Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in response to Senator Lundy's motion to take note of answers. I want to be very categorical: our position was not that the ABC and the SBS—the public broadcasters—should be immune from savings, but that those savings should be undertaken in an informed manner. That was the reason why the minister established, back in January, the efficiency study, the Lewis review, to assist the public broadcasters to manage their businesses more efficiently and effectively, and to examine specifically back-of-house costs of operation and to identify savings through increased efficiencies and to reduce expenses without impacting on the quality of the extent of programing.

The efficiency study did find that these savings were definitely achievable if the ABC was willing to tackle the inefficiencies in its back office operations and, effectively, get more bang for their buck—or get more bang for fewer taxpayer dollars. Of course the easiest way for the ABC would be to cut costs to programing rather than tackle their outdated business and administrative practices. The efficiency study was designed to make the public broadcasters look at their back-of-office operations and to find those efficiencies, so it is totally disingenuous for those opposite to now come forward and to basically go on about cuts to programing when this efficiency was about back office operations.

It is clear that since the draft of that study was announced in May the public broadcasters, especially the ABC, have been busily looking for efficiencies. I have a copy of a document, which is dated 24 November; it is a very detailed document which is headed 'ABC News proposal for change'. It says:

The Managing Director, Mark Scott, has announced proposals for wide-ranging changes designed to secure ABC's future in the digital media era. As part of that process, News management has been reviewing every aspect of the news operation to find savings and to ensure that we are strongly positioned to deliver our world-class journalism to audiences when, where and how they want it. We are proposing measures aimed at improving ABC's news and current affairs service to audiences across all platforms and enhancing our reporting from across the nation and around the world.

And then this document goes on, in quite a lot of detail, to specifically identify those areas. It says:

To ensure we have the right mix of skills to address the future needs of a multiplatform operation, in many cases we propose pooling staff with similar skill sets for selection for redundancy, not only those affected by the discontinuation.

The point that I am making is that the ABC has already gone through this process. The document talks about changes to current affairs. It talks about proposing initiatives in current affairs that would 'better showcase our agenda setting reporting'. It talks about 'investigations and analysis across 24-hour news platforms and making them more accessible to audiences'. And it goes into detailed key proposals that they have already identified. On the international front, it says:

We want our international operations to be more responsive, with greater flexibility to be on the ground when and where major news breaks in any corner of the globe.

Then it goes on to identify about 10 key proposals in relation to international operations. I move to state and territory newsrooms. It says:

We want to offer state and territory audiences more responsive approaches to coverage of local news, more on-the-spot coverage—

and, again, gives detailed key proposals as to how they are going to effect that. News operations is another area that they have looked at. It says:

We are proposing changes designed to make the news operations management and support structures more efficient, consistent and effective.

Again, they detail changes there. They have also looked at management and support teams. It says:

News management has reviewed how we can most efficiently resource structure and utilise management.

This is what the review and the efficiency review was about, and the ABC have identified the areas already.