Quentin Dempster provided input to the National Conference on the important issues of:
*Commercialisation of the ABC from within
*ABC "plans" to take advertising on their website
*Balance and bias on the ABC.

Quentin also stressed the issue of digital broadcasting, suggesting Government policy was to hold the digital revolution back to suit the Commercial Broadcasters.

Quentin thanked FABC for all their efforts and emphasized how much ABC staff appreciate our support.

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Commercialisation of the ABC – address by Quentin Dempster to Friends of the ABC National Conference in Melbourne, May 2007.
Quentin affirmed his belief that the ABC will survive, but asked in what form it will survive. 
The federal Budget: The ABC again did not get what it wanted in this week’s federal Budget. 
By way of background, he observed that the 2006 budget had continued the tendency towards tied funding. The support for regional services was welcome, but it was essentially an exercise in pork-barrelling marginal governments seats. Overall, the ABC did not get adequate funding to maintain and enhance operations.
In the lead-up to the current Budget, the ABC applied for $22m for ABC3, a dedicated multi-channel children’s station, which it believed would encourage people to take up digital television by encouraging them to buy cheap set-top boxes. This could have helped to resolve a pressing problem, which is that the existing free-to-air channels are hamstrung from shifting over to digital because of the low rate of take-up. In effect, Foxtel is being given a six-year window to gouge the Australian market. The current policy on digital television has been a ‘technological betrayal of the people of Australia’. 
But no money was given to support ABC3, and only a little for digital radio. The ABC’s overall Budget allocation may not cover operating expenses; the unions believe that it will not cover pay under the existing EBA, so redundancies will be inevitable. 
Quentin believes that the Friends need to help communicate a sense of direction for what the ABC should be in the new media era. For example, through multi-channelling the ABC could become involved in the education field, providing free resources for people generally rather than selling education to international students, as the universities are doing.
Tied funding: The ABC board and management have not objected to tied funding because their attitude is that any money in the door is money that the government will not be willing to take away. But the question is: why does the government appoint a board when it evidently doesn’t trust the board to spend the money it is given?
Commercialisation: Since the ABC was set up as a corporation, it has had to power to borrow money and enter into consortium agreements, but the pressures for commercialisation are increasing. Mark Scott has changed the Enterprises Division to a Commercial Division. ABC Online has been a huge success, with specialist programming reaching new audiences through iPods and vodcasting. 
Inevitably, the board started looking for ways of making money out of the Internet; it was assisted by the fact that the Act was written before the Web existed, so that website advertising was not specifically excluded. 
Quentin suggested that we need to ask whether we want ABC shops and other commercial enterprises if they are going to further the commercialisation of the ABC? The digital archive is also extremely valuable, and the commercialisers would love to exploit it; but Australian taxpayers have already paid for that content. Labor has said that they will amend the Act to exclude web-based advertising if they are elected. Mark Scott has indicated that management won’t move on the issue until there is a full debate.

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There will be further reports from the conference - keep watching