Steve Price: It will take more than a tokenistic move to save ABC

Australia’s national broadcaster has become a bloated, unfunny, staff hijacked mouthpiece for the green left and politically correct.

It will take more than moving offices to save the ABC, writes Steve Price.

In the same week national broadcaster the ABC aired a hatchet job aimed at Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the current affairs show 4 Corners, staff were told it was time to connect with average Australians.

This ambitious move by the taxpayer-funded media outlet will not involve more balanced programming on their radio and TV assets, but a location shift.

It’s easy to make jokes about ABC staff being shifted out of their inner-city boltholes at Southbank in Melbourne and Ultimo in Sydney, but imagine the conversations around the vegan-only sandwich press.

In Sydney, 300 staff will relocate west to Parramatta. The rough equivalent in Melbourne would be sending ABC 774 to studios in Frankston.

Incredibly, this tokenistic shift has been described by managing director David Anderson as helping staff connect with communities in the demographic heart of Sydney.

He says it will help the ABC become more relevant in western Sydney.

Not only is he out of touch with geography – Parramatta is no longer as it once was the centre of Sydney. That’s now probably a few dozen more kilometres to the west. This attempt to be more relevant started last June and is part of five-year plan.

But putting 300 staff on the moving list only highlights how overstaffed the ABC has become.

Given they produce less and less local content you would wonder what those 300 people do now and how many will be left behind at the expensive inner-city location they are leaving.

Australia’s national broadcaster has become a bloated, unfunny, staff hijacked mouthpiece for the green left and politically correct.

Seriously, this bloke Anderson seems to think you better understand an audience you don’t have by ordering your almond milk latte from a cafe in Parramatta instead of Ultimo.

Sadly, the ABC chair – don’t dare use the label chairman – Ita Buttrose, who presumably understood her market when she was running the Women’s Weekly and Cleo and sitting on the couch at Network Ten’s Studio Ten, seems no better.

Ita chimed in when the move was announced that perhaps Ultimo was “a bit remote from the rest of the community.”

Can someone please explain to Ita that it’s not about where you make TV and radio, it’s about the people making it for you.

Take for example the success of radio broadcasters like Alan Jones, Ray Hadley or Neil Mitchell.

The first two have spent most of their broadcasting careers at either St Leonards on Sydney’s lower north shore or at Pyrmont next door to the ABC’s suburb of choice Ultimo.

They are hardly working class suburbs, but the on-air staff connect with their audience because they listen to them and present content they relate to.

ABC managing director David Anderson and Chair Ita Buttrose after announcing ABC HQ will move from Ultimo. Picture: Ryan Osland

Mitchell has been on air in three locations — Latrobe St in Melbourne’s CBD, Bank St in South Melbourne and now in Collins St back in the city.

You’d have to say those three – Hadley in particular — have a pretty good grasp of genuine average Australians.

For Buttrose and Anderson to believe the ABC is suddenly going to be more representative and accessible to average Australians by shifting 23km to the west is laughable.

Ms Buttrose further stretched belief by claiming the move was not politically motivated. “It’s not designed to appease any Government, it’s a move that David Anderson and I and the board decided is in the best interests of the ABC,” she said.

Pull the other one Ita — it plays the ABC News theme. Does anyone seriously believe the major players, the faces you see on the TV and voices you hear on the radio, will be part of this revolutionary move?

I doubt they even have a building in Parramatta yet, and they’ve admitted they will have to build TV and Radio studios — a project that will take years.

Connecting with your broader audience isn’t about where you’re broadcasting from, it’s about having program makers – TV and radio – that understand who is watching and listening.

ABC shows like 4 Corners, the 7.30 Report, Insiders and Media Watch, talk to a rusted-on version of the people making and presenting them.

The national broadcaster aims itself at, and caters for, an inner city Green Left Labor audience obsessed with gender politics, climate change, feminist campaigns and it seems a hatred of any politician not of the Left.

It’s been pointed out time and time again that despite its charter demanding they be balanced, the ABC refuses to employ one conservative commentator on any of its main programs.

Its obsessive pursuit of Cardinal George Pell, the recent Craig McLachlan episode with witnesses being coached in their answers and last Monday night’s beat up about Scott Morrison and QAnon are just a few examples.

Using an hour of your flagship current affairs show to flail around trying to connect our Prime Minister with a lunatic fringe cult and failing was an embarrassment.

The program was nothing more than a tale about a seemingly dysfunctional family losing one of theirs to QAnon and getting them to be the bridge to Morrison.

Given the story was largely ignored by mainstream media the next day, that it died a 24-hour death and even ABC news services largely ignored it should tell you something.

That 700,000 Australians watched as the ABC gloated the next day tells me more about an appetite of Australians for information about the cult itself rather than any Morrison link.

Like SBS did, 4 Corners would have been better off running an imported special on QAnon itself.

Without being nostalgic, I hanker for the ABC days of Countdown with Molly, GTV before the 7pm news and state-based Today Tonight shows producing good local current affairs stories about places where we all live.

Just for fun I checked the 1991 TV schedule just out of interest to see what, back then, our eight cents a day bought us. Between 6 and 7pm we had The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Roger Ramjet and then a half-hour episode in black and white of I Love Lucy.

This led into your local state news and now even that’s gone off the main channel.

It’s going to take a lot more than a move across Sydney to fix what has sadly become their ABC.

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