position adopted during his absence. Broinowski was a career diplomat who held ambassadorial posts prior to and following his employment at the ABC. A messages service to the military, he said, “could be seen to be uncomfortably close to being a kind of government propaganda service.”

The matter quickly became a contest of will between the government and the ABC. Once Operation Desert Storm commenced on 17 January 1991 all attention was focused on the US-led assault and the role of Australian forces. As the Senate Hansard reports of 21 and 22 January show, parliamentarians felt keenly the onerous nature of their role in endorsing the Australian commitment.

A former defence minister, Kim “Bomber” Beazley, brought to a head the impasse with the ABC. As transport and communications minister he met with the ABC’s chairman, Robert Somervaille, and David Hill at their request. Beazley reminded the pair of Section 78 of the ABC Act, which empowered him to direct the Corporation to broadcast matter deemed to be in the national interest (with the requirement that he justify the order in a statement to parliament). This would have been the first and, to date, the only instance of the power being invoked.

After brief reflection, Somervaille and Hill agreed to negotiate a face-saving solution for both parties. The Royal Australian Navy commenced its own messages service using Radio Australia transmitters. Because this was a separate programming stream, it was not technically an ABC service. By agreeing, the chairman and managing director avoided the prospect of government intervention.

Over time it became clear to me that the controversy was as much a product of stressful circumstances as it was a reflection of any substantive need to maintain a service for sailors. Never since has there been such an expectation within government.

Why this matters

Almost a quarter of a century later, Nick Cater has used a few previously published words from my briefing note to David Hill to help make his case about the anti-military bias of the ABC. As has been demonstrated in recent months, hostility flares readily in times of political stress or when the public broadcaster reports unfavourably on the government or agencies under its direction. No doubt, like all journalists, ABC content-makers have sometimes erred in fact or the presentation of stories.

But the point remains: in our system, the legitimacy of public policy depends not only on whether it fits with the nation’s values – including patriotic sentiment – but also on whether it reflects our faith in the efficacy and capacity of government and its agencies.

Developments internationally – not least how great power relationships evolve in the Asia-Pacific region – will keep throwing up challenges for Australia’s security and economic prosperity. Australians will need to think rationally and not just sentimentally, and they will be best served by those institutions that identify and interpret major issues. This calls for the engagement of serious patriots, not just cheerleaders and polemicists.

Shock jocks may bellow emotively and the Australian and its News Corp stablemates may continue to campaign against public broadcasting. But the very presence of the ABC and SBS makes a difference. International studies have shown that in societies without strong public broadcasting systems (the United States and Russia, for instance) free-to-air television contributed to a heightened sense of fear in relation to hostile events such as terrorism. In Britain, by contrast, public broadcasting values had a strong moderating influence. Public broadcasting contributes to media diversity, with an obligation to respect audiences as citizens, not just consumers to be delivered to advertisers and commercial sponsors.

In 2007 Sarah Oates (then at the University of Glasgow) published the results of a substantial study of media coverage of the terrorist threat in the context of British elections. (Terrorists had attacked travellers on the London Underground in July 2005.) The study found that British television and British citizens had remained relatively “rational and resilient” about the terrorist threat. By comparison, Oates recalled her earlier research on Russia and the United States, where the media – rather than “using its ability to inform the public about the complex underlying causes of the terrorist actions” – mainly framed terrorist attacks as justification for war.

Oates’s study, funded by Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council, identified three factors to explain why British television had not apparently played on “fear, insecurity or implicit racism”: the community’s prior experience of domestic terrorism (carried out by the Irish Republican Army as recently as the 1990s); a relative emphasis on policy over emotion in election campaigns; and the existence of broadcast media that adhered to socially responsible reporting.

Oates’s study concluded:

It shows that it is not inevitable – as many assume – that television must contribute to a sense of fear and political inefficacy on the part of citizens. While television seems to have this effect in the United States and Russia… objective measurements show that the BBC model of public journalism (which resonates through the British broadcasting industry) does lead to less trivialisation and less sensationalisation of important civic coverage such as election news and terrorism.

That should give all thinking Australians some cause for reflection. •

The post The ABC of patriotism appeared first on Inside Story.

ACCOUNTABILITY is the price of statutory independence, and the price is considerable, especially for the kind of editorial and creative independence exercised by the ABC and SBS. As the Australian National Audit Office once observed dryly of the ABC, a national public broadcaster is subject to “more diverse” expectations of accountability than a private sector operator driven principally by the need to achieve a commercial profit. Having offered this self-evident truth about the national broadcasters, the Audit Office was silent on the reciprocal accountability of government.

To survive, the public broadcaster must win and retain the endorsement of the community at large, including those who don’t frequently use its services yet support them through taxation. The public broadcaster must compete for a critical mass of listeners and viewers while also serving specialist audiences; it must retain credibility within a ratings-driven industry while adhering to public sector principles and values; it must serve parliament, not the government; and it must demonstrate leadership through innovation. Inevitably, public broadcasting operates in a politically contested zone where – as demonstrated again in recent months – the discourse is often combative and careless.

Too often a gap exists between government assertions and community perception or the findings of external inquiries. Although the gap extends across party lines, among sections of the Liberal-National Coalition it can seem wide enough to be visible from space. It is time to make government engagement with national public broadcasting more accountable and transparent, and genuinely in the public interest.

TWO RELATED decisions provide a starting point for discussing these issues. The first is the possible closure of the international television service, Australia Network – or, at least, the cessation of the ABC’s role in delivering this service – as foreshadowed recently by the Abbott government. The second is the decision of the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to commission an efficiency review of the ABC and SBS, reporting by April this year, a month before the federal Budget.

The future of Australia Network is a legitimate public policy issue, and raises important questions about the role, rules of engagement and effectiveness of cultural diplomacy. Of relevance here is the inconsistency – or perhaps the ineptitude – of the former Labor government in establishing and later cancelling a public tender process for its operation. Rather than awarding a ten-year contract to the national broadcaster’s rival, Sky News Australia, which is one-third owned by Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB, the government overrode the tender panel’s recommendation and decided that the ABC would continue operating the service in perpetuity.

Although the Audit Office confirmed that cabinet was entitled to take that action, it said the matter “brought into question the government’s ability to deliver such a sensitive process fairly and effectively” (notwithstanding that it had managed routinely many other tender processes). Whatever your opinion of Sky News Australia and its ownership structure, this clumsy affair demonstrated the intensity with which governments and power elites wrestle over issues of media domination.

The commissioning of the efficiency review of the ABC and SBS inevitably invites speculation as to whether this is a prelude to budget cuts, some kind of ABC–SBS rationalisation or a hunt for evidence that the ABC uses funding intended for a particular purpose to subsidise other operations. It also has a precedent under an earlier Coalition government. In 1996, soon after taking office, the Howard government commissioned an extensive review of the ABC while going ahead with two phases of budget reduction – first, a cut of 2 per cent ($11 million per year) and then a cut of 10 per cent ($55 million). The so-called Mansfield review, nonetheless, produced a strong affirmation of the ABC’s value to Australia.

The Turnbull review has a much narrower focus. It will examine “input costs” in order to determine whether the ABC and SBS are making efficient use of the funding they receive. Specifically excluded are the broadcasters’ legislative charters, questions of program quality, and whether the ABC should be allowed to accept commercial advertising.

