GOVERNMENT ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL THE ABC: STAGE TWO

TO: CHIEF OF STAFF

MEDIA RELEASE - 28 AUGUST, 1997

"The Australian public should be warned. Stage two of the Governments plan to control the ABC has been launched. After seriously damaging the ABC by slashing its funds by $66 million (twelve percent), the Government is 'testing the water' on whether to continue with the job, by tampering with the ABC's Charter.

In Parliament this week Government Members of Parliament from Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia spoke on cuts to ABC services. MPs who had previously denied to their constituents that funding cuts would result in any loss of services, were at last acknowledging that significant losses had occurred.

But what was their purpose in speaking out at last? Not the viability of the ABC, it would appear. They misrepresented the decline as having occurred only in ABC services outside the major capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne, and attempted to detract from serious funding problems being the real cause of reduction in the quality and level of ABC services across Australia. Instead, speaking in the context of a motion moved by their colleague, Russell Broadbent, the Member for McMillan in Victoria, they proposed the ABC's Charter be revised to emphasise regional needs.

Changing the Charter will not help, when the ABC simply does not have adequate money to provide the level of service required by country or city people. Regional broadcasting services rely heavily on support and back-up from other parts of the ABC and will flourish only by maintaining the ABC as a whole.

The present ABC Charter has served the Australian community well. It has been broad enough to encompass the wide diversity of Australian culture and interests. The ABC's popular youth radio station, Triple J, was created without any specific mention of youth in the Charter. It was under this charter that the ABC services to regional and rural Australia flourished. That is, until government funding was cut and the ABC forced to rationalise.

In debate on this matter, one of the Government's own members, Mr Eoin Cameron, The Honourable Member for Stirling in WA, in fact defeated his own argument about the need to change the Charter, when he acknowledged that, without there being a specific obligation in the Charter to cater for country people, "...the ABC is fully conversant with and provides for the needs of rural and regional Australia".

This recent Government action is even more cynical than an attempt to deflect attention away from the real cause of the loss of ABC programming and services. Under the guise of concern for country Australians, the Government is seeking support to interfere with the Charter which governs the operations of the ABC.

The Australian public will not trust a Government, betraying its pre-election committment to maintain ABC funding, and exposed as wanting to control the ABC, to meddle with the Charter of an institution essential to our democracy."

(Dr) June Factor, FABC National Spokesperson