Katharine Murphy, deputy political editor
theguardian.com, Thursday 30 January 2014
Growing signs that Abbott government will strip the ABC of international broadcasting as a concession to conservative critics
Julie Bishop argues the Australia Network is not serving Australia’s regional interests. Photograph: Stefan Postles/AAP
Another signal has emerged that the Abbott government intends to strip the ABC of its international broadcasting service – the Australia Network – in a significant concession to Rupert Murdoch and to conservative commentators critical of public broadcasting.
The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, has been preparing the public ground since opposition for the ABC to lose its Australia Network regional broadcasting service, which it was awarded by the previous Labor government after a bitterly contested process.
In January Bishop criticised the quality of the programming on the Australia Network, and argued it was not serving Australia’s regional interests as “a tool of public diplomacy”.
The Australian newspaper reported on Thursday that the service was likely to be scrapped in the May budget as a savings measure. The commission of audit established by the government will also run the ruler over other ABC services.
The Sky News network lost out to the ABC in the Australia Network tender process carried out under the previous Labor government. The multimillion-dollar tender was botched due to sharp divisions within Labor over whether the ABC or Sky should emerge with the regional service.
Sky, a broadcaster part owned by BSkyB – a British company controlled by 21st Century Fox, which is a sister company to Murdoch’s Australian publishing arm, News Corp – has made no secret of its fury about that process, and has lobbied the Coalition to have the ABC’s contract dumped.
In its aborted media reform package in early 2013, Labor did manage to legislate a provision where only the ABC or its associated companies could provide “commonwealth funded international broadcasting services”. It was a means of trying to lock in the ABC’s position regarding the Australian Network after any change of government.
The reform suggests the Coalition would need further legislation if it wanted not to bank the saving, but clear the field for a commercial broadcaster. Whether the ABC would need to be compensated for the dumped contract is unclear.
The acting opposition leader, Tanya Plibersek, said she did not watch a lot of the Australia Network because she lived in Australia, but believed the channel was providing “a very valuable service” in projecting Australian values to the region.
She said the government was "proposing to cut almost a quarter of a billion dollars" through the axing of the Australia Network contract, despite signalling before the election that it would not reduce funding to the ABC.
Asked whether the Australia Network should reflect support for Australia to achieve the aim of soft diplomacy, Plibersek said freedom of speech was a worthy value to promote.
“I'm very happy for the world to see that in Australia you can stand up, you can criticise the government, the government can respond and everybody goes home that night safe and sound,” she said.
The Greens leader, Christine Milne, said the Australia Network did an "outstanding job" and it would be "a very bad mistake" for Abbott to abandon the service.
In addition to bruised feelings over the Australia Network process, the Murdoch-owned News Corp is also campaigning to have the ABC pushed out of digital news services. The ABC’s online content is offered free to readers and viewers, and News Corp is one of several publishers arguing the national broadcaster’s ongoing digital expansion threatens their business.
News Corp faces further commercial pressure in 2014. The tabloids will face competition in Australia for the first time in many years with the entry of the British-owned Daily Mail – one of the most successful digital news sites in the world.
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, launched a strong public criticism of the ABC on Wednesday during a radio appearance on 2GB in Sydney.
Abbott took issue with the ABC's reporting of claims by asylum seekers of mistreatment at the hands of the Australian navy. The prime minister suggested the national broadcaster needed to be more patriotic, and should be inclined to give the navy the benefit of the doubt.
The ABC has taken steps to check the accuracy of the claims made by the asylum seekers, and an email from an ABC researcher made its way into the public domain indicating that some editorial executives doubted the allegations were accurate.
This email has given impetus to the broadcaster’s critics who contend the story should not have been broadcast. A spokeswoman for the national broadcaster said: “In a climate where official information about asylum seeker operations is scarce and hard to come by, the ABC makes no apologies for seeking as much information as it can from as many sources as it can to either verify or disprove the allegations at the centre of the story.”
Abbott also reaffirmed his concerns about the ABC's collaboration with Guardian Australia on the story that revealed Australian spy agencies’ past efforts to target the phones of the Indonesian president, his wife and inner circle. Those disclosures were based on documents provided by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
Abbott’s intervention was amplified in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper on Thursday with strong page one treatment.
The paper quoted Abbott’s key business adviser, and former ABC chairman Maurice Newman as saying: “In relation to the navy, [the ABC has] given credence to the idea that the navy may well have tortured people … 99% of Australians would think that's highly unlikely. I think [the allegations] are inimical to Australia's best interests.
“It casts doubt on Australia's reputation and I think it's regrettable.”
The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, however, launched a defence of the ABC. He told Fairfax Media that politicians may have issues with ABC content, but could not tell media outlets what to write.
“What's the alternative … the editor-in-chief [of the ABC] becomes the prime minister?” Turnbull said. “Politicians, whether prime ministers or communications ministers, will often be unhappy with the ABC … but you can't tell them what to write.'”
- with Daniel Hurst