Time will tell whether the findings about the ABC, in particular, differ from a series of less well-known reviews over the decade and a half since Mansfield reported. For a time, in fact, external reviews and audits, commissioned by the government or by the ABC itself, seemed to just keep on coming. These reviews, which required the ABC to justify its role, its performance and its need for particular levels of funding, included a major assessment by the financial consulting firm KPMG in 2006, another by the Macquarie Bank in 2002 and others by the Audit Office in 2002 and 2004. Of these, only the Audit Office’s reviews of ABC corporate governance and its conversion to digital broadcasting were made public. Often commissioned in the heat of political battle, the likelihood of such reviews being released publicly depends very much on their conclusions.

If you pay close attention today you may well hear the sounds of exasperation and anxiety about this latest probe emanating from the corridors of national public broadcasting. “We’re already the most scrutinised organisation in the country,” some staffers will argue. Performance reviews are certainly no fun. But they need to occur regularly, in the public interest, to ensure that the broadcasters deliver high value for money and fulfil the roles defined for them by parliament, and to pre-empt the arrogance that commonly accompanies media profile or an entrenched sense of institutional entitlement.

For me, the pertinent question is not whether Minister Turnbull should have commissioned another review or what options it might canvass; rather, it is the question of how he has chosen to conduct it and what he will reveal publicly about its findings.

The process is being kept close to the minister’s office. Turnbull commissioned the Department of Communications to undertake the task, assisted by Peter Lewis, a former chief finance officer of Seven West Media Ltd. Regardless of its professional expertise and personal integrity, the department exists to advise and serve the lawful policy agenda of the minister; inevitably, the outcome of the review will be associated directly with Turnbull and the policy intent of his government.

The review’s terms of reference are prefaced with the claim that “there is limited transparency to the Australian public, the government and the parliament of the breakdown ofs cost of delivering the ABC and SBS Charter responsibilities.” No mention is made of the existing web of accountability requirements: a high-level corporate plan, performance data in the annual portfolio budget statements in the government’s Budget Papers, the acquittal of performance targets through the ABC annual report, the yearly sign-off on the Corporation’s financial statements by the Audit Office, appearances before Senate estimates committees, and the published outcomes of adjudicated complaints and numerous public opinion surveys. Every three years, on top of all that, the broadcasters make detailed submissions to the government about their proposed activities in the next triennial funding period.

Of course, the decision to invoke transparency as a principle tends to be a matter of convenience rather than the norm. A government may require it of others but not of itself. The Howard government chose not to publish KPMG’s voluminous ABC Funding Adequacy and Efficiency Review, for instance, which concluded that the ABC was operating efficiently, suffered from a “structural funding deficiency” and bore costs that weren’t faced by commercial operators. KPMG also raised a number of matters regarding the efficiency of the Corporation’s use of capital assets such as outside broadcast vans. Among its recommendations were that funding be increased by about $126 million over three years, and that the funding mechanism be reviewed.

It was a significant result for the ABC and probably not the outcome anticipated by the government. Without intending disrespect to the big consultancies, clients employ them with a purpose, and part of that purpose can be to influence the terms of the analysis. If a preferred outcome is in doubt, the client may remonstrate with the consultant. I have witnessed such exchanges, and more than once have had a role to “assist” consultants with their investigations.

ALTHOUGH there are few absolutes in public sector governance or in media policy, there is much to defend in the public interest. And, at the moment, the stakes are high.

For most of the ABC’s history, it has operated as a complementary and, in terms of its share of available audiences, a lesser presence in the mixed economy of Australian broadcasting. Generally (but not always) the ABC’s market presence didn’t threaten – and wasn’t even seen to be threatening – the commercial wellbeing of private corporations.

Unlike in Europe, where public broadcasters operated for decades as monopolies or near-monopolies, commercial broadcasting arrived first in Australia and the ABC came into being only when parliament responded to a failure in the broadcasting market. The federal government had licensed a private entity, the Australian Broadcasting Company, to operate a national radio broadcasting service. Parliament recognised the potential of broadcasting to link widely dispersed communities and help nurture a sense of common nation-building endeavour. When that struggling commercial radio network handed back its licence in 1932, parliament established what was then called the Australian Broadcasting Commission. By design and circumstance, the ABC has evolved into a highly distinctive and – many would argue – indispensible part of Australian society that acts partly as a guarantor of media diversity in a highly concentrated industry.

Today’s ABC has greater presence and more influence than ever, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed among the commercial media. The ABC has successfully exploited the potential of the many-channel digital and online environment while key commercial operators have struggled to adopt sustainable new business models. Even by 2006, KPMG reported, the range and scale of its operations, in Australia and overseas, were unmatched by any other Australian media organisation.

Like the rise of a geopolitical superpower, the present strength of national public broadcasting has the potential to seed its future vulnerability. That vulnerability may arise from the broadcaster’s own hubris as much as from the lobbying of vested interests such as News Corporation or Canberra’s own neo-liberal zealots. More broadly, of course, all established media enterprises are vulnerable to the disruptive impact of the borderless digital economy.

DESPITE the tendency to view the ABC and SBS through the prism of a media-saturated and consumerist society, a fundamental principle needs to be acknowledged when considering their roles. As the High Court determined in a key decision in 1997, the national broadcasters constitute elements of Australia’s executive government. Our system of government is founded on the division of accountabilities between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. According to the High Court, the executive is not just made up of government ministers and the public service but also includes the affairs of statutory authorities and public utilities that are obliged to report to parliament, or to a minister who is responsible to parliament.

Most Commonwealth departments and agencies of executive government, including Malcolm Turnbull’s Department of Communications, are subject to the direction of the government. A small number – including the Audit Office, the Australian Federal Police and the national public broadcasters – operate at arms length from government on the basis of statutory independence. The ABC Act, for example, gives the Corporation both editorial and administrative independence from government. Ministers can only direct these independent bodies on carefully prescribed matters. This is essential in order to protect the integrity of Australia’s political system.

The point is that national public broadcasting exists formally within the constitutional framework of Australian democracy. The Audit Office, likewise, has an express duty to apply independent scrutiny and analysis of the performance of public sector organisations, such as the ABC and SBS (employing experts to offer industry-specific advice, as required). Fundamentally, the Audit Office is concerned to ensure that a public sector organisation fulfils its legislated purpose in an efficient and effective manner.

The Audit Office’s mission doesn’t necessarily coincide with a government’s short-term political agenda, and nor does it conduct a performance review solely with reference to the business environment. It is more encompassing of both enterprise governance and underlying civic purpose. In my experience, the Audit Office’s forensic doggedness can rub against the inclinations of broadcasting managers, absorbed as they are in the business of media rather than the crosscutting influences of legislation and public policy. But, to borrow from the language of the prime minister, this is not a vocation for wimps and more is required of those executive officers with custody of the national broadcasters.

In 2002, for example, an Audit Office report on ABC corporate governance noted that a number of senior executives had recently been recruited from the private sector. According to the report, their understanding of their responsibilities appeared to be focused exclusively on line relationships with the managing director (and, in turn, the ABC board). At the time, according to the Audit Office, these new executives lacked a sufficient understanding of their own public accountabilities – in my words, they had yet to achieve a sufficient balance of perspective between the imperatives of industry performance and community obligation. Theirs ultimately was a responsibility to serve people not only as consumers but also as citizens; and not only to operate in markets but also to serve the Australian federation.

