Ita Buttrose: ABC is too ‘east-coast centric’

ABC chair Ita Buttrose had admitted the public broadcaster is ‘too east-coast centric’ and she has spoken to management many times about addressing the problem.

ABC chair Ita Buttrose speaking at the ABC Friends WA annual general meeting on Sunday.

ABC chair Ita Buttrose has admitted the public broadcaster is “too east coast-centric” and she says she has repeatedly raised her concerns with management about the ongoing problem.

In an extraordinary public concession, the 79-year-old blamed budget cuts and the “tyranny of distance” for the lack of programming produced in locations outside the eastern seaboard, which has left states such as Western Australia largely under-represented on the national broadcaster’s various platforms.

Addressing an ABC Friends WA meeting via Zoom on Sunday evening, Ms Buttrose was asked by one attendee why “all of the ABC programs apart from local ABC and 7pm news are very east coast-centric and most of the guests are from up and down the east coast states”.

“We have an advisory council with representatives from WA on it and I have said to them, ‘please, send us some ideas, what do you think we should be doing, where are the stories, give us some more ideas so we are open’,” she said.

“I would like to see us return to WA more than we are, we do have news programs coming out of WA.

“It’s the tyranny of distance to some extent but I think it’s also budget cuts that have restricted the ABC in WA, these restrictions were in place long before I came into the chairmanship but I am pressuring management to look.”

Ms Buttrose said she had been discussing the issue with management for some time and had also spoken to WA-based ABC board member Mario D’Orazio about it.

The chair’s public concession about the national broadcaster’s failings in Western Australia will reinforce a widely held view that too many programs on the ABC are geared towards inner-city dwellers, predominantly in Sydney and Melbourne, and too little content is aimed at a broader national audience.

Ms Buttrose also criticised the federal government over a “new funding formula” she claims has been foisted upon the national broadcaster in recent months.

She said the ABC had been left “in an unusual situation” over the new funding arrangements.

“It’s what we are stuck with, and the government is the government,” she said. “This year we’ve been told that there’s a new funding formula, and it’s no good us going outside whatever that formula is going to be.

“And you know what, we haven’t heard back from them so we don’t have the formula yet.”

The ABC is under a triennial funding arrangement — the existing triennium began on July 1, 2019 and ends on June 30, 2022.

Despite this set arrangement, which last year saw the ABC enjoy $1.065bn in taxpayer funding, Ms Buttrose said: “In a sense you’ve almost got to be grateful for what you do get, it’s better than what you don’t get.”

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher would not comment on the matter.

Ms Buttrose said the board would continue to support the ABC’s role to provide a “safe space to reflect upon issues that matter to Australians, whatever they may be”.

“From dying with dignity to gender fluidity to the status of women to Indigenous reconciliation,” she said.

“The ABC is making a great effort to reflect the diverse Australia it represents. People have remarked to me that the ABC and its presenters are looking and sounding more diverse, and I think we are all the better for it.”