Off the Charter
The last proposed inquiry into the ABC was rejected in 2013. With its audience dwindling, a proper inquiry is now long overdue, says Nick Cater.
Malcolm Turnbull rejected a proposed inquiry into the ABC in 2013. With the network's audience dwindling, the inquiry is now long overdue.
The Friends of the ABC were out at selected polling booths last month, peeping from beneath unfeasibly large sun-hats, toggles drawn close to their chins, handing out bits of paper drawn from hessian bags bearing the words “I said no to plastic”.
In a gesture of scrupulous impartiality, they endorsed both Labor and the Greens while urging voters to avoid any party backed by Rupert Murdoch and his subservient acolytes. “A Health Warning,” ABC Friends tweeted on April 29. “Do not read the Nick Cater article in today’s Australian. Total anti-ABC tripe from the Murdoch Mafia.
The ABC is losing friends at a rapid rate, and not just readers of The Australian. The audience for the ABC’s evening news and 7.30 has halved in Sydney and Brisbane in the past 10 years.
The fall is far from uniform, however, and provides evidence of its bias. Taking the last Thursday in May as a benchmark, the audience in Melbourne fell by a modest 16 per cent on the equivalent day in 2009. In Adelaide, where the popularity of the Holden Commodore betrays a soft spot for doomed, subsidised products, the ABC News audience fell by just 8 per cent.
As a result, the ABC’s dwindling metropolitan audience is increasingly concentrated in the two least conservative cities. Ten years ago, 38 per cent of the ABC’s 7pm news audience lived in Melbourne and Adelaide, a figure roughly proportionate to the general population. Today 48 per cent of the ABC news metropolitan audience lives there.
In last month’s election, 54 per cent of votes in metropolitan Melbourne went to Labor or the Greens. In Adelaide it was 53 per cent. In Sydney and Brisbane, where the ABC is least popular, the Labor/Green vote was 45 per cent and 47 per cent respectively. Coincidence? Probably not.
One can forgive the occasional election night indiscretions of ABC presenters who use the personal pronoun “we” when referring to Labor. For most of the time, however, ABC staff and their friends are united by what they are against, rather than what they’re for.
In his recent book The Noble Liar, former BBC journalist Robin Aitken examines why BBC presenters are so troubled by people such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban, or indeed Peter Dutton, who would no doubt be included in the ranks of dangerous far-right lunatics if the BBC had ever heard of him. Aitken asks why the BBC is so hostile to social conservatism, a way of thinking shared by tens of millions of Britons that encourages self-restraint and patriotism. “In the BBC,” writes Aitken, “we are all liberals now.”
When Tony Abbott was elected in 2013, there were calls for an inquiry into public broadcasting as a prelude to rewriting the ABC’s charter. A fresh discussion about the ABC’s purpose was long overdue. The last examination had been commissioned by the Fraser government in 1979, and was headed by Alex Dix. It found the ABC had become slow-moving, overgrown, complacent and uncertain of the direction it was heading despite the efforts of many talented and dedicated people who worked for it.
The charter was revised in 1983 with a recommendation that the ABC should aim to be at the forefront of technology. This clause has been used to justify many of the ABC’s least helpful experiments, such as its multiple television channels, each of them poor in its own particular way. It has justified the ABC’s push into online journalism and, worse, online comment. And it is the excuse for the ABC’s embarrassing ventures into social media and lifestyle programming.
The technological changes since the Dix inquiry are so considerable that they demand the question of why we need an ABC at all. The current charter was written for the analog age when Australians had to choose between five TV channels at best, the internet did not exist for all intents and purposes, and telephones were attached to the wall.
Today the choice is almost limitless and most of it can be watched on a mobile phone if we want to, as one in four Australians did when surveyed in 2017, and more undoubtedly do now.
Malcolm Turnbull rejected a major inquiry as communications minister in 2013 in favour of a light touch with the feather duster.
The short inquiry into the efficiency and operations of the ABC and SBS specifically excluded resource allocation and programming.
Turnbull’s criticisms of the ABC were muted. “I think it’s like the curate’s egg, Tony,” he said to Tony Jones during one of his frequent appearances on Q&A. “I think it’s good in parts.”
Six years on, the case for an inquiry on the scale of Dix is undeniable. Far from riding the wave of technology, the ABC threatens to be overwhelmed by it. Its business model is in trouble.
The game changer is streamed video on demand, services such Netflix, Stan and Amazon that started to arrive in Australia during the Coalition’s first term. This has accelerated the drift away from broadcast television.
A report by Screen Australia found the proportion of Australians watching broadcast TV declined from 87 per cent to 84 per cent from 2014 to 2017. The use of SVOD, on the other hand, almost doubled from 37 per cent to 68 per cent in the same period and has continued to grow. Netflix’s success is driven by its investment in high-quality content that the BBC is struggling to match.
Former BBC editorial director Roger Mosey wrote in April of “an end-of-an-era” feel at his old employer. The defining moment was when Netflix commissioned The Crown. “At that point, the BBC could no longer say it was the place for the very best high-end British drama,” a former colleague told him.
If the BBC is in trouble, we might well ask how the ABC is expected to compete against the likes of Netflix, which will spend about 20 times the ABC’s annual budget on new content this year.
How will the ABC fill the dead air as it is priced out of the market? There are only so many editions of Antiques Roadshow one can take.