Like every major media institution, the ABC (and SBS, no doubt) pursues self-interest, empowers and privileges star power and occasionally oversteps accepted editorial boundaries. Each time there is an external inquiry, hostile or not, the frontline warriors of corporate management renew their efforts to enhance performance and plug weaknesses in corporate governance – whether in strategy settings, policies and procedures, monitoring and compliance processes, or in forms of external reporting. It is not the glamorous end of public broadcasting but it is fundamental to the health and hygiene of the whole.

Australia is subject to accelerating forces of unprecedented change. Amid this, Australian citizens respond consistently to opinion surveys by expressing their high degree of trust in the relevance and integrity of the ABC relative to other media and public institutions. Both the ABC and SBS contribute diversity to the media landscape and thus to the democratic fabric. Together, and across the whole spread of their offerings, they provide uniquely for a range of geographical and cultural communities of interest. But they may not always remain essential to the nation’s social and democratic wellbeing.

The public interest would be better served if both national broadcasters underwent rigorous performance appraisals, not in ad hoc political circumstances, but at regular intervals using criteria that remain consistent over time. These reviews might be scheduled, say, every five years (ten at the most). Opportunities for citizen input would help to mitigate the baseness of tribal politics, compensate for the leverage of cashed-up rent-seekers and transcend fads of marketing management. The national broadcasters already generate most of the performance data that would be required for presentation in this context.

These reviews would not eliminate political gamesmanship or struggles of ideology. But they could serve to establish a “drumbeat” of enhanced public accountability and expectation. Their very existence would serve to draw attention to the effort of any government – regardless of which was the governing party or coalition – that sought to mount ad hoc or, to be blunt, capricious inquiries to suit their partisan agendas.

If governments were sincere about respecting the public interest, they would commission such appraisals to take place at arm’s length. They would utilise, if not the Audit Office as an independent agency of executive government, then an entity of comparable rigour and stature. The findings would be tabled in parliament and therefore open to public scrutiny.

MEANWHILE, the Turnbull review takes its course within the cloisters of the Department of Communications.

About eight years ago, when KPMG had completed its ABC Funding Adequacy and Efficiency Review on behalf of the then Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, the Howard government chose not to release its findings. It would be reasonable to expect the current review team to refer to the 2006 report – a short summary of which was eventually leaked – and evaluate the changes that have occurred in the intervening period.

Among the findings of KPMG were the following:

• Even with indexed funding, the ABC faced cost pressures that were industry-driven, and ABC Television in particular could not sustain its range, quantity and mix of outputs without additional funding.

• The ABC provided a “high volume of outputs and quality, relative to the level of funding it received” and performed well in relation to “many types and levels of benchmarks and external points of reference.”

• The ABC appeared to be “a broadly efficient organisation” although the consultants identified a number of areas where further (meaning, I think, incremental) improvements could be made or further analyses undertaken.

• Labour-related costs in the previous five years increased from 56 per cent to almost 60 per cent of total costs notwithstanding that the ABC managed such costs “as well as, if not better than,” most comparable organisations.

• While KPMG approved of the ABC’s focus on using labour effectively, it urged greater effort to improve the efficiency of capital utilisation (by minimising the cost and maximising the use of assets such as production facilities and outside broadcast vans). It urged the Corporation to overcome a mindset of having to retain assets in perpetuity rather than outsourcing or sharing some resources (especially OB vans).

• Expansion into new media areas was consistent with the initiatives of most other public broadcasters in the world, undertaken with very limited funds and well supported across the Corporation.

• Consultants encountered “good examples of leadership and innovation” across the ABC and “many talented, diligent professionals” who were committed to quality output.

Significantly, KPMG drew attention to a “deficiency” in the ABC funding mechanism. Well-known to the Corporation’s management, this deficiency caused them to deal with what might be described as a funding crisis about every five to seven years. Successive Labor and Coalition governments had applied a particular indexation formula, known as WCI6, to certain agencies including the ABC. Forty per cent of the formula reflected movements in the price of labour and 60 per cent the underlying consumer price index. At the time, though, ABC staff-related costs represented 60 per cent of the total and general expenses made up only 40 per cent, an inversion of the formula.

In effect, WCI6 operates as a kind of productivity or efficiency dividend, forcing the ABC to deal with a cumulative reduction in real levels of operational funding. Each year of a triennial funding period, a gap opens between real costs and available funding. In time, the gap can become unmanageable without a reduction of staffing and/or service levels. KPMG recommended that the formula be reviewed. (At the time of writing, WCI6 continues to apply although, following funding increases awarded by the former Labor government, the indexation formula presumably has not had a material impact on the sustainability of ABC services over the past few years.)

The KPMG report acknowledged that there were “significant costs associated with ‘being the ABC,’” that is, fulfilling certain community obligations that would not otherwise apply to a broadcaster: maintaining a federal presence throughout Australia, rather than withdrawing to Sydney or Melbourne; supporting a substantial audience response and complaints management function; fulfilling national archive and library responsibilities, and so on.

Although KPMG disagreed with certain ABC calculations, it concluded that the Corporation needed additional capital funding of $73.8 million over three years to replenish or replace ageing technical assets (that is, on top of the normal funding, indexed for inflation). It also needed additional funding for operations to a total of $52 million over the three years of the funding triennium 2006–07 to 2008–09. “We stress,” said the KPMG report, that these recommendations would be sufficient to maintain the ABC’s “present level of outputs in the same broad structure” but not to reverse previous declines or to provide for new policy proposals.

By this time, John Howard had been prime minister for a decade, perhaps long enough for his government and the ABC to reach some kind of accommodation after years of complaints about the latter’s alleged editorial bias and following a succession of highly partisan appointments to the board. The government’s response to KPMG addressed different constituencies. Rather than the recommended $73.8 million for capital, the government provided $45 million. Instead of $52 million in funding for general operations, the government allowed $30 million tied to the commissioning of TV drama and documentaries from external producers, with another $13.2 million for content tied to regional (non-metropolitan) activities. ABC chairman Donald McDonald declared that it had been the best funding outcome in more than twenty years.

It was a qualifiedly good outcome for the ABC (though some people oppose the concept of tied funding, which can limit the future prerogatives of the board and managing director in responding to evolving circumstances). At another time, in a different political mood, the outcome may have been otherwise. Regardless, the Australian community had no opportunity to review the evidence.

One wonders what has changed since 2006 in the efficiency and effectiveness of the national public broadcasters. What will be learned about the efficacy and underlying motives of Malcolm Turnbull’s departmental review? And what will the government choose to tell us? •

discusses this essay with Richard Aedy on ABC Radio National’s Media Report.

The post The public interest in public broadcasting appeared first on Inside Story.

RUPERT Murdoch’s Australian newspapers are not going gentle into that good night. Although their lamentable circulation performance suggests that grim days await them, their rage is undiminished. And the Australian has maintains a particular rage against its most enduring target, the ABC.

In recent weeks the paper has published almost twenty stories about the pay packages of prominent ABC broadcasters – packages that pale beside the remuneration rates seen as unremarkable among its commercial competitors. But that was just a prelude to its more intense coverage of the decision by the Guardian and ABC to publish leaked material revealing how Australian intelligence had tapped into the phones of, among others, Indonesia's President Yudhoyono and his wife.

The leaks provoked intense diplomatic tension between Australia and Indonesia, and commentators in the Australian were overwhelmingly of the view that they should not have been published by the ABC. With its usual percussive campaigning, the paper found many ways to hammer its theme of ABC irresponsibility. On Tuesday this week, for instance, the topic took up more than half the paper’s front page, and included a very long article claiming that “some” have claimed that ABC chief executive Mark Scott and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger are involved in a “bromance,” evidenced by the way that they are “praiseworthy of each other” – yes, “praiseworthy” – in private and public.

