Plan widens ABC’s perspective

Like most media organisations, the ABC is making changes to live within its budget. Taxpayers provide the public broadcaster with a generous $1bn in funding a year. How it is spent is up to the corporation’s executives and producers. What the public expects, as chairwoman Ita Buttrose wrote in the ABC’s annual report last year, is “an independent, accessible public broadcasting service that produces quality drama, comedy and specialist content, entertaining and educational children’s programming, stories of local lives and issues, and news and current affairs coverage that holds power to account and contributes to a healthy democratic process”.

Organisational change is usually difficult. But managing director David Anderson’s 50-page, five-year strategic plan is designed to shift the ABC’s compass in a way that will address some of its problems. Sydney is not Australia and Ultimo, the inner-city suburb where the ABC is headquartered, is not Sydney, as Communications Minister Paul Fletcher says. The initiative to make the corporation less Sydney-centric by basing 75 per cent of its journalists, producers and editors outside Ultimo by 2025, compared with 64 per cent now, is worthwhile. Replacing people who leave Ultimo in the next few years with staff at locations such as Parramatta, interstate capital cities or regional areas will broaden the perspectives of programmers, news coverage and commentary. Over time, regional news and current affairs programs scrapped in recent years should be restored.

The decision to scrap the ABC Life division makes sense. In allocating resources, the move accords with the corporation’s charter to consider services already provided by commercial and community broadcasters. The focus of ABC Life — food, wellbeing, work, money, travel, style, sex and relationships, home and garden, and family — saturates an already crowded market catered to by commercial entities in digital, broadcast and print media. Redirecting resources from ABC Life should allow content makers to venture into high-quality programming not provided elsewhere.

Beyond examining the broad direction of the plan and whether it serves taxpayers’ interests, decisions about which 250 staff are to be made redundant and which programs will be cut or scaled back are matters for Mr Anderson and his management team, including editors. Because the ABC is taxpayer-funded, the public interest and balance should be at the centre of such decisions. As Scott Morrison says, the ABC remains the safest place for journalists to work because its revenue is guaranteed by government.

The release of Mr Anderson’s plan coincides with publication of the efficiency review into the ABC and SBS conducted by former Foxtel boss Peter Tonagh and former media regulator Richard Bean. At least one of the recommendations in that review — closer co-operation between the two public broadcasters to share support, back office, property services and broadcast facilities — would be worth both broadcasters exploring.

Amid the digital revolution, Mr Anderson is correct when he says ABC audiences want “to watch, read and listen to the ABC when and where it suits them’’. In making the plan work, the broadcaster must get on with the job of improving the quality and balance of what it offers audiences. It will be judged on that content.