ABC chair Kim Williams says Radio National needs to take urgent action to address falling ratings

Kim Williams said urgent action must be taken to try and revive Radio National listeners, after voicing his concern over its declining audiences.

The ABC’s flagship political station, Radio National, needs to ­urgently repair its diminishing audiences by reshaping its objective, according to the public broadcaster’s chairman.

Kim Williams, who began his five-year tenure as chairman in March, made his sharp criticisms of the station during an interview with Patricia Karvelas, host of the channel’s breakfast program, on Friday.

“I would like to see larger ­audiences for Radio National. I would like to see Radio National lift its ambitions in terms of its role in Australia,” Mr Williams said during the interview.

“The closest comparative service to Radio National is Radio 4 at the BBC.

“Radio 4 has an astonishingly strong reach, it reaches almost 20 per cent of the British community every week which is really dramatic when you think about the variety and vast flotilla of services that exist in Britain. Radio 4 cuts through.

“We have a much smaller and more modest reach at Radio ­National, but our audience has declined and we need to address that.”

Karvelas agreed that the station’s audience had declined.

The latest ratings data by GfK show that over the past four years, the RN Breakfast audience in the five major metropolitan cities has fallen by 15.4 per cent.

In 2021 when Fran Kelly was host, it had 318,000 listeners across the five major cities. This fell to 269,000 in survey three this year with Karvelas as host.

Mr Williams said RN needed to “rebuild” in order to lure listeners back. “Through rebuilding one needs to examine purpose and performance in ways that stimulate and entice and really get a sense of community adherence,” he said.

The ABC board last year told the ABC’s senior management that immediate action must be taken to address its declining radio audiences after it was presented with an internal report into issues at the network.

Despite this, in the latest survey for the period February 25 to March 30 and April 14 to May 18, ABC Melbourne recorded its lowest ever audience share since the existing survey system began more than a decade ago, while ABC Sydney managed to regain audiences after suffering falls over the past 18 months.