On Wednesday, the media in general, and the Australian in particular, reported the strong criticism of the ABC and its left-wing bias expressed at Tuesday’s meeting of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party. Among the variety of sanctions proposed was Senator Cory Bernardi’s suggestion that the internet publishing activities of the “taxpayer-funded behemoth” should be terminated.

The echoes of the Howard era are almost deafening. During the 1996 election campaign, the Coalition foreshadowed a public inquiry into commercial television and promised to maintain the ABC’s funding levels. Once elected, it quietly abandoned the inquiry into commercial TV and then, citing the budget deficit, announced a major inquiry into the ABC, with its main term of reference the need for the national broadcaster to adapt to a reduced budget. What the head of the inquiry, Bob Mansfield, discovered was the strength of public affection for the ABC. In the end, he recommended cuts to international broadcasting (which would not offend substantial domestic constituencies) and changes to how the broadcaster managed its properties, a recommendation that was thankfully ignored.

With its public harassment and its appointment to the ABC board of ideologues who lacked any sympathy for the national broadcaster’s mandate, the Howard government inflicted considerable damage. A funding squeeze meant that the ABC’s budgets declined relative to its major commercial competitors. But the strong public regard for the ABC that Mansfield had discovered was its major protection against stronger frontal attacks.

If the contrast between vocal opinion (as represented by conservative Liberals, News Corp newspapers and commercial talk-radio announcers) and public opinion was wide in 1996, it is almost unbridgeable now. To get a sense of how out-of-step the ABC’s loudest critics are, it’s useful to begin by looking at public opinion about the media as a whole.

The Australian Election Survey, conducted after the 2010 election, asked respondents to express their degree of confidence in thirteen different groups and institutions. The armed forces came top, with 91 per cent expressing either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. Perhaps surprisingly, universities came next, at 80 per cent. The two institutions at the bottom were television (23 per cent) and, still lower, the press (17 per cent).

Although opinion polls show great variation depending on the phrasing of survey questions, the general theme is scepticism about the media’s performance. In May 2011, for instance, Essential Media – which now polls regularly on this issue – found that only 35 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that the media usually report the news accurately, while 54 per cent disagreed. On the question of whether the media usually report all sides of a story, the split was an even more unfavourable 21–69. On their capacity to hold politicians accountable, the media did better, almost evenly split 45–43.

Sometimes public regard for the media is even lower than might be imagined. Following the Abbott government’s travel rorts scandals in October, Essential asked respondents to rate ten industries and organisations as either “extremely corrupt,” subject to “some corruption,” or “not at all corrupt.” The media topped the list with a 34 per cent “extremely corrupt” rating, just ahead of government, on 32 per cent, and building and construction, on 25 per cent.

Contrasts in attitudes to individual news organisations are equally interesting. In a 2010 online survey conducted by Polimetrix, which I designed with David Rowe and Paul Jones, respondents were asked to rate ten different groups and organisations on a “feeling thermometer,” with a higher rating indicating more favourable feelings. The ABC rated highest, with a mean of 6.7, and commercial TV coming second, on 6.0, ahead of the two major political parties Labor and Liberal on 5.0. News Limited newspapers rated 4.8 and commercial talkback radio 4.7, both well ahead of the bottom-rating group, asylum seekers, on 3.4.

When Essential asked respondents to rate their trust in sixteen institutions and organisations in March 2013, the High Court rated highest at 74 per cent; the ABC came second, at 70 per cent, ahead of the Reserve Bank (64 per cent) and charitable organisations (52 per cent). The TV news media came in ninth, at 30 per cent, and newspapers were eleventh, at 27 per cent. The same question had been asked two years in a row, and the ABC’s rating has been heading up, while TV news and newspapers remained broadly flat.

In August, Essential posed a more focused question about trust in media coverage of the 2013 election. Contrasting those who had a lot and some trust, with those who had not much trust and no trust at all, ABC TV ranked highest with a 58–17 ratio, while commercial TV had a 29–53 ratio. Among newspapers (according to respondents in the relevant state for each title), the Age had the best ratio (42–34) and the Sydney Morning Herald ranked second (39–37). The Australian split evenly (31–31), while the Murdoch tabloids were well into net negative ratings – the Herald Sun 30–51; Daily Telegraph 25–49 and Courier Mail 23–41.

Essential had carried out a similar survey in July 2011, but had only asked people to rate newspapers they regularly read. All came out on the positive side of the ledger, but there was quite a hierarchy: the Age was at the top (79 per cent of its readers expressing trust; 18 per cent distrust); then the Sydney Morning Herald (74–25); the Australian (69–27); the Courier-Mail (65–34); the Herald Sun (54–44) and last the Daily Telegraph (52–46). Among these respondents, in other words, almost half of its own readers didn’t consider the Telegraph trustworthy.

The generally high regard for the ABC carries over into support on particular policy questions. For example, in our 2010 Polimetrix survey, 80 per cent thought that in the modern world public broadcasting was still important, with only 6 per cent thinking its time had passed. In June 2013, an Essential Poll found a clear majority (57–15) opposing privatisation of the ABC and SBS. In October 2012, Essential reported that 34 per cent thought the ABC should receive more funding, with another 32 per cent considering current levels about right and only 17 per cent believing it should receive less funding.

A consistent – indeed a stark – picture emerges from this polling data, but it is not one you are likely to see highlighted in the Australian. The public has little confidence in the news media as a whole, and the ABC is, overwhelmingly, the most trusted and respected media institution in the country. •

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The dominance of British – and mainly BBC – productions was particularly pronounced over Christmas and the New Year period and overwhelmingly so during the three-hour peak viewing time between the end of 7.30 and the late news at 10.30. Over those six weeks Australian programs were on the screen only a little over 10 per cent of the available time. On twenty-nine of the forty-two nights in question there were no locally made programs at all. None! At one point, seven nights in a row passed without anything Australian on the screens during those hours. There was a second period of five nights without anything local to watch. Over the six weeks only twelve Australian-made programs were shown during peak time, several of them repeats. During four weeks in January, seventy-eight British programs were screened and only nine locally made ones.

By any measure this was an extraordinary situation – a complete failure to present Australia to the national audience during a holiday period when presumably people had more leisure time to watch television. It also raises the larger question of whether the ABC makes enough product to be able to represent and interpret Australia to the world.

It is interesting to speculate about how a visitor over the holiday period would have fared if she had sought to learn something of this country by watching the national broadcaster during the peak viewing period. Many evenings would have passed without her hearing an Australian accent. She would have concluded that the quintessential Englishman Stephen Fry was a pivotal figure in local cultural life: he headed up a weekly panel program, his travel adventures were screened on four nights and on one Saturday evening he was allowed to hog the screens for ninety minutes while being interviewed before an audience at the Sydney Opera House. Has any Australian public figure ever been so indulged by the ABC? Our hypothetical tourist would have left Australia with the impression that she had visited a county rather than a country.

The lack of Australian programs might be accentuated during the holiday period but it is symptomatic of a larger, more general problem. Regular ABC viewers learn more about British than Australian history, archaeology and heritage, landscape and wildlife, architecture, planning and design. Perhaps more importantly, we see more British than Australian programs that might be characterised as contemporary sociology – programs that deal with consumer issues, social relations, schools, hospitals and other institutions. And then there are the travel programs, often dominated by ageing British chaps who see the world through British eyes.

