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ABC annual public meeting: Guthrie, Milne take ‘hard questions’

It now costs Australians 4c a day in 1987 terms - when it was famously 8c - due to funding declines, the ABC reveals.

Stephen Brook
6 min read
10:44AMFebruary 09, 2018.
Updated 1:42PMFebruary 09, 2018
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ABC chairman Justin Milne and managing director Michelle Guthrie at the event with the new slogan. Picture: John Feder
ABC chairman Justin Milne and managing director Michelle Guthrie at the event with the new slogan. Picture: John Feder

The ABC costs Australians just four cents a day in real terms due to funding declines since the 1980s, the corporation revealed today as it launched a major new marketing campaign and released strategy documents to herald a new era of openness.

Despite receiving $1 billion in annual public funding, the national broadcaster’s budget declined 28 per cent in real terms over three decades.

“Back in 1987, your ABC famously cost each Australian eight cents a day. In 1987 dollar terms we now cost each Australian just four cents a day. In other words, our per-capita funding has halved in real terms,” Louise Higgins, ABC chief financial officer, told the first ABC annual public meeting.

The ABC served a population one-third the size of Britain but had only one-eighth of the budget of Britain’s public service broadcaster the BBC.

The ABC annual public meeting revealed a major new brand strategy, centred around a slogan “Yours” accompanied by a new advertising campaign.

The TV advertisement launching on Monday features Justine Clark hosting a tea party for Play School characters as well as other ABC stars Annabel Crabb and Costa Georgiadis accompanied by a modern reworking of the Dusty Springfield hit I Only Want to Be With You.

In the spirit of its new era of accountablility, Ms Higgins said the ABC would release its internal strategy document Investing in Audiences for the public to read (link: pdf).

The meeting took questions from the public, whittled down from 350 submitted, that covered percieved bias and “dumbing down”, trust, advertising of ABC products, programming and Radio National.

Read some of the questions and answers in our earlier report below.

ABC faces ‘hard questions’

Welcome to the first ABC Annual Public Meeting, a sort of AGM for Aunty’s viewers and listeners.

This morning chairman Justin Milne, ­managing director Michelle ­Guthrie and finance chief Louise Higgins take the stage inside the ABC’s ­Ultimo headquarters in Sydney for an event unprecedented in the national broadcaster’s 85-year ­history.

Milne is sitting next to Guthrie on the far right of the stage, with Higgins on the far right in front of giant screens showing Australiana.

Also on stage are staff board member Matt Peacock as well as board members Peter Lewis, Kirstin Ferguson, Georgie Somerset and Vanessa Guthrie.

There’s a giant logo in the background: Yours Now & Into The Future.

ABC breakfast host Michael Rowland is the MC and is setting the scene, promising live crosses to Launceston and Rockhampton, where similar events are being held.

He reveals he was the third choice for the role: B1 and B2 knocked it back. Noting that sitting behind him are the ABC chairman, managing director, board members, the head of news and the leadership team, he quips: “If anyone is feeling bad or under pressure this morning, just spare a thought for me.”

The ABC has gone to some trouble with this event. Each member of the public who applied to attend was asked to submit a question, all of which were collated by an independent research company. Rowland will invite audience members to put their questions to the top brass in the style of the ABC’s Monday staple Q & A.

“People can eyeball each other. Hard questions can be asked. ­People have to be accountable,” Milne said in spruiking the event on ABC radio.

Justin Milne is now addressing the audience.

Justine Milne on the live feed of the ABC Annual Public Meeting in Sydney.
Justine Milne on the live feed of the ABC Annual Public Meeting in Sydney.

Michelle Guthrie is now giving her address.

Michelle Guthrie addresses the public meeting.
Michelle Guthrie addresses the public meeting.

Finance chief Louise Higgins is now reporting. She says the ABC serves an audience one-third the size of the UK but with one-eighth the funding of the BBC.

She says that by the end of this year the ABC’s savings over the past five years will be $324 million; it’s given 78 per cent back to the government and the rest has gone into programming.

