Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I do not normally speak to MPIs because they can, as some senators have observed, be fairly predictable. I could not let this one go past. It is premised on the rather now famous quotation, and I thank our colleagues in the Labor Party for bringing it forward—the PM's election promise, right on the eve of the last federal election, and it could not have been clearer: 'no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.' It is a measure of the despair with which many people hold politicians, that you would get a comment as bold-faced and as black and white as that, and it is immediately doubled back on at the earliest opportunity. That is the nature of someone who lied his way into office. There is no way of being more polite about it than that. It is as though the Prime Minister exists in his own eternal political present, where words just come out of his mouth to suit a particular moment or a particular sound grab, and the next day it is as though it was never said and we are all meant to just forget that it ever happened. The GST was the last piece of that puzzle until fairly recently, and, of course, that has been put into the public domain as well. The catalogue of deliberate deceptions that the GST has set running is now complete.

Everything, as far as this government's budget repair proposals are concerned, is on the table except that which might offend powerful donors or interests. That has been very safely quarantined away as you have been marching around the landscape abolishing taxes for the last 12 months. Some economic interests—many of them very used to exercising their political clout—are coming in a hard-line and strategic way after our national broadcasters, the ABC and the SBS. It is that element of this trashed promise to the Australian public before the election that I want to focus on.

Cuts of somewhere between $120 million and $200 million to our national broadcaster, the ABC, are described by the minister as a 'down payment'. It is quite creepy behaviour when you think about it—'That's a nice national broadcaster you've got there; it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.' There are threats to editorial independence, threats to funding and now direct threats to programming. Maybe the ABC will be forced to take advertising. Maybe it will be forced to curtail its online presence. You can see why some of the ideologues who are coming after the ABC and SBS are so terrified of how well our national broadcasters are performing online. They are doing some of the most innovative stuff, I would say, not just in the country but in the world in taking a publicly funded national broadcaster and putting that presence online in a way that enlarges its audience to a new generation of people who are not necessarily watching mainstream free-to-air TV or, for that matter, reading newspapers.

I have come to realise that the ABC and SBS are not being attacked because they are failing; they are being attacked because they are succeeding a little too well. That is something that is really worth considering. These broadcasters are loved. They are national institutions that are loved by people right across the political spectrum and right across this continent—from downtown in the big cities all the way out to the most remote and regional areas where you can get an ABC radio broadcast. That is one of the elements of why this government is in such trouble. The government was asked about the prospect of whether this could lead to job losses and, at this stage, we are looking at 500 or 600 job cuts. It may be less than that or it may be more. We do not know the scale of the cuts that are proposed. Mr Turnbull has said, 'It would depend on which staff are cut. The ABC is not a workers' collective.' What contempt! As though anybody proposed that it was a workers' collective; it is a much loved national broadcaster. That is why we have already seen the beginning of the damage being done: 80 staff have been let go from ABC International, the Australian Network has been trashed, the payments from DFAT to wind up its operations fell short by $5 million and the broadcaster is facing serious and significant cuts. That is why we will fight it.

As we put the government on notice, do not be surprised if the tiny handful of ideologues who loathe the very existence of public broadcasters come to heel when they need it. Do not be too surprised if that tiny handful of people are completely overmatched by the breadth and depth of passion with which Australian people from right across the country and right across the political spectrum will stand up and fight for their national broadcasters, both the ABC and the SBS. You are put on notice now. The Prime Minister may have forgotten that commitment that he made to the rest of the country right before the election, but we have not.