The galling aspect of all this is that many such programs could be made in Australia by Australians. They are not the highly expensive costume dramas that the ABC cannot realistically afford to make. The frustration of ABC staff must be acute as they see program after program brought in from Britain, the like of which could be made here, and which they know many Australians hunger for. The country’s large and able community of documentary film-makers must surely feel, with much justice, a sense of betrayal.

Does all this matter to the management or the board, I wonder? Are they ever embarrassed by the Union Jack on the mast head? Do they ever feel uncomfortable when night after night ABC screens are dominated by British programs? The ABC never bothers to indicate, as SBS routinely does, the provenance of its programs. It is as though it doesn’t think it matters – that British and Australian programs are easily interchangeable, that what is of interest or concern over there will evoke the same response and be equally relevant here, half a world away.

The comparison with SBS is instructive in other ways as well. Both networks show many non-Australian programs. But the difference is that SBS is cosmopolitan and as a result reflects contemporary multicultural Australia by screening programs from all over the world. The ABC, meanwhile, refers back to the long-lost British Australia of the age of Empire. This must surely be the explanation for the continuing dominance of British programs. But there is a further, more humiliating symptom of the colonial subservience. It is not as if the ABC and the BBC had an equal, reciprocal relationship. Almost all the cultural traffic is in one direction, following the old imperial lines of communication and authority. Does the BBC often take ABC programs I wonder? It is certainly unthinkable that any British television channel would show little but Australian programs, as a matter of course, night after night.

Clearly the ABC has not outgrown its origins, dating from 1932 and the Indian summer of Empire. It was at birth a “thoroughly imperial artefact,” in the words of the corporation’s historian, Ken Inglis. For many years Australian accents were shunned on air and imperial benefactors paid for ABC staff to train at the BBC in pursuit of a conscious policy of strengthening ties and perpetuating Dominion subservience. Over the years many senior positions were taken by expatriates from the BBC.

It is easier to understand the present situation of the ABC if we consider the development of many of Australia’s cultural institutions, which moved from deference to independence over the course of the twentieth century. The orchestras, the universities, the galleries, theatre companies and the courts all freed themselves from the imperial embrace. ABC radio followed a similar trajectory, and in the process created a network which, on any measure, outshines the BBC. Will ABC television continue to be the last of our great cultural institutions to fully reflect contemporary Australia at a time when Britain becomes of less importance to us politically, economically and diplomatically with every year that passes?

Will it change? Probably not any time soon. The ready access to affordable British programs slows adaption and limits innovation. Government could speed up the process in two ways. More money is obviously essential. But it would be useful to apply a new system of quotas. We are familiar with ones that mandate Australian content. Perhaps the ABC should be forced to accept an upper limit on the number of British programs that can be shown. By that means we might during future holiday periods be able to watch Australian-made programs. It would be a welcome and refreshing change. •

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TENDERS are open for a ten-year contract to operate Australia Network, the country’s international television broadcaster. Only two groups are likely to apply: the ABC, which currently operates the service, and pay TV network Sky News. The history of Australia’s overseas television service has sometimes been less than rational, but if the government did decide to dump the ABC, it would need measures that would prevent Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited from enlarging its stake in Sky News.

The service we now call Australia Network was launched in 1993 by the ABC in fulfilment of its charter obligation to provide international television. The ABC had been involved in international broadcasting almost continuously since the Menzies government launched Radio Australia as a short-wave broadcaster in December 1939. When a new ABC Act was introduced in 1983, turning the commission into a corporation, international television broadcasting was inserted as a charter obligation. But until the advent of Australia Television International, or ATI, in 1993, the ABC had only served this charter responsibility in the very weak sense of selling the odd program overseas.

The driving force for the service was ABC managing director David Hill. In Whose ABC?, the second volume of his authoritative history of the broadcaster, Ken Inglis shows how the Keating government made it clear that it would only support the proposed service if it included advertising, both as a means of financial support and to help showcase Australian enterprises in Asia. The decision was taken amid general antipathy to the ABC among members of the Keating cabinet, with the prime minister himself harbouring considerable doubts about the whole project. The government gave only a one-off grant of $5.4 million to launch the service.

Inside the ABC, the advent of ATI was greeted with some alarm. There were doubts about the implications of the first ABC service to be funded partly by advertising, about whether an already over-stretched and cash-strapped broadcaster could take on such a major new venture, and about the optimistic financial projections for the project. And all this occurred when the much bigger issue inside the ABC was its apparently imminent entry into pay TV.

ATI began operating in early 1993 on a shoestring budget. Soon its failure to attract advertising and its call on funds from elsewhere in the ABC earned the ire of Keating’s communications minister, Michael Lee, and the attention of a Senate committee. After a series of controversies and a growing sense of internal crisis at the ABC, the government promised in October 1995 to spend $6.2 million each year on the service for three years from July 1996.

By 1996, ably led by Michael Mann, ATI was operating within its budget and its revenue and audiences were increasing. A December 1995 survey suggested that its penetration of the Asian market equalled that of CNN and the BBC and was second only to Hong Kong Star Television.

In the lead-up to the March 1996 election, the Coalition gave guarantees that there would be no cuts to the ABC’s funding, a position it reversed with a vengeance once the size of the Keating deficit became official. In July 1996 it announced an immediate cut of 2 per cent in the ABC’s budget and foreshadowed that deeper cuts would be made in the next funding triennium. The government also announced that a public inquiry – to be conducted by businessman Bob Mansfield – would identify a “more focused” role for the ABC in line with its reduced budget. Perhaps contrary to the government’s expectations, the Mansfield Inquiry elicited an outpouring of positive public sentiment towards the ABC. Around 11,000 submissions were received – possibly the biggest public response to any government inquiry. The message of public support for the ABC was unequivocal.

When Mansfield reported in January 1997 his one nomination for a substantial funding cut was Radio Australia. Before the election, the Coalition had said that it was “strongly supportive of Radio Australia’s existing services and will ensure that they are not prejudiced or downgraded in any way.” Now, the communications minister, Richard Alston, accepted Mansfield’s recommendation that international broadcasting should be abolished.

Mansfield’s recommendation was politically opportune. It meant the government could punish the ABC financially without suffering the opprobrium of having forced cuts in popular services or programs. The decision also held some attraction for ABC management because the saving in transmission costs – not previously included in the ABC’s budget – would constitute a sizable proportion of the overall savings from cutting Radio Australia. Moreover, Radio Australia was still principally a short-wave broadcaster; in the age of FM broadcasting, CDs and satellite television, this was clearly a medium in decline.

Radio Australia might well have disappeared altogether if not for the fact that its complete abolition required legislation and the government lacked a majority in the Senate. Moreover, a furious public campaign followed the announcement. The repercussions abroad were probably also greater than the government had expected. (Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, Julius Chan, for instance, offered to give some aid money back to keep the service operating.) For a government already viewed in the region as being too soft on Pauline Hanson’s racist views, this was diplomatically uncomfortable. So Radio Australia was saved, but at a radically reduced level. Its budget – and hence its services and staff – were drastically cut and its major transmission site, near Darwin, was closed, eventually to be leased to an evangelical Christian broadcaster.

Meanwhile, the government – without any warning, and without preparatory work of any kind by the bureaucracy – had announced its intended privatisation of ATI. This initiative of the prime minister, John Howard, was a complete shock to the ABC and to the head of ATI. At the time, there were strong rumours that it followed suggestions made by a business figure close to the Liberal Party who was interested in buying the service. Mansfield subsequently endorsed this sell-off.

