Jobs to go as ABC strives for relevance, diversity

Job cuts at the ABC are inevitable, as managing director David Anderson leads a review of the broadcaster’s operations.

ABC managing director David Anderson in his Sydney office. Picture: Nikki Short

Job cuts at the ABC are inevitable, as managing director David Anderson leads an extensive review of the public broadcaster’s operations with a five-year blueprint to be delivered in March.

Amid criticism of left-wing bias, selective coverage and a broadcaster failing to represent mainstream views, Mr Anderson is looking to extend the television and radio broadcaster’s focus beyond the inner cities to suburban and rural Australia.

READ MORE: ABC boss shifts focus out of inner city

Faced with a budget hole of $84m after the federal govern­ment froze its $1bn annual funding for three years, Mr Anderson and his senior management team must decide which areas, including ABC Life, could be downsized or cut.

“Ultimately, we want to be more relevant to more communities, so we’re exploring that in order to reflect the diversity of the country and reflect the country back to itself,” Mr Anderson said.

“We think we might be able to improve in being able to be more relevant to more communities, and that may mean having a presence in outer suburban areas that’s greater than the one we have now.

“Anything we do is seen through the prism of the fact that we are effectively going to have to operate for less money into the ­future.

“I think we’re facing an ABC of the future that has less people.

“What we’re exploring is how we might be able to have a presence in Sydney that sits outside of Ultimo but we’re looking at other cities as well.”

The ABC had centralised a lot of its activity in recent years, aimed at finding efficiencies, he said. The ABC’s 2019 annual report revealed last week that most of its near 3280 workforce is based in NSW. The ABC had 1696 staff in NSW, followed by 495 in Victoria and 333 in Queensland. It had 17 staff abroad.

Mr Anderson recently told staff the ABC needed to find ongoing savings of more than $40m annually from the 2022 financial year. “To date, we have found ongoing savings that will total around $17m a year from 2021-22. It’s good progress, but more needs to be done,” he said in an email.

Mr Anderson said the savings had been achieved through re­negotiating third-party contracts, and “curtailing travel not related to content production … From here, we’re looking at both efficiencies as well as prioritising our output — I haven’t put a number on staff … affected by that.”

He will give an update in March.

“In the media environment we’re in, with the financial constraints we have in real funding terms, you have a choice to make … and we choose quality over quantity.”

Over time, the ABC would produce less, he said.

Mr Anderson, who came up through the ABC ranks over the past 30 years, said “strategy sessions” would be held towards the end of the year, ahead of the release of the five-year blueprint.

The 49-year-old started working on the five-year blueprint “just simply as a foundation to get things going” when he took the reins from Michelle Guthrie in September last year after the board fired her. He was formally ­appointed to the role by the ABC board on May 3.

The Public Sector Union on Sunday released a report finding the ABC’s underpayment of up to 2500 staff breached its enterprise agreement and the Fair Work Act. The report, obtained by The Australian, found the ABC had 10 “significant” opportunities to review casual employee payments over the past six years, including during enterprise bargaining back in 2016.

It comes days after the ABC’s annual report revealed the public broadcaster had set aside $22.98m for historical salary, wages and superannuation entitlements for casuals, and 10 months after the underpayments of the casual staff across six years were revealed.

Mr Anderson played down the public spat between News Breakfast co-host Michael Rowland and The Australian’s Chris Mitchell after the newspaper’s columnist accused the broadcaster of not having enough political voices.

He also questioned Rowland’s plans to broadcast from Wollongong to see “how good the coffee in Wollongong is”.

Rowland hit back on Twitter last week, saying it was a “shame” Mitchell didn’t watch the breakfast program to hear the views of the people of Wollongong and he was “sure more ­people in the Gong watch and listen to the ABC than read the shitty rag he writes for. The coffee’s great, BTW”.

“I think there were probably cheap shots in both directions in that situation,” Mr Anderson said.

“I saw those comments in both directions as being lighthearted.”