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

It was nice being in the chamber for that, Senator Faulkner. Happy birthday, indeed.

I rise to speak as a friend of the ABC and a friend of the SBS—the Special Broadcasting Service. I am one among many friends of Australia's broadcasters. I am speaking as an admirer of the group Friends of the ABC—and the friends of the SBS—who do great public advocacy, inform their membership and play the role, I suppose, of watchdog and advocate in defence of public broadcasting in Australia; and also, in the broader sense of the term 'friends of the ABC', as one Australian among millions who admire, respect and trust the work of our public broadcasters.

There is, unfortunately, a problem. The problem is what passes for a policy development process under the Abbott government, which was elected without much of a clue as to what it wanted to create if it did win government. It had a bit of an idea of what it wanted to destroy, but not a great deal about what it wanted to create. It effectively outsourced its policy development process to a rather ambiguous organisation known as the Institute of Public Affairs.

The IPA published a hit list of 75 policy recommendations, followed by another 25 a short while later. Three of them are relevant to people who consider themselves friends of the SBS and friends of the ABC. Item No. 47: 'Cease funding the Australia Network'—silence Australia's voice in the Asia-Pacific region, our diplomatic voice, the public broadcasting arm of the ABC that reaches deep into China, Japan and other countries in South-East Asia. Item 50: 'Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function.' And item 51: 'Privatise SBS'.

Having outsourced policy to the Institute of Public Affairs, and being reasonably awake to the demands of the Murdoch press—which we could probably say played quite an important role in the change of government, and the events leading up to it, last September—the Abbott government, particularly the Prime Minister and the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, have basically proceeded to work their way through the IPA's hit list. This is where we find ourselves tonight.

If you are going to start softening up the broadcasters to the demands of the Institute of Public Affairs and its unknown financial backers, and those in the Murdoch press who would probably just like to see their competitor eliminated from the market, you would probably commission an efficiency review recommending that the ABC and SBS cut hundreds of jobs, merge their back office functions, replace more content with advertising, charge for content which was previously free, outsource all production to the private sector and cancel new building construction. And what do you know? Such an efficiency review was commissioned and then tabled.

Efficiency appears to have a curious meaning to this government. Where is the efficiency in funding for absurd urban freeway projects that have no cost-benefit analysis, no business case and no environmental impact assessment? What is efficient about handing 920 million bucks to the Roe Highway for a project that will never go ahead? What is efficient, exactly, about purchasing $24 billion worth of fighter aircraft that cannot take off because they catch fire? There is not a lot of efficiency there. The ABC and SBS, on the other hand, will be subject to 'efficiency', in pursuit of the ends identified by the IPA.

This is all cloaked in statements by the communications minister claiming that he, too, is a friend of the ABC and by the Prime Minister, in the lead-up to the election, saying there would be no cuts to the broadcaster. That has not worked out very well, has it? The efficiency review has effectively identified the down payment that was made by the ABC: the abolition of the Australia Network cuts tens of millions of dollars out of the broadcaster's overseas arm which will hit current affairs and news reporting in the region back into Australia. So that is efficiency; it is not working out particularly well.

Then what you would probably do is stack the board in a rather dismal repeat of what I imagine you got up to in your student politics days. And, if you cannot stack the board by direct political appointment, you would abuse the process set up by Labor minister Stephen Conroy, and supported by the Greens, of making board appointments at arms-length from politics. That is what appears to be underway now.

I am going to read a series of quotes relating to the ABC and public broadcasting. Let's see if we can identify who said them. How about this: 'It is a Soviet-style workers collective'; or, 'It is a sort of private club promoting its own ideology at the taxpayers' expense, with no apparent control by its board and no real incentive to change'—fascinating, isn't it? Here is another one: '… most of its news is opinion, its "fact checking" is the new way of declaring its own approved version of the facts and the role of Media Watch is apparently to intimidate the commercial media.' Here is another one: 'It gets a herd mentality … and takes an official view about what you, the citizen, should believe in.' What about this one—this is a cracker: 'Mark Scott should resign.' Or better yet: 'I think it should be sold. The best thing to do might be to start again.'

As you might have guessed, these are comments by very high-profile commentators who have, over the past several years, declared their loathing of public broadcasting. That is not unusual, and both of the broadcasters are strong enough to stick up for themselves. In fact, those kinds of attacks on public broadcasters, or on any media organisation, should probably tell us that they are doing their job well. William Randolph Hurst said years and years ago:

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

So if the ABC and SBS are not copping a flogging from somebody, then they are probably not doing their jobs very well.

Both of the broadcasters are built on fairly strong foundations—they are run by strong minded people and they can stick up for themselves—but there are times when the ABC and SBS will need friends, and in my view this is very much one of those times. Because the Abbott government, through its communications minister and through the office of the Prime Minister, has declared war on broadcasting, war on editorial independence, war on board independence and war on funding and function, let us not pretend that this government is a friend of public broadcasting at all. Why else would you appoint people like Janet Albrechtsen and Neil Brown, to whom those quotes that I read into Hansard a moment ago can all be attributed, to a four-person panel which then oversees future board appointments to the ABC and SBS? These are people who hate the ABC and want it to die. Why would you put them in charge of selecting the board of an entity that they think either should not exist at all or who have been profoundly critical of its editorial direction and tone? This is sharply at odds with the views of the vast majority of Australians, who trust and depend on the ABC, particularly for the regional broadcasts and for those who have rather limited alternative channels for news and current affairs. Why would you put people like that in charge of this important role?

It was something that the Greens voted for in an attempt to place these appointments at arms-length from politics, and of course the Abbott government has just gone around them. Very clever, extremely cynical, and it needs to be fought. Janet Albrechtsen is obviously a fairly strident commentator for News Ltd publications, who just wants to get rid of a competitor. They are not ambiguous about it; they do not try to pretend that is not what they are up to. Neil Brown is a former Liberal MP and minister. These are not people who are outside the political process. Mr Brown wants the ABC to be scrapped and started again from scratch. That is where we have come to.

Polling by Essential Research that was published late last year shows, as it always does, that the ABC is Australia's most trusted media outlet, and that SBS is only a few percentage points behind. Trailing them significantly after that are the commercial publications and commercial channels that—some are worse than others obviously—have done so much to undermine the credibility of public broadcasters, to very little effect, I should say, because most Australians are still strongly affectionate towards the ABC and SBS. If this is the kind of government that is struggling desperately behind in the polls, picking one fight after another indiscriminately with every part of Australian society, under attack from our allies overseas and from groups right across civil society here in Australia, what would you do? Would you declare yourself a friend of the ABC or would you just go and attack it? That is what is underway. It needs to be resisted, and the ABC and SBS need their friends.