ABC costs Aussies more than a Netflix subscription as lavish $1.1 billion dollar budget revealed
The ABC costs Aussies more than the price of a Netflix subscription. See where its $1.1 billion dollar budget has been spent, vote and have your say.
National
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The ABC costs each Australian household more than the price of a Netflix subscription but four in 10 Australians never watch, listen or read anything the broadcaster does.
New figures have revealed that the national broadcaster lost one million viewers or listeners in a year, with television and radio ratings plunging.
The ABC has also left a $100 million long-service leave time bomb on its books, as the management of its $1.1 billion budget is expected to come into sharp focus ahead of this year’s federal election.
The broadcaster is now under pressure to reveal the names of its 151 top staff who earn over $250,000 in the same way that the BBC has done since 2016 after the UK government demanded transparency as part of a funding deal.
The ABC has refused to reveal how much incoming boss Hugh Marks will be paid just weeks ahead of his start date, saying it would be listed in next year’s annual report.
His predecessor David Anderson pocketed $1.1 million last year.
Federal Labor’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has promised to increase the ABC’s funding by $40 million a year from 2026, and slated new laws that would lock in five year funding agreements to prevent “political interference”.
Those laws were unlikely to pass before the next federal election, widely tipped to fall in May, making the broadcaster’s future an election battleground.
The ABC’s chair Kim Williams has begged for more cash, even though the broadcaster fails to reach 10.6 million Australians.
“Target not met. Combined weekly reach shows the proportion of Australian adults that have accessed any ABC content each week. In 2023–24, just under two-thirds of Australians watched, listened to, or read ABC content in an average week (62%),” the ABC’s 2024 annual report states.
“When compared to the same metric last year, combined weekly reach declined from 66% in 2022–23. This decline is mainly driven by a drop in broadcast TV reach, and to a lesser extent, radio reach.”
That drop in audience reach equates to more than one million Australians who tuned out from the ABC in the 2024/25 financial year.
When asked about its failure to reach four in 10 Australians, the ABC responded saying: “No other Australian network produces, distributes or supports more Australian content, stories, news and information than the ABC.
“The latest ABC Corporate Tracker data shows the ABC is trusted by 81 per cent of Australians. This compares to 64 per cent for newspapers, 61 per cent for commercial radio, 58 per cent for commercial television and 26 per cent for Facebook.”
Former 7.30 NSW presenter Quentin Dempster said “the ABC’s original ideas for content to compete with the video streamers and audio apps requires significant reinvestment and is a challenge for incoming managing director Hugh Marks and the board.”
“To sustain its audience the ABC’s relying on repeats of popular acquisitions (e.g. Vera, Midsomer Murders), which can easily be persuaded to go elsewhere.
“There’s hardly a village in all of merry England which doesn’t have a gruesome murder every week.
“Audiences are tiring of it for sure but for the ABC to fix this problem it will require money and very creative thinking.”
Mr Dempster said the ABC also needed to “lift its game” in news and current affairs reporting and “should also bring back Lateline”.
An insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the ABC needed a shake up to produce shows that mainstream audiences would watch.
“There’s just a layer of cardigan wearing, middle aged, white male middle managers; they have to go. It’s that or they just walk away from drama,” an insider said.
An investigation, based on freedom of information requests and interviews with five current and former ABC insiders, has raised questions about wasteful spending, including staff being paid for “transgender leave” which is now part of the ABC’s employment agreement.
The ABC has confirmed it paid thousands to put up Bruce McAvaney in Paris while he was covering the Olympics on radio after he was snubbed by Nine, the official TV broadcaster.
But it refused to detail his broadcaster fees, while it did confirm it spent more than $150,000 on travel and accommodation for journalists to broadcast the games.
And the ABC shelled out $10,712 paying for journalism award entries, including 57 entries for the Walkley Awards and 35 entries for the NSW Kennedy Awards in 2024.
The lavish spending in some areas has infuriated insiders, particularly the recent coverage of the United States election, which sent a conga line of hosts to Washington including Michael Rowland and David Speers while local staff struggled to cover the Queensland election.
The ABC refused to say how much it has spent so far fighting former broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf over her sacking following social media comments about the Gaza war.
The ABC responded to more 8394 content complaints in the 2024 financial year, of which more than half were related to coverage of the Israel/Gaza conflict.
The ABC once boasted that it only cost taxpayers 8 cents each a day, and it has consistently complained of budget cuts.
But its $1.1 billion taxpayer funded budget costs Australia’s 11.5 million households $105 each year. In comparison a budget Netflix subscription costs just $96 per year.
The ABC’s top heavy city staffing levels have also been questioned, with six times as many “content makers” working in metropolitan offices compared with regional or rural bureaus in 2024.
The ABC’s chair Kim Williams, who replaced Ita Buttrose, blamed Federal Government funding cuts for declines at the ABC, acknowledging that regional broadcasting was faltering.
“Even the scope of the ABC’s superb regional media offerings … are not what they once were,” he said in a National Press Club speech in November.
Mr Williams also said that the ABC needed to lift its standards in drama.
“How many times have you sat watching a brilliant overseas-produced drama or documentary series on Netflix or Binge or Disney+ and found yourself thinking: Why aren’t we doing this?,” he said.
ABC WASTE REVEALED
$818,164 – The ABC spent big on consultants to redesign the graphics used on its TV programs and a rebrand of its website in August 2024. “Third party design firms” were paid $682,762, graphic artists pocketed $65,533, the new branding cost $37,290 and there was $32,579 spent on travel costs for “training and system implementation”. Of the changes, one of the biggest was simply returning to use the traditional ABC news theme that had been on air between 1986 and 2005.
Bruce McAvaney said “I feel like I’ve been given a gift” when he was spruiking his ABC radio gig at the Olympics last year. The veteran Seven caller was snubbed by official TV broadcaster Nine, but the ABC came to the party, paying him a secret appearance fee and picking up his $4750 Paris hotel bill and his $532.85 Uber ride costs.
$165,000 per head – the ABC spent $39 million moving 236 staff to new offices at Parramatta, which opened in May 2024. The shift west was an admirable bid to get more reporters in Sydney’s west. But the bill came in at $165,000 per staff member, with $23 million spent on technology, $12 million on the fit-out and more than $3.5 million on staff consultants. However, at the same time as the Parramatta build was happening, the ABC spent $27 million for a new fit-out at its Ultimo headquarters in the heart of Sydney.
$21.41 million – The ABC spent $12.52 million on advertising, $1.39m on promotions and $7.5 million on audience research in 2023/24 despite audiences falling. In June 2024, the ABC spent $2.44 million on advertising.
$670,000 – The ABC poured in $165,000 a year between 2020 and 2023 to its Fact Check program in partnership with RMIT University in Melbourne. However, the unit was criticised as a “waste” after it let its International Fact-Checking certification lapse. The program was shut down in June 2024 after 11 years.
$150,000 – The ABC sent 37 journalists to the Garma Festival in 2023, the year of the Voice referendum. The total costs of flights, accommodation and car hire to cover the event in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory was $150,000 a Senate hearing was told.
$10,792 – The ABC forked out $6,950.03 for 35 entries into the NSW Kennedy Awards. It also paid for Walkley Awards entries at the cost of $3762.
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