A year later it was announced that the successful tenderer was Kerry Stokes’s Seven network. The commercial attractiveness of the service was damaged almost immediately by the onset of the Asian financial crisis. Then, after the fall of President Suharto and with increased unrest in the region (most dramatically in East Timor), the government rediscovered the importance of international broadcasting. The major objection to Radio Australia for the previous two decades had been that its Indonesian language broadcasts upset the Suharto government, a backhanded testimony to its popularity in Indonesia.

By 2001, with its three-year agreement due for renewal, Seven had lost interest in the international service. It was closed for several months and the government called for new tenders. Several organisations made submissions, but the ABC was not among them. To his credit, foreign minister Alexander Downer, recognising there was only one organisation with the credibility and capacity to deliver a service of this kind, privately asked the ABC to apply. As a result, ABC Asia-Pacific was born, and began broadcasting at the end of 2001. Since that time, the government has continued to fund an Australian international television service – now known as Australia Network – through the ABC.

RECENTLY, however, foreign minister Kevin Rudd has called for a public tendering process. With the experience of a failed commercial foray into international broadcasting and the proven capacity of the ABC to deliver highly credible and consistent programming, it would have seemed safe to assume that the contract renewal would normally go to the national broadcaster. But the attractions of a switch to Sky News have been canvassed, at least in the Murdoch press. As far as I know, no other government in the world outsources its international broadcasting to a private company.

The major commercial contender, Sky News, was born following a brazen exercise of power by Rupert Murdoch. After protracted debate on pay TV policy, the government had decided to allocate two channels on a ten-channel satellite transponder to the ABC, one for children’s TV and a dedicated news channel. The government gave the ABC $12.5 million to develop the new services. In December 1994 a new organisation to run the news channel, AIM, was formed by the ABC in partnership with Fairfax newspapers. It engaged more than one hundred employees, including many distinguished journalists, created a digital news production centre, and worked out the logistical and institutional routines to run a high-quality, 24-hour dedicated news channel.

Then, on 31 July 1995, during a flying visit to Australia, Rupert Murdoch, angered by a report in a Fairfax paper, reversed the decision of the Foxtel officials in Australia, and said they would have nothing to do with the ABC service. The two other players in Australia’s infant pay TV industry followed suit.

The Keating government simply rolled over; there were some cries of pain from the ABC, especially the people facing unemployment. But Murdoch got his way and the venture was dead. The closure had nothing to do with the working of market forces; rather, it was an exercise of monopoly power that denied a market choice to consumers. Indeed, in the short term it was injurious to the pay TV operations that Murdoch and others were starting. In the early days, the industry was marked by low take up and high “churn” (cancellation) rates; a high-quality news channel would have been more attractive than the very cheap Sky News service that was cobbled together as a substitute.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Sky News has developed into a valuable news outlet, a welcome addition to Australia’s media mix. If the government chose to go the commercial route, the major objection to Sky News would not be its performance thus far, but its current and possible future ownership structure.

At the moment Sky News is owned in one-third shares by Nine, Seven and Britain’s BSkyB. It is ironic – and far from helpful to Sky News’s case – that during the tender process Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited has moved from being the largest shareholder to total ownership of BSkyB. Amid controversy, the British government has approved Murdoch’s takeover attempt, which will mean News holds a full one-third of Sky News through BSkyB.

The record of Murdoch’s companies in international broadcasting is far from encouraging. Most infamously, in 1994, Murdoch kicked the BBC off his Star satellite service, which broadcasts into Asia, in order to curry favour with the Chinese government. At the time, Murdoch was keen to expand his business in China and the BBC had displeased Beijing with its independent reporting. Murdoch simply replaced the world’s most credible broadcaster with a music channel. Less well known is the fact that around this time, as he was trying to expand the availability of the Hong Kong–based satellite service he had bought, he gave guarantees to the Malaysian government as well. According to the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohammad, Murdoch promised that Malaysia could simply block any material it didn’t like on Star.

If the Australian government did give the contract to Sky News, Australia would not only be outsourcing its international broadcasting to a private operator, but would be outsourcing it to an operator that is one-third owned by a company that has blurred the line between commercial interests and independent news in its international programming. •

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INEVITABLY, much of the media coverage in March 2009 about the appointment of Kate Torney to the lofty position of director of ABC News emphasised the historic aspect of her promotion as the first woman to lead the ABC’s news division. Perhaps that preoccupation veiled the more pertinent facts of her solid credentials as a journalist and news executive, managing director Mark Scott’s role in appointing her and the immense challenges of change management he and she now face every day.

Six months into the job and on the sidelines of the Media140 Conference on real time social media and journalism at the ABC’s Sydney Centre, Kate Torney told Peter Clarke how she was perceiving and meeting those challenges.

Listen here

• ABC managing director Mark Scott’s speech, The Fall of Rome: Media After Empire

• Mark Scott’s speech, Soft Diplomacy and the World of International Broadcasting

The post Authenticity and the ABC appeared first on Inside Story.

HOW MANY SUBMISSIONS from the public constitute an overwhelming response? Last Friday the federal government released more than 2400 submissions to its review of public broadcasting, and the claim has been made that this demonstrates overwhelming public involvement.

Yet twelve years ago when Bob Mansfield conducted his inquiry into the future of the ABC he received over 10,600 submissions – more than four times the current number. It was this convincing evidence of public affection and concern for Auntie that convinced Mansfield the organisation should continue as a broadly based public broadcaster rather than being recreated as an organisation addressing only those types of content that the commercial organisations couldn’t or wouldn’t provide.

Has public support and affection for the ABC declined by more than three quarters? I doubt it. The Mansfield inquiry was better publicised than the present public service led review. As well, in 1997 the ABC was understood to be under imminent threat from the new Howard government. The troops rallied.

Today the medium term threat is just as great – but the troops are diminished in number and distinctly off topic. Many of the lobby groups and individuals whose submissions support the ABC are stuck fighting yesterday’s battles. Often, they have failed to grasp the changes technology brings and the new and fundamental challenges to public broadcasting’s claim on the public purse.

The great majority of submissions to the review are from individuals who love the ABC with a passion. Yet they tend to be hostile to ABC management for, variously, putting too much emphasis on the internet and podcasting, for outsourcing too much production, for not supporting Radio National sufficiently, for being nasty to Stephen Crittenden, for being too “commercial,” for being too downmarket, for screening Spicks and Specks, for not screening Four Corners all year round so on and so forth. All these are legitimate areas of concern. But they are not the main game. The main game is to justify all over again why we should have public broadcasting at all.

Late last year, trying to round up submissions to this review, the Victorian campaign manager for the Friends of the ABC, Glenys Stradijot, reflected sadly in an email to supporters that, since Mansfield, “lifestyle and technology change has resulted in interest of many to act only when quick and easy.” She also celebrated the fact that the Rudd government at least recognised the importance of the ABC.

Yet those same changes of “lifestyle and technology” are the very reason why public input is more than ever necessary. They constitute the main challenge to public broadcasting, and also the main opportunities. To understand why, we only need to look at some of the submissions to the current review. The public broadcasters are being challenged to redefine their purposes and their claims on the taxpayer’s purse.

