BY ADAM MACLEAN
After the much-publicised $26.1 million cuts the Australian Broadcasting Corporation management made on August 5, federal communications minister Richard Alston has hinted at allowing it to raise funds through things like telethons and allowing subscriber-only services.
This year, the government cut, in real money terms, at least $5 million from the ABC's triennial budget, rendering it incapable of giving modest wage rises to its workforce, producing locally made programs or obtaining quality programming from overseas. Alston disputes that his government cut at all, claiming that he kept the ABC budget at the same level as last time, in real terms.
Going even further, Queensland Liberal senator Santo Santoro said on August 15 that government funding to the ABC has actually increased 17.31% in real terms between 1995-96 and 2003-04.
Many commentators have now come forward to call for the ABC to accept paid advertising on its radio stations, TV channels and web sites to make up the shortfall in public funding.
All these claims and "suggestions" conveniently ignore the facts. The Coalition government has been slashing away unrelentingly at the ABC for more than seven years. In 1996, the first year of the Coalition's current reign, $55 million was taken from the ABC. Any claim that this government is maintaining funding in any shape or form, is a plain lie.
If you go back further, the picture worsens. Bob Hawke's and Paul Keating's Labor governments did much damage to the ABC. Since the early 1990s, a cumulative total of $120 million has been cut from the ABC. Thirty-four per cent of ABC funding has been cut in 15 years.
There were 300 ABC redundancies under former managing director Jonathan Shier, leaving a $37 million debt by the end of 2001. Highly paid managers were hired to replace those ousted, and the organisation today is paying for a failed government experiment in not-so-subtle political interference, which is itself continuing on other battlegrounds today.
The real operational funding of the ABC has declined 23.2% from 1985's $613 million.
Australian National University professor Glenn Withers has cited research showing the ABC is very efficient at what it does. It spends about $140,000 per employee, compared with $313,000 per employee at commercial networks. The cost of the ABC is less than half that of the average commercial network and it gets programs to air at half the price.
Alston has offered up "an idea [he] read about the other day". It was the US public broadcasters model, which uses telethons for funding.
Alston told ABC Radio National he rejected any prospect of a licence fee levied on each television set, as done in Britain now and Australia before 1972.
He said, "Let's just assume the ABC has 20% [of the television] audience, and the bulk of that comes from one particular part of the demographic — let's say they are middle-class viewers, right? That means that if everyone's paying a licence fee, because everyone's got a television set, it means lower-income people are actually subsidising or cross-subsidising middle-income people."
Alston takes everyone for a fool if he thinks they will believe that by watching TV or listening to the radio you are subsidising the rich. He makes no mention of abolishing the real subsidies, like the GST, surely one of the biggest forms of welfare for the wealthy ever implemented in this country.
Taxpayers already fund the broadcaster. But it's the government of the day that decides how much. Clearly, governments find budget cuts the most effective weapon in their battles to turn the ABC into their voice.
Now more than ever, the ABC needs better and wider sources of funding, while still remaining 100% in public hands.
Ads on the ABC will threaten the independence of the network as much as government interference and budget cuts do. Allowing commercial interests to affect programming decisions, no matter how minor, will put the ABC's obligation to provide "fair and balanced" coverage for all Australians under threat.
We are facing a situation, as exists on Channel 10, where the Commonwealth Bank "presents" the finance news. Ads for breakfast cereals and lollies between children's TV shows may appear lucrative for the broadcaster, but are they in the best interests of the audience? "Sponsorship", like that used at SBS, comes with strings attached. What guarantees will keep advertisers away from editors, journalists and program schedulers?
The advertising "industry" makes a profit of around $5 billion a year in Australia. In its submission to the 2001 Senate inquiry into the methods of appointment to the ABC Board, the Socialist Alliance called for a tax on advertising profits to fund public and community broadcasting.
"Given the outrageously high profits enjoyed in the commercial communications industry in Australia, a tax on their advertising revenues should be levied", it said. "Any future leasing of the Australian airwave (spectrum) should carry levies that go into the program development costs of the ABC."
Alston is dead wrong to expect people to pay twice for their right to an adequately funded public media in this country. They already pay many times over for advertising: in the increased cost of products (and even lower wages in the corporations paying for the advertising), in the pollution it creates in our public spaces and in the artificial production of consumer demand for innumerable useless objects of desire, in "planned obsolescence" and glossy, environmentally destructive, packaging.
Even just a tiny percentage of that $5 billion would represent a timely contribution to the public good. In addition to the present system of federal government three-yearly grants, this money would go a very long way in ensuring a future for broadcasting in the interests of people, not greedy corporate interest or government propaganda.
Otherwise, get ready for the Alston Broadcasting Corporation, where the final solution means you'll pay again and again for no choice, no complaints and definitely no off switch.
From Green Left Weekly, August 20, 2003.
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