BY ADAM MACLEAN
Public calls for the sacking of ABC managing director Jonathan Shier, chairperson Donald McDonald and the whole ABC board are growing. If the national broadcaster is to be saved from the oblivion the Coalition clearly wishes to consign it to, those calls not only need to become far louder, they need to be successful.
The ABC is set to face another corporate restructure, its second in 14 months. The announcement is a tacit admission that the previous restructure, which started in June, with its excessively large (and hugely expensive) management structures, was unwieldy and a failure.
Since June, there have been cuts in TV production (the ABC's science television production unit was axed, for example), in set building and in technical crews in news and current affairs. Most recently, cuts have been announced in the Archives and Library Service, which will lose 36 positions.
These cuts can be directly attributed to mismanagement at the ABC, rather than just cuts in government funding.
At a cost of nearly $15 million in executive salary increases, recruitment agency fees and redundancies — which staff are labelling hush money — Jonathan Shier's reign as managing director has been one long series of cuts, sackings and compromises of the ABC's charter, especially relating to commercialisation.
Long-running programs like Quantum have been axed, with no long-term replacement formulated. Quantum's short-term slot-filler, Aftershock, is due to run only a few weeks, and even this is an outsourced, contracted effort.
This flies in the face of Shier's recent National Press Club address when he claimed "By June, we will have almost doubled our output of television science programs over the previous financial year".
Indeed, the few new TV programs that have been produced under the current management have all been "buy-ins" or outsourced. No new television is being made by ABC staff.
This is at the heart of the matter of commercialisation of the ABC — over-paid executives outsource program-making while program makers are sacked.
More and more deals are being made with large corporations for shows that have projected merchandising "spin-off" opportunities. This is the case with the program Love is a Four Letter Word, a show about an inner city music venue showcasing "independent" musicians.
All these musicians are on the books of media giant Sony, despite the fact that the ABC already has a unit devoted to finding and promoting new Australian music.
Commercial imperatives are the plus, minus and equal signs in the equation, rather than the quality of the program and audience reaction.
And it's not just the workers and supporters of the ABC who have "unresolved issues" with this management. Independent film-makers complain that the ABC, when negotiating with their representatives, seeks to underpay and place overly restrictive rights on their material.
Given that the ABC is one of only two mass-media organisations that purchase independent Australian content, this game of "hardball" will undermine the ABC's charter obligation to reflect and advance local culture.
So much so that the Australian National Audit Office has been brought in by a parliamentary joint committee to investigate — an extraordinary action given that the committee is made up solely of Liberal and Labor politicians.
So Shier's response, to take his 160 managers on a two-day Launceston retreat so he can launch his "new" structure, is being treated with scepticism. Any reorganisation that continues to hire (then fire) overpaid executives, while at the same time cutting ABC program making and sacking the people who make the programs, will undoubtedly receive a cynical reception from ABC workers.
Even if the ABC receives the reported extra $28 million in the May 22 federal budget, very little of that will translate into production roles for more ABC staff.
With handouts of this token size, the Coalition government will be hoping to deflate the growing public anger over funding cuts to the national broadcaster, hoping to improve its chances in its heartland seats.
As well, the Liberals will give their man Shier a chance to win some credibility as a saviour of the ABC, proving his management style wins dollars, thus taking the heat off communications minister Richard Alston to sack Shier and the whole ABC board.
But the promised amount of extra funding is paltry and insulting compared to what was cut in the 1990s. The ABC is funded under provisions of specific pieces of legislation, and its funding has been progressively reduced by successive Labor and Coalition governments.
Since the early 1990s a cumulative total of $120 million has been cut from the ABC. In 1996, when the Coalition came to power, $55 million was sliced from the national broadcaster.
Things like the state-based symphony orchestras were cast adrift and the transmission tower, used for Radio Australia broadcasts into the Asia Pacific, was leased to a fundamentalist Christian broadcasting organisation. The broadcast rights were then picked up by Channel 7, which has now cut the broadcast completely, because its satellite venture wasn't turning a profit.
According to ABC broadcaster Quentin Dempster, ABC funding has been cut by 34% in real terms over 15 years. In the last 10 years, 2000 broadcasters have been axed.
Under Shier — that is, in the last 14 months — 30% of TV producers in NSW have been made redundant, with only 10 researchers left at the ABC studios in Sydney's Gore Hill.
With calls on May 2 from the chairperson of the Australian Broadcasting Authority chief David Flint, to further relax cross-media ownership laws — thus allowing Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer to enlarge their already expansive media empires — now more than ever we need a properly funded, independent and public media outlet.