ABC’s regional cuts ‘political payback’

ABC management should be ashamed of themselves for their decision to cut back on regional broadcasting services – a decision that can only been seen as political payback.The Federal Government’s efficiency dividend could easily have been extracted out of the ABC’s bloated Sydney bureau and studios, which, at last count, is home to more than half the ABC’s employees nationwide.The decision to cut back on regional services makes the national broadcaster much less “Our ABC” and much, much more “Sydney’s ABC”.Why didn’t ABC managing director Mark Scott find savings by dropping at least some of the hundreds of websites that the ABC owns and operates?Why does the ABC even have an online presence? It is not as if we can’t get our news for free from a vast array of other sites. There is no void out there. It is just spending taxpayer dollars to compete with what the private sector is already doing.Why do we need ABC2, which repeats programs that rated so poorly on ABC1 the first time?Why not save money by axing Double J radio – the station set up for people who listened to Triple J 20 years ago? Presumably, it plays the same crap music that is just as unfit for commercial radio today as it was 20 years ago.Why do we have money being funnelled into a news breakfast show when commercial networks are doing it to death? Is a taxpayer-funded 24-hour news channel really necessary when the minority of those who watch it can subscribe to Sky News?All of these things are outside the core function of the ABC. The ABC exists to provide news, information, and cultural content to communities where commercial broadcasters fail to do so – whether it is the national community, a state community, or our local community.In regional communities, there is much less provision of local news, information and local cultural content than is available in capital citiesThat is why the decision to take the axe to regional broadcasting, rather than get rid of the extraneous rubbish that the ABC is engaged in is beyond the pale. In fact, it is worse: Scott has actually flagged that he is going to increase the ABC’s online services, to the detriment of regional broadcasting.It is either insane or, as I suspect, politically motivated. ABC management knows that most regional electorates are Liberal/National electorates and I believe he is inflicting vengeance on the government for seeking the same efficiency dividend that has been sought of other government-funded organisations.[pullquote align="left or right"]That’s playing a very dangerous game. [/pullquote]There is a growing armada of Liberal National backbenchers who want the Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Communications Minister Malcom Turnbull to go further than asking for an efficiency dividend and either privatise or commercialise the ABC.For my part, I don’t understand why we cannot tender out the ABC’s broadcasting services to the best bidder, just as we did with the Australia Network.Such a tender would come with set criteria of what we expect to be provided. Under this arrangement, the ABC would remain a public broadcaster; we could ensure the provision of regional services, and at the same time save a lot of taxpayer dollars.Heaven knows if we had an ABC that felt it had to compete with the commercials, they might be more in tune with the average Australian, rather than the average Greens voter.Other MPs would prefer we just simply privatise the ABC altogether.Whatever the case, if ABC management is going after the regions as some sort of petty political payback then it is playing a very, very dangerous game.