In January, Jonathan Holmes met with then Managing Director of the ABC, David Anderson.
Well, I'm not going to go into depths about what was on the agenda.
It was David, Jonathan and some of his colleagues from the group ABC Alumni. These meetings happened a few times a year, and usually what happens at Ultimo stays at Ultimo.
They were confidential.
I've decided to release the snippet of that conversation because he Davi is no longer managing direction, and it turns out that he was precisely correct in what he said.
What he said was in response to a question did Anderson think the Coalition had plans to cut the ABC's funding if it won the election. The fear from Jonathan and his colleagues was not unfounded. Successive Coalition governments have made cuts to the national broadcaster over decades, and as Peter Dutton now signals he's looking to cut anything he deems to be waste at the ABC, alarm bells are once again ringing from Schwartz Media. I'm Daniel James. This
is seven AM Today. Chair of ABC Alumni and former host of Media Watch, Jonathan Holmes and the coalition's plans for the ABC and whether it's possible to truly shield the national broadcaster from outside interference. It's Tuesday, April fifteen, Jonathan, thanks for joining me. What can you tell me about your meeting with David Anderson back in January?
We were concerned that given what was happening in the United States, where public radio and public television are both under severe threats of being completely defunded at least by the federal government, and where they'd already defunded a Voice of Amara, their overseas radio service, and at that time Peter Dutton was quite admiring of a lot of the things that Donald Trump was doing in the United States.
He's less so now, I think. We asked David, what do you reckon if the coalition gets in, are we likely to see actual defunding of the ABC, privatization which news corporation we're calling for again as they have for decades? And he said, no, no, no, they won't do that. What they'll do is what they've always done, which is they'll hold an inquiry into the efficiency of the ABC and almost regardless of what the result is, they'll cut the budget a bit and if that goes okay, they'll cut
some more of the following year and so on. He said, that's the standard coalition approach.
He worked at the ABC for decades, Jonathan, starting in the eighties. How many efficiency inquiries did you witness during that time and what came out of them in the past.
I can't document them all, but Kim Williams in a recent speech claimed that there have been fifteen since the year two thousand and each one of them occupies the finance department of the ABC in vast amounts of work in you know, answering the same questions over and over again. I mean, one of the good ways of being efficient for the ABC would be stop the bloody efficiency reviews quite frankly, because they chew up so much time effort.
But before that, you know the Mansfield inquiry in ninety ninety eight, nineteen eighty two, there was a Dicks inquiry, and there was a whole succession of them at absolute regular events. Sometimes the ABC comes out of them really well. For example, there was four or five under Howard. One of them was by KPMG that was asked to look at the ABC sufficiency came back with the response that said that the ABC was an extremely efficient organization and in fact to do the job it needed more money.
Of course that wasn't what the how government wanted to hear, so essentially they kind of suppressed it. I mean you still can't get the full report. Quite often they would actually make a cut, like an Abbott's government, they cut the ABC and then they instituted an efficiency inquiry under Peter Lewis to basically explore how it could possibly manage to survive the cuts. And that's happened a couple of times. You know, cut first and then enquire after.
So now we're in the thick of the electric campaign, Peter Dutton has started talking about having another efficiency inquiry. Can you just lay out for me what he has said and what you thought as you were listening.
Peter Dutton's driving through Melbourne right now.
Good morning, Good morning Rath.
Yes.
Well, look, when he was asked by Ralph Epstein on Melbourne Morning Radio.
Being generous, but I have to ask, are you going to cut the ABC's funding if you win?
Dunton said, and I'm quoting, well, I think there's a lot of very good work that the ABC does and if it's being run efficiently, then you would keep the funding in place in place.
If it's not being run efficiently and there is waste, then I think taxpayers who pay for it and who are working harder than ever just to get ahead, would expect us to you to not support the waste, but to invest into areas where the ABC is doing things.
Epstein pushed him a bit to say, well, does that mean a cut, and Dutton said, there's just going to be a ruler run across where we're spending money in government.
And I want to make sure that we're spending government money efficiently. In that way we can bring inflation down and the dream of home ownership can be achieved more quickly. Appreciate your time this morning, Thank you enjoying Melbourne. Thank you Rafe Tekula.
And my reaction was here we go again.
Absolutely, of course we should be efficient, and of course we should be excellent, and of course the ABC should and it should be a publicly accountable organization. But I doubt that Peter Dutton watch his ABC drama. I doubt he's ever watched Bay of Fires or Newsreader or you know, any of this stuff. I doubt that he listens to triple J. So you know, how are they going to rate whether the ABC's excellence or not. It's a very
difficult task. I mean a lot of people who are supporters of the ABC don't think though it's as excellence as it should be in various areas. I spend quite a lot of time by defending the ABC to its friends. But you either think it's necessary, essential service that helps Australian democracy or you don't. And frankly, on that score, I would reckon that Peter Dutton probably doesn't.
