The Minister for Communications, Richard Alston, has made a spirited attack on the board of the ABC, asserting that its budgeting is remiss and its programming inappropriate. He said, “”If you are going to run a corporation with a budget in excess of half a billion dollars you need to have quality people with proven commercial and business expertise and this board simply doesn’t have that. . . .It’s all very well to win award, but if no-one is watching then you’ve got to ask yourself, “should we be producing these programs.”
It seems that Mr Alston completely misunderstands the role of the ABC. Since television began in Australia, and before that, with radio, it has been recognised that broadcasting has a special role requiring special government involvement. As time goes on the need for that involvement increases. It is not merely a question of allocating frequencies. It is a question of ensuring that radio and television services in Australia present a proper range of programming. That means covering the nation geographically, culturally and intellectually. This cannot or will not be done by the commercial operators alone. The nature of broadcasting is such that commercial broadcasters will always go for the mass market; sometimes that may be satisfactory, but not always. There is only a finite amount of air time and broadcasting overhead costs are fairly constant. It means the main commercial networks will seek to maximise their audience share so they can charge more money per minute for the finite broadcast time.
If the whole spectrum were surrendered to commercial licensees mass taste would be catered for several times over and minority taste would be ignored. A market the size of Australia would not generate the income to support the overheads to make minority-taste broadcasting economic. Moreover, given that overseas programs can usually be bought more cheaply than producing Australian ones, a purely commercial market would result in less Australian production.
It means broadcasters must be regulated if local production, children’s, educational or less popular cultural programs are to get a reasonable run. It is in the public and national interest for these sorts of programs to run. The most effective way is to have a public broadcaster and to force through regulation or self-regulation a code on the commercial broadcasters to satisfy broad programming criteria.
Senator Alston is correct in asserting that the ABC board must supervise operations in such a way that the organisation meets its budget, but that does not mean it must run like a business corporation. Businesses are there to make profit; the ABC is there to perform a statutory role given by the Australian Parliament.
Senator Alston is wrong to assert that the ABC should chase ratings. If it did that it would be doing no greater function than can be done by commercial broadcasters. It would be denying its own raison d’etre. He is wrong to assert that ratings should be part of the ABC’s efficiency benchmarks.
Rather the ABC should be an innovator, leader and experimenter, in addition to providing a comprehensive news and current-affairs coverage. It has already had a profound influence on Australian commercial television, forcing them to lift their current-affairs profiles and to venture more often away from the former strict diet of American sit-coms.
The other public broadcaster, SBS, has also played an important cultural role that transcends the chasing of ratings and the almighty dollar.