The challenge is coming not from government, not from the cultural warriors of the right (or not only from them) but from pay television, which barely existed when Mansfield did his work. Channels Nine, Seven and Ten are almost irrelevant in this. The pay television sector understands that the commercial free-to-air business model is broken. Commercial free-to-air television cannot afford to compete with pay television in providing multiple channels of specialised content to niche audiences. To do so would fragment the audience and remove the motivation for mass market advertisers to spend their bucks on television commercials.

Public broadcasters are a different matter. They are, potentially, the main competition for pay television. The ABC doesn’t have to worry about advertising. For Auntie, there is nothing but opportunity in the capacity to provide more and more choice. She already has two digital television channels, and plans several more – a dedicated children’s channel, a public affairs channel, an education channel, and a “best of overseas” channel. SBS also has multiple channels, and plans more.

So in the new battle between pay television and free to air television, the ABC is in the front line. This is why it is the ABC, not the commercial channels, that has taken the lead role in the Freeview organisation, which is leading the free-to-air sector in its marketing efforts. Channels Nine and Seven have not yet even announced what they plan to put on their new multi-channels. In fact, they give the impression of wanting the whole multichannel thing to go away.

This battle between public and pay is not only about government money, but also about spectrum and government favour. Thus we have Foxtel announcing its A-PAC public affairs channel with a cheeky video boasting “at no cost to the taxpayer.” A-PAC was launched by the prime minister late last year – just as the government was considering the ABC’s triennial funding submission, which includes a bid for a public affairs channel. I understand the announcement came as a surprise to the ABC managing director Mark Scott.

Now, in its submission to the current review, the pay television sector has made its challenge to public broadcasting both comprehensive and clear. The submission from ASTRA, the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association, which includes not only the major subscription television platforms of Foxtel and Austar but also the many channels that provide programming, as well as communications companies such as Optus and Telstra. The former Victorian premier Steve Bracks is its chair. The ASTRA submission is one of the most aggressively argued the government has received.

As well as having some substance, it is a clever exercise in sophistry. ASTRA begins by protesting that its members support public broadcasting. It then goes on to say that the ABC and SBS should receive government money for new channels only in cases where there is a clear market failure. ASTRA contends that there is no evidence of market failure in news reporting, children’s content, education or overseas content. After all, there is Skynews, A-PAC and a big handful of pay television channels devoted to children’s content.

Even if there is a market failure, ASTRA says, then the money to address it should not go straight to the ABC and SBS. The required services should probably be put out to competitive tender. Likewise spectrum. If that is available, it too should be put out to competitive auction, not given to the public broadcasters. (But how is the ABC meant to bid at such auctions, if it only gets public money once market failure has been established?)

ASTRA goes on to argue that the ABC should not be allowed to raise money by selling its content, whether in DVD format or online, in competition with pay television. And it criticises the ABC and SBS for being “increasingly aggressive” in demanding “hold back” clauses in production contracts to block programming being made available to subscription television.

After all this, one is tempted to ask exactly what aspect of public broadcasting it is that ASTRA supports? Perhaps they like Radio National. The ASTRA approach would indeed see the ABC and SBS, if they survived at all, become much smaller organisations forced to compete for funds at every step with the private sector.

The ASTRA submission directly challenges almost every leg of the ABC’s funding pitch and vision. Mark Scott has used words like “market failure” at virtually every opportunity to press his claim for government money for children’s content, investigative journalism and more Australian content. What ASTRA doesn’t say, of course, is that its own claim to satisfy the market is partly smoke and mirrors, because it cannot claim to be a universal service.

The Australian television sector is different from that in the United States and Europe, where pay television has succeeded in signing up a majority of households. Only about a third of Australian homes get subscription television. The subscription fees are not cheap, and not everybody can afford to pay. The ABC and SBS, on the other hand, are almost everywhere, and free.

Within a year or so, once our broadband speeds get up to scratch, most Australians will be able to watch television-type content on the internet. There will be a near limitless amount of content, much of it free. If you haven’t signed up to Foxtel’s highly managed packages of content already, it is hard to see why you would do so once you can get so much content a la carte. So pay television is desperate to establish its continued relevance. In its way, it is just as desperate as commercial free-to air-television.

What do the public broadcasters have to offer to ward off this challenge from pay television? What is their continued claim to taxpayers’ dollars in the face of endless media choice?

The answers emerge from some of the other submissions to the government review. First, there is universality – the ability to reach all Australians. Second, there is the ability to innovate, free from commercial imperatives. And third, there is Australian content, which elsewhere will always tend to be squeezed out by commercial imperatives.

As the Australian Children’s Television Association states in its submission, “the free market conspires against the creation and delivery of Australian programs, especially Australian drama. Providing local content is effectively a gift of government.” The association acknowledges that the pay TV sector is increasingly important to children but points out not only that it is viewed in just a third of Australian homes but also that the main channels screen only about 5.7 per cent of Australian material.

“This lack of universal access combined with relatively low levels of Australian content means that pay television children’s channels remain a relatively minor component in the mix of measures aimed at delivering local content to children,” says the association. “This is a position which is unlikely to change significantly. The pay television sector has consistently sought to distance itself from being tied to cultural outcomes. Furthermore, most pay television local children’s drama relies on significant funding from the commercial broadcasters under the Standards. As pressure on the levels of content created by the Standards continues to grow, the pay television business model for acquiring local children’s drama content will also come under threat.”

Exactly the same arguments could be applied to other kinds of Australian content, such as adult drama and documentary. It should be said, though, that the ABC is doing worse than the commercial networks in screening Australian children’s content. It wants to do better. The planned dedicated children’s channel would screen at least 50 per cent Australian content, and the current funding submission argues for more money for Australian drama.

SO MUCH FOR UNIVERSALITY and Australian content. What about innovation? Various submissions, including those of the ABC and SBS, say that innovation is the thing that makes the ABC and SBS important. The ABC and SBS have led the way in multichannelling and in use of the internet and pioneering innovative drama. What more can be done?

A vision for a uniquely innovative role for public broadcasters is contained in a clutch of submissions by academics from the Queensland University of Technology and the Australian Research Council–funded ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. The approach is neatly summarised on the blog of one of the authors, Terry Flew.

It is a “beyond broadcasting” model that proposes the ABC and SBS should conceive of themselves as not so much as delivery platforms or as institutions but as public services. This pitches the claim for taxpayer’s dollars more broadly than market failure. Says Flew, “The basis for supporting public service media is not simply that of market failure in a limited channel environment, but the capacity to promote innovative, engaging and inclusive Australian information and entertainment content in a world of seemingly limitless media choice.”

What exactly does public service media mean? First, it means decentralisation – allowing a model in which innovation arises around the edges, from the interactions of the users, rather than through central planning. The ABC is already active in this. It has asked for funding to make its local radio presence the basis of “town square” sites in which communities can interact and discuss local affairs. It has also set up Pool, which makes user generated content available for collaboration and remixing. It was mentioned recently by New York University new media guru Jay Rosen (in a Twitter post, aptly) as one of the places that should be watched by those interested in how user generated content might develop.

But Flew says these are not enough. They are “add-ons to a service which continues to emphasise a transmission model of communication, where it is the in-house media professionals who decide what their audiences should receive.” The academics are not proposing that the professional content makers at the ABC and SBS should get the sack, but rather than they should increasingly see their role as working with their audiences to help them become content makers themselves. According to Flew, “The ABC can help to shape this activity in ways that generate greater quality, reach wider audiences, and enable more significant conversations among Australians about matters of shared local, national and international importance.” Meanwhile SBS could make user-generated content the basis of a new relationship with ethnic communities.

