BY CAM PARKER
SYDNEY — Workers employed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation held stop-work meetings across the country on October 27 to discuss their response to managing director Jonathan Shier's cuts to the ABC budget.
Shier had attempted to justify a cut of almost $4 million from ABC news and current affairs in a nationally televised address to staff the previous day. "A 3.2% change in funding happens a lot in Australia; 3.2% is not Armageddon", he said.
ABC journalists estimate that the cut will result in around 100 people losing their jobs. The number and quality of radio and TV news and current affairs programs will have to be reduced. However, ABC board chairperson Donald McDonald told ABC radio: "I don't believe any material program cuts will be justified in the next year. Public institutions all over the country can adjust to a change that's of the order of 3%."
ABC news presenter Quentin Dempster told ABC unions' stop-work meeting that McDonald's and Shier's argument refuses to acknowledge that the latest cuts are part of the "ongoing defunding of the ABC". The ABC has endured severe budget cuts, going back at least to 1988 when the Labor Party was in office.
In 1996, the Coalition government broke its election promise and cut ABC funding by $67 million a year. One in five jobs were cut. There has been no funding increase since 1994. The ABC currently has 4200 staff and a budget of $550 million.
At the large and fiery meetings, members of the Community and Public Sector Union and Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance resolved to begin a "wide-scale public and community-based campaign to defend the ABC, its editorial independence, its ability to fulfil its charter obligations and against any cuts".
Workers demanded that management publicly reveal from which programs the cuts were to be made. If no satisfactory answers are forthcoming by November 24, an industrial campaign will begin.
Staff attending the union meeting in Brisbane had their pay docked, even though ABC management sanctioned the meeting nationally. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie addressed the meeting, criticising Shier's plan to lobby state governments for funds to transform the ABC into a "virtual university". Beattie's presence followed loud criticisms of the ABC budget cuts by former National Party premier Rob Borbidge.
Commercialisation
Since the beginning of the year, Shier — a former Liberal Party official and one-time executive of Rupert Murdoch's European Sky TV — has shed about 100 staff; split the organisation into competing wings; proposed more ABC programs be produced by commercial media; hired new executives with salaries reportedly two-and-a-half times the standard; and instructed ABC's web sites to pursue "appropriate e-commerce activities".
At his staff briefings, Shier has dwelled on the ABC's ratings. He drooled over ABC's success with its coverage of the Paralympics. But what use are ratings statistics, other than to convince advertisers to buy time on your network?
Using private companies, state governments and other federal government departments to supplement funding for the ABC could lead to potentially complex conflicts of interest.
During the October 26 staff briefing, ABC journalist Jill Kitson asked Shier why he thought organisations giving money to the ABC for programs would not want some kind of endorsement. Shier said that was an issue for executive producers to deal with.
"On-selling" and "pre-selling" is a central tenet of Shier's plans. It involves a program, or part of a program, being sold to other media organisations either before or after it is aired on the host media. Australia is a significant market for US and British commercial and public television programs, whereas few Australian programs are resold internationally.
In his address to staff, Shier chastised the producers of Foreign Correspondent for not pre-selling a story about Mongolian hillsmen. Yet, Foreign Correspondent is at the forefront of the ABC's commercial pre-selling of its programs; since 1996, it has generated approximately $700,000 in pre-sales.
Who's ABC is it?
Outside the major cities and provincial towns, the ABC is often all there is. ABC stations are often the only source of serious coverage of world events and issues. The ABC is the only Australian media organisation that has a full-time news bureau stationed in the Middle East.
To pressure the ABC to further commercialise and self-market is to steer it from quality public broadcasting to that of naked profiteering. To argue, as Shier does, that the federal government is the ABC's "shareholder" is wrong. In a country with one of the most monopolised mass media, the ABC is the one outlet over which the Australian people can exercise a degree (albeit limited and declining) of democratic control.
Governments come and go and their malice toward inquisitive journalism ensure their reluctance to adequately fund public, non-commercial broadcasting.
Shier will be in Canberra this week, cap in hand. How far his appeals get may already have been answered by Prime Minister John Howard on October 27, when he said, "The government provides the ABC with a good budget and it is up to the ABC to decide how to allocate the money".
Trade unions and groups such as the Friends of the ABC must now begin the campaign — one that includes large demonstrations and other opportunities for public participation — to defeat Shier's and the Howard government's attacks on public broadcasting.
[Cam Parker is a member of the CPSU and the Democratic Socialist Party. He works as a web producer/developer at ABC Online. He can be contacted at <camparker@cia.com.au>.]