The ABC OF EFFICIENCY

While it’s never a surprise when the Chairman of the Institute of Public Affairs attacks the ABC (What the minister should have told the ABC bleaters, Weekend Australian, 4/4/20), what really surprised me was how different Janet Albrechtsen’s experience of the ABC was when compared with my own.

After all, our time at the public broadcaster overlapped by several years – she as a respected board member and me as a senior manager – and yet the deep and far-reaching efficiencies that I witnessed (and in some cases helped drive) seemed to have passed without her notice. To be fair, some of them happened after she left.

Let me fill in some gaps.

It is generally understood and accepted that the ABC has lost close to a third of its budget in real terms since the mid 1980’s while also having to expand its output to meet demand. One television channel grew to four (as it did for all Australian broadcasters when multichanneling was introduced) while overall staff fell from 6000 to 4000. But even against that background the ABC cuts of the last several years have hit particularly hard. Even if you ignore the reduction or cancellation of specific services like the Australia Network and expanded news gathering, the ABC has lost nearly $80 million a year from its operational funding. That cut only gets bigger in the years to come. To focus only on the latest in that long line of funding cuts is to assume that it really was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The cumulative impact has been the real killer.

But has the ABC really been ignoring the need for restructures and efficiencies in the face of these cuts? The truth could not be more different. The ABC has in fact being doing nothing but restructuring and cutting for years now, in a desperate attempt to keep doing its job in the face of government neglect.

To mention just a few of the larger initiatives, the ABC has outsourced its master control and technical support, automated its studios, introduced desktop editing so that journalists can cut their own stories, and cut back on panel operators in radio. It has not only moved to single person camera crews but expanded the use of reporters who shoot their own stories. It removed hundreds of jobs from its managerial, administrative and support ranks. It renegotiated contracts, sold buildings and shut down programs. Hundreds and hundreds of good people doing good jobs left the organisation.

Some of these initiatives were similar to efficiencies being achieved at commercial networks, but many were ground breaking, and led the way for others to follow.

Many of these efficiencies and savings initiatives were in place before government cuts were announced, as the ABC is always looking for ways to meet rising costs and rising demands. However, the cuts meant that instead of the savings being used to help fund new content, they were taken away by the government.

Like Ms Albrechtsen, I want to see an ABC that is efficient and effective in its use of taxpayer funding and delivers on its charter. Where we perhaps disagree is on what the plain facts of the matter make clear – that the ABC is already doing everything it can to continue to serve the public while facing cut after cut imposed for absolutely no good reason.

If the Government were to heed its own most recent report into the ABC’s efficiency, it would be accepting one of the key conclusions, which was that to achieve the current transition to a digital environment, the ABC would need additional funding support. More, not less.

In these difficult times, every publicly funded service needs to share some of the pain and cut back where it can. What I fail to understand is why the ABC is being forced to bear more than its fair share of that pain, while at the same time being falsely accused of failing to live within its means.

One of the constant refrains from critics is that the rest of the media is suffering badly because of a loss of advertising revenue to the major online companies, so the ABC needs to suffer too. I wholeheartedly agree that journalism in particular is under threat from a loss of revenue. It is a problem all Australians should be worried about. But to imagine for a moment that part of the solution is to impose vindictive, unnecessary and arbitrary cuts on the most trusted and valuable source of public interest journalism is to favour ideology over common sense.

What we are seeing at the moment is not a demand for the ABC to be more efficient. It is a stubborn refusal to pay for what the Australian public needs.

Alan Sunderland

July 2020

Alan Sunderland worked for the ABC for 23 years, and was Editorial Director from 2013 to 2019.