Lousie Higgins. Picture: John Feder
Lousie Higgins. Picture: John Feder

Here’s the link to that Investing with Audiences document (pdf)

The meeting has now been thrown open to questions. MC Michael Rowland says they received 350 questions and with the help of an independent research company they were grouped into themes. “The questions are the result of that independent process; if you submitted a question that did not relate to one of those themes an answer will posted on our website,” he says.

Milne: “We’ve got a range of questions and some of them are hard ones.”

The first comes from NSW: Why must we be bombarded with contant commercials for ABC products? Specific reference is made to the ABC Listen app.

Guthrie replies: I get this question quite a bit... but I also get the reverse - why didn’t you tell me this was on or that you’ve launched this product?

She says the ABC has lots of great services and “it’s really important that we tell people about them”. The ABC Listen app is not intended as a replacement, but is “simply a way of freeing up the schedule”. “If I can’t listen to Fran in the morning but I can later in the day it’s a way of staying connected to the great programs and services that we have.”

Gaven Morris is asked whether the ABC has adopted a policy of dumbing-down for viewers and listeners, with reference to the cutting of The World Today and Lateline. “Let me seek to assure to all audience members the last thing we seek to do is dumb down,” he says.

Editorial director Alan Sunderland is thrown a question that states there’s a strong perception that the ABC is anti-Liberal/National party and “acts more like the opposition than a neutral broadcaster”. “Many people are of the same opinion as me and what are you going to do about it?” the questioner writes.

“Thanks for the hospital handpass,” Sunderland says to Milne, before going on to answer that “this is something that has been a perennial issue for us to confront, as it is the case for many broadcasters around the world”.

“I’m not here to say to anybody listening here today that ‘you’re wrong’ or to convince you otherwise,” he says.”The only thing that’s going to convince peopl that we are impartial and accurate is the quality of our work.”

Sunderland says there is a detailed and clear set of editorial standards and his unit trained 600 program makers last year and aims to train 700 this year. The broadcaster has committed to reviewing the quality of its work every time there is a federal or state election.

When people contact the ABC and say “you’re biased”, he says, “we will say to them: please give us an example, please tell us about that piece of content, what concerns you... and we will review it independently and seek advice and form a view. “I’m satisfied with how often our content comes up trumps,” he says, while acknowledging that “we will make mistakes” and what matters is that “we listen, engage and learn from that, it’s an ongoing process”.

“I work for for a propd organisation that asks difficult questions, holds governments to account and speaks up for people who don’t have a voice - that will sit uncomfortably with a great many people a lot of the time.

“The challenge for us is to understand when that criticism is unjustified and to hold that ground - we owe that to you - but also to be listening carefully enough to understand when we do get it wrong and to learn from that, and that’s the commitment we have.”

Michelle Guthrie with the backdrop. Picture: AAP
Michelle Guthrie with the backdrop. Picture: AAP

Justin Milne takes a “trust” question from a woman whose concern is that with “staff cutbacks and reduced resources” proper fact checking might not be done.

Milne replies: “Trust is non-negotiable, it’s what we do.” He says that being the “most respected media organisation in Australia is fundamental and vital for us” and everybody in the ABC believes that. He says they’re all driven by being trusted, by telling the truth, by trying to find that balanced line down the middle.

He says ABC’s “ed pols” - editorial policies - are like two or three phone books of guidelines and every journalist is “trained to within an inch of their life”. The organisation “never, ever stops trying to do the right thing” and while “we’re not perfect... all organisations have an error rate of some description” they spend heaps of energy on trying to get it right and inform Australians.

“We don’t have revenue... our continued existence depends entirely on our shareholders - Australians - thinking we’re worthwhile. So maintaining your trust is a fundamental thing for us.”

And the meeting wraps up with the announcement of the ABC’s “new brand manifesto”:

Milne says “it may be a simple word but it packs a punch.”

Here’s a link to all today’s speeches and documents on the ABC website

The Australian

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/broadcast/abc-annual-public-meeting-guthrie-milne-to-take-hard-questions/news-story/ceec8c5520355a988c6c9dfdb91a381b