And as Kim.
William said in his reaction, we are an efficient organization.
Go for your life.
I don't think there's any doubt that in the event of mister Dutton acceding to office, that there would be a very early call for an efficiency and apparently an excellence review on what the ABC does.
Game on.
The ABC is.
An accountable institution and I have no doubt it will perform well in any such review.
I think the important thing to remember though, is that however popular the ABC is, News Court will always attack it, and a chunk of Coalition supporters will always attack it, But so far most Australians trust it and value it.
Coming up after the break the ABC's new boss needs to do to keep the broadcasters strong.
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Donovan, you've seen, we've all seen successive cuts to the broadcast over decades. Can you lay out for me how the Albernesi's government's ring statement of funding has impacted the budget as it stands.
Okay, well, first thing is Albersi has not reinstated the budget. He's managed very cleverly to persuade most of the public les he has. What he's done is to restore the loss of indexation under Turnbull and Morrison resulted in eighty four million dollars less going to the ABC over those three years than it would have done if its funding had been indexed, and so Albansi promised in the previous
campaign to restore that money. But he's done a bit more than that now he's actually raised the budget to where it would have been if there hadn't been any indexation. But the ABC is still in real terms somewhere between one hundred and fifty million and two hundred million dollars a year worse off than it was in real terms in twenty thirteen. So thanks very much Albansi government. At
least you've stopped us going backwards. But all the things that Kim Williams wants to do with better documentaries and better drama and all of this stuff, it ain't going to happen unless we get more money.
What is the overall budget of the ABC? Just want to get a sense of how significant the cuts have been to the total size of the budget.
At the moment, the ABC's operating budget is around a billion dollars. And on top of that, when you see what the ABC costs, they always add the transmission costs, which don't go to the ABC. They go to the companies that own the broadcasting towers around the country, and that's about another two or three hundred million dollars. What's actually happened is that the ABC is producing far more
with less than it ever did. If you look at nineteen ninety, say that then it produced one television channel, four national radio channels and practically nothing else. So now it produces six television channels. I think it's about twelve radio networks if you include digital as well as analog, masses of online stuff on every kind of subject under the sun, and podcasts, I think hundreds of podcasts, you know, just incomparably more for less money with less staff.
And that's the situation inherited by new managing director Hugh Mars, who was just started in the role coming over from the nine network. What challenges does he face as he steps into the role?
Oh gosh, where to start?
It is, I would say one of the more challenging jobs in the country. Everybody's got a view about the ABC. Everybody knows what they would like to see. But of course the first and biggest challenge for any CEO of the ABC at the moment is recognition. Huge numbers of people under forty never watch live television or practically never
accept maybe sport. A lot of the time they're getting ABC content through YouTube or Apple News or whatever they may not even be particularly conscious that it is ABC content. I mean the days when everybody knew that Channel two was the ABC and seven oh two was ABC Radio in Sydney or seven and seven four in Melbourne, I mean just long gone. So how do you justify your existence and get this vitally important, impartial, objective news across to a large enough number of people when there's nowhere
that they will automatically go. You've got to do a lot of things that a lot of times.
Finally, Jonathan, is there any mechanism that could be formally instituted to insulate the ABC from future political interference?
Michelle Rowland, the Minister for Communications in the Alberanzi government, has held an inquiry precisely to look at that issue. How do you make it harder for an incoming government that isn't the same as the one that's outgoing to stick to the commitments for the five year period.
That's the question that was answered.
We haven't got an answer, but look, you know, the fact is, in the Westminster system it's extremely hard to stop an elected government from doing what it wants to do. The Parliament is sovereign and it all depends on the ABC earning the trust and rewarding loyalty sufficiently that it retains the eighty percent kind of approval rating that it has at the moment, and if that drops, then its enemies will probably find a way of getting rid of it.
Jonathan, a fascinating discussion. Thanks for your time.
You're welcome.
Also in the news today in the labor'st attempt to court the youth vote. The Liberals yesterday released a disk track on SoundCloud at just over one minute long, leaving Labor, targets the cost of living crisis and is self described as Kendrick meets Question Time. The track dropped as economist level criticism at both Labor and the Liberals, saying that both parties housing policies could inflame the housing crisis rather
than ease it. And the Greens have renewed their push for free university and TAFE with the forty six point five billion dollar policy to be funded by high taxes on corporate giants. Green's leader Adam Band announced the policy yesterday, saying it's a key priority they will push for in a possible labor minority government. This has been seven am. Thanks for listening.