“In news and current affairs in particular, SBS has been a leader in provision of international news and information, but this has largely been done off the backs of the big global news agencies,” writes Flew. “Material sourced and distributed through the internet among different communities could provide new windows on world events, with SBS acting as a ‘meta-news-aggregator,’ developing an informal network of specialist ‘reporters’ around particular topic areas and international events.”

The director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Stuart Cunningham, argues in another submission that it is only in the non-commercial environment that the necessary depth of innovation and risk taking involved in user generated content and pro-am collaborations can occur. In this context it is significant that almost all the substantial submissions to the review argue for the ABC’s rich archives of content to be opened up to the public – something that is already underway on a small scale, as I have reported elsewhere.

Likewise, all the substantial submissions argue for a recasting of the charters of the ABC and SBS, at least to make it clear that broadcasting is no longer the only thing they are about. The kind of innovation envisaged in the academics’ submissions would suggest that more fundamental charter revisions may be necessary – to focus on what the ABC and SBS can do to help others, as well as on what they can provide.

To all this, some would argue – and have already argued – that this kind of innovation is happening in any case, all over the place, without the need for taxpayer’s money being involved. There are plenty of people who argue that in the world of media plenty, there is no reason for having an SBS or an ABC.

SO THERE YOU HAVE the battle lines. Public broadcasting’s claim to continued support is the net effect of its ability to be universal, its (presently unfulfilled) commitment to Australian content, and its capacity to innovate and take risks. Pay television’s claim is that it can also provide specialised quality content to small audiences, that it could be universal if only given the spectrum, and that it costs the taxpayer nothing.

It’s a shame, really, that the inquiry is a limited exercise. There is enough meat here for a white paper on communications policy. It would also help if the Rudd government had come to power with a media policy in place – something that was often promised, but never delivered.

Nevertheless, the government is unlikely to do everything pay television wants. One of its few election commitments for the media sector was to fund the ABC and SBS properly – although nobody has defined what “properly” might mean.

I suspect the results of the present review will be minimal in the short term – a change to the charters, some reorganisation of the back offices so that SBS and the ABC can share some functions. Meanwhile all eyes will be on the budget, and the government’s verdict on the triennial funding submissions by the ABC and SBS. Current indications are that the ABC will get the money it needs for the new children’s channel and some more Australian drama content, but not much else. As for SBS, who knows?

I suspect the bigger questions will, for the moment at least, remain largely unaddressed. •

The post Public broadcasting looks for a future appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of us who wonder about the future of media tend to look to the United States for indications of the path ahead. I recently heard news.com.au editor David Higgins, for instance, say that developments in the Australian media are about two to three years behind those across the Pacific.

Perhaps, but the trajectory will not be identical. At least so far as journalism is concerned, Australia ticks differently to the United States, not least because our election cycle is less drawn out than theirs. And the Australian tradition of publicly funded broadcasting – via the ABC and SBS – is another important difference.

The ABC and, to a lesser extent, SBS represent collections of content makers already in the pay of the audience/taxpayer. Unlike commercial broadcasters, whose business model relies on selling the attention of mass audiences to advertisers, public broadcasters can embrace the fact that their audiences are fragmenting. Just as importantly, the fact that they are already in the pay of the audience means that it’s a smaller step to set about fostering more intense interaction, giving up some control and becoming less of an institution and more of a “space” in which Australians can meet and collaborate.

So much for potential. The ABC and SBS are about to pitch their triennial funding submissions to a preoccupied government. At the next federal budget, we will find out whether that politically nimble man, ABC managing director Mark Scott, has said and done enough to get the funding he needs. Meanwhile, SBS seems unsure what it is actually for these days, as recent controversy attests.

This is the context in which the elusive communications minister, Stephen Conroy, this week announced a review of the role of public broadcasters, and invited public submissions. The review has been coming for months; I broke the story in Crikey back in June. What’s been happening since then? Apparently the whole thing got caught up in Kevin Rudd’s office. The charitable view of Stephen Conroy’s silence on so many matters (his refusal to be interviewed has become a running gag on the ABC Radio National’s Media Report) is that there is a great deal of his work caught in the same snag.

The blockage seems to have cleared. In the same week he announced the public broadcasting review, Senator Conroy also revealed a new board appointment process for the ABC and SBS and more detail on the timetable for switching off the analogue television signal.

So what will the public broadcasting review achieve, and what will it be about? It’s a shame that its scope is so narrow. After all the mucking about, false starts and craven decisions of the last eighteen years, surely now would be a good time for a white paper on media policy, and public broadcasting in particular. After all, Labor failed to release a media policy before the last election. It would be nice if the government found a policy, rather than being so obviously driven by the agenda of the same public servants who advised the last government. I gather that such an exercise was suggested, but rejected long before the present review was agreed to. A pity.

At a superficial level the discussion paper issued to kickstart the public consultation process is a rather bland document. ABC Managing Director Mark Scott should be happy with it, since it closely mirrors the issues he raised at the 2020 Summit. But there is plenty of fuel for controversy.

Up for grabs is a rewrite of the charters of the public broadcasters, which is well overdue. After all, in what sense are they “broadcasters” when much of what they are already doing is about online, and about niche audiences? Also up for discussion are the proposed new ABC channels, including the dedicated children’s channel and a new ABC 4, devoted to politics and public affairs.

None of this is new, but there are a couple of matters in the discussion paper that seem to have been given significance merely by being included.

First, there is the proposal that the “back office” functions of SBS and ABC – mainly the management and purchase of transmission services – be combined. At first sight this seems uncontroversial. The transmission requirements of SBS and ABC were, after all, once handled by a single government body, before it was privatised and sold off to Broadcast Australia, owned by the Macquarie Bank.

But if this comes off there will be feathers flying behind the scenes as SBS and ABC learn more about the way the Macquarie Bank has played them off against each other in negotiating the long term contracts that are Broadcast Australia’s main business. Who has cut the best deal, and how transparent are those deals? There will be surprises in store, but we are unlikely ever to find out the details.

Of more interest to the average viewer will be the suggestion – less explicit in the discussion paper – that other back office functions might be amalgamated, such as legal services and distribution. What qualifies as a back office function? Where will the lines be drawn? And, if it fails to find a new direction and definition, will SBS be able to justify its continued separate existence ten years from now?

But on to content, and in particular Australian content. The discussion paper revives a notion that many thought had been killed off: that commercial free-to-air broadcasters, struggling with the erosion of their business models, should be allowed to escape from their obligations to screen Australian content by “buying out” their quotas.

In other words, Channel Nine or Channel Ten might give the ABC or SBS money to take on the their Australian content obligations. The idea was first raised by the Australian Communications and Media Authority in the issues paper for its review of the Children’s Television Standard. Nobody supported it. Nevertheless, I suspect the fact that it has been raised again in the context of this discussion paper means that someone with the ear of government wants to see it pursued.

Also floated in the discussion paper is the idea that the government might introduce “contestable funding” for public interest content. In other words, the government might effectively put content commissions out to tender. This would be done, the discussion paper suggests, particularly for training and educational material. Media organisations would tender for the contract to produce and air the material. Public broadcasters would be in the race, but in the new media world, I see no reason why relatively small organisations or freelance content makers might not also be able to contest such tenders, delivering content online.

So, there are lots of things up for grabs in this exercise, even given the government’s failure to conduct the sort of broad, white paper exercise that media policy so desperately needs. Submissions are due by 12 December. All the information you might need is here.

Sharpen your pencils. •

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