Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In making this speech today, I'd like to dedicate it to that wonderful organisation, ABC Friends, and particularly to my mate in Western Australia Margo Webb, who recently chased me down and gave me the forms and information to become a 'friend' of the ABC. She also got me to become an official member of an organisation here in parliament which I'd assumed I was already part of, which was the Parliamentary Friends of the ABC.

I was lucky enough to spend a bit of time chatting to a couple of regional heads of the ABC Friends organisation who were in the building for a Parliamentary Friends of the ABC event. I put to them some of the ideas that have been circulated recently in relation to the future of our national broadcaster, particularly the idea that has been floated by some in the Liberal Party and in the national spaces that it be separated and that a rural and regional broadcaster be created and the rest of it sold off. The president of the New South Wales regional chapter, I think it was, was quite angry at that idea, and I was quite surprised. I said: 'Why? What would be the problem with that for you?' She said, 'One of the greatest challenges that we as country people have is that the people in the cities don't always seem to understand us and we, being isolated in rural and regional communities, don't get the opportunity to connect and engage with what is happening in metro and other areas of the country. So the fact that the ABC serves both the rural and regional communities and the metro communities allows it to act as a bridge between the two and ensure a continuation of shared understanding.' She said to me that it was actually quite offensive to assume that any particular content on the ABC wouldn't be relevant to rural and regional communities because actually people in rural and regional communities like to know what is going on in other parts of the country too. Then we had a very interesting conversation about how certain political parties in this place seem to function to reduce rural and regional identities and communities down to a flat parody of what they actually are, for political purposes. I said to her: 'Well, enough about the National Party. Let's get back to the ALP and to the ABC more broadly.'

On the question of our national broadcaster, I've got to say that I love it. There are so many people in our community who feel the same. As somebody who came to Australia from the UK—I know I hide my accent well!—it was something that allowed me to begin to develop my identity as an Australian person and to connect with the community that I'd joined. I remember so fondly, obviously, Play School and all of that. Also, for anybody watching along at home, there was a series the ABC did when I was a kid called Ace Lightning, which was an early attempt to meld together a children's program and a computer animated thing, which I absolutely loved and rewatched recently and realised how utterly terrible the graphics are by modern standards. But, between that and the educational portions of ABC programming in the morning on the TV, that was it for me, really. I consumed it all, loved it all, and found it an amazing source of knowledge, information and connection to community and to the world.

It struck me, even as a kid, that whether it was listening to a Radio National program at night on the beach in Rockingham and a story about thylacines—I think I was probably eight at the time—or whether it was watching the children's programming in the afternoon or sitting on Pop's knee and watching Lateline when it was technically bedtime, the ABC was somewhere you could go where there wasn't the noise. You could go and engage with the information. Now in this job I have discovered that that is so much the case. If you put the ABC next to any of its commercial equivalents, there's no comparison. Putting aside the gross, horrible stuff that often comes spewing out of a channel like Sky, trying to consume their content is really quite challenging because there are about 14 million things happening on the screen simultaneously and it breaks every five or 10 minutes for an ad session.

Every Australian should be concerned that there are views given oxygen within their government that are not only somewhat questioning of the value of the ABC; they are nakedly hostile to the ABC. They want to cut it up and sell it off. They don't want it to be a thing anymore. They'll come in here and give you all these arguments and clasp their hands behind their backs as though it's a Young Liberals meeting, and talk about the history and all the rest of it. But, if you cut it all down and cut out the noise, what is their problem? Their problem is that sometimes the ABC has the gall to fact-check them. That's the problem. It fact-checks them and it finds out they're speaking nonsense, and then they come in here and have a sad, and they take that sad to the cabinet room and put all these ideological ideas around it and say, 'For these reasons, we've got to cut the thing up and sell it off,' when really it's just that they're annoyed by the fact that they've been fact-checked and called out.

May I suggest that, rather than trying to take the knife to the national broadcaster, a better course of action would be to actually do your homework before you speak, and then this whole thing could be avoided. Senator Hanson-Young, who has done fantastic work in this space and I think is quite fairly regarded as the parliament's fiercest champion for the national broadcaster, has made the observation that Ita Buttrose, the current chair, could eat some of her critics for breakfast. I totally agree—she absolutely should! But, knowing some of her critics, I would suggest that she not do that, because I can't imagine that they would be very good for her health.

An honourable senator: She's a vegan.

Oh, she's a vegan. Okay. Well, then they're safe! Going specifically to the idea of selling off Triple J, Triple J is a fantastic institution. It is often one of the only mediums through which information about public affairs and complex issues in our community are addressed by young people in a way that is relevant to our lives. Programs like Hack are indispensable. Triple J also has the proud honour of being the host of the world's largest experiment in musical democracy, with over three million people participating in the Hottest 100 process every single year. It is a platform that has given space to innumerable artists who make incredible contributions to our cultural life as a community. It absolutely should be preserved and celebrated.

The ABC, as I said at the beginning of my speech, is excellent. It should be celebrated, supported and well funded. This government's taken about $1 billion out of the ABC between 2014 and the 2024 budget. Not only is this money in need of urgent return to the ABC; what is needed is for the proper investment to be made. It's not good enough just to take the ABC back to where it was in 2012. We actually need to see proper investment in our ABC so that it is able to be the dynamic, diverse, relevant and trustworthy public broadcaster that our community loves, needs and wants to see continuing to exist. I thank the chamber.