Malcolm Turnbull wears the blame for Mark Scott’s cuts

ABC managing director Mark Scott is linking the cuts required by the Coalition to a management restructure he always planned to institute, in order to push the blame for the changes on to the government rather than himself.

Yes, Tony Abbott broke his pre-election promise not to cut the ABC; his denials are ridiculous. And Malcolm Turnbull is being too clever by half trying to suggest that what the Prime Minister said on the eve of the election doesn’t count.

But it is Scott who is using the forced cuts to justify front-of-house job losses and program changes that he wants. That’s his right, he is the managing director after all. But he should own the decisions and not try to sheet blame on to the government.

Turnbull is right when he says a 5 per cent cut in funding over five years should be able to be absorbed by the ABC without impacting on programs. It is a bloated organisation capable of better efficiencies. It is, after all, part of the public service.

But Scott wants to be a media mogul rather than the manager of a public broadcaster, and it is in that image that he is seeking to make the ABC. Cut the less sexy regional operations, as well as state editions of 7.30. Shove Lateline, a program Scott has never much liked, across to ABC News 24 to kill it softly by starving it of resources. Doing this frees up money in a tighter financial environment for larger audience shows such as the national edition of 7.30which moves into Fridays, or some version of infotainment late at night on the main channel to replace Lateline further down the track.

Instead of continuing to provide regional areas with programming that commercial operators can’t turn a buck broadcasting, or some state-based sports that don’t rate all that well, Scott wants to play the mogul and knock out the commercial viability of online news by flooding the market with more and more free digital ABC content. We don’t need that as a ­nation nearly as much as rural and regional communities need local news, yet Scott is cutting this important ABC product.

Not that Scott is under fire. He has neatly left the government to bleed for his programming decisions because of its funding limitations.

What motivates Scott? The ABC — and by extension Scott — is a bigger fish in the small Australian pond if he searches for larger audiences in the fancy online world, or the burgeoning field of infotainment TV. But the great thing about the ABC has ­always been that it doesn’t need to chase ratings or adhere to commercial viability principles. As a public broadcaster it isn’t ­accountable to a profit-and-loss statement, only the need to live within its budget. Scott long wanted to reshape the ABC into a model of a quasi-commercial operator, and he got his chance to achieve that, all the while blaming the government for the changes. Yes, the government broke the PM’s pledge not to cut the ABC’s budget, but Scott is responsible for the way the cuts have been carried out: to satisfy his desire to compete with Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes. That certainly isn’t in the ABC charter or Scott’s job ­description.