Senior journalists at the ABC were called into a meeting with management on Monday afternoon and told a quarter of them would lose their jobs under the federal government's $254 million funding cut.

And hours after Prime Minister Tony Abbott denied breaking a promise to strip funs from the broadcaster, a Coalition senator has conceded Mr Abbott did in fact pledge not to cut funding.

In the Sydney newsroom, six of the 24 senior journalists face redundancy and two of the six junior reporters may also lose their jobs.

Staff members were in shock, with one saying: "It's like Survivor. Who's going to be voted off the island?"

Journalists were given a sheet of paper with a list of skills benchmarks and told if they were unable to meet them they would face losing their jobs before Christmas.

The new benchmarks focused on the ability to report stories across multiple platforms including mobile and online.

The news came as a blow to newsroom staff who thought the job losses would mainly affect management and backroom operations.

ABC managing director Mark Scott faced robust questioning from 7.30 host Leigh Sales, whose own program will not be spared from the cuts.

She asked her boss why the state-based edition of the 7.30 was being axed when online opinion site The Drum would continue despite a plethora of similar sites on offer.

Mr Scott told her cost was a factor in the decision but said savings were not the only driver in choosing which programs are axed and which would stay. 

"It's a balancing act," he said. "There's no single formula you can apply."

He denied that the broadcaster's news and current affairs programs were being targeted, saying the majority of cuts were coming from administration and management.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/its-like-survivor-abc-staff-respond-to-cuts-20141124-11szw3.html

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Will Mark Scott take a 20 per cent pay cut? Would this government submit itself to "efficiency review" and sack itself considering the Abbott regime is completely incompetent, puerile, infantile, degrading, dangerously retrograde and idiotically ineffective?

From all the slimy muck that is creeping into so-called politics nowadays... God help us! 

(adapted by Gus from a Cecil J Sibbert quote)

My dad used to make us watch the ABC news every night. As a child, I hated it. It was always with a certain amount of resentment that I watched afternoon cartoons give way to the “youth programming” I could bear, if not understand. But the news was a step too far into a bleak space. Dad was stern on this point. “If you don’t watch the news, Van,” he’d admonish me, as I wriggled and whined, “you don’t know what’s going on”.

In the wake of the extraordinary cuts to the ABC and SBS this week, I can only imagine that the architects of this savage attack on our national broadcasters – the Coalition government, its supporters in the Murdoch press and the conservative “free market” think tanks – were told by their own ideological papas the exact same thing.

My dad plonked me in front of the unbiased, articulate and meticulous news reporting of the ABC because he was educating his daughter in how to be a good citizen. By closing ABC news outlets, firing journalists and nobbling independent journalism, the Coalition affirm not only their preference for corporate news but destroy alternatives to the corporate news worldview. Citizens “knowing what’s going on” in the era of climate change, expenses scandals and “on-water matters” is precisely what the Coalition are trying to head off.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/24/abc-cuts-had-abbott-been-honest-about-his-true-agenda-he-would-have-been-unelectable

Prime Minister Tony Abbott should not have promised in an interview the night before the last federal election that there would be "no cuts to the ABC or SBS", a Liberal MP says.

ABC managing director Mark Scott yesterday announced more than 400 job losses in response to a $254 million budget cut confirmed by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull last week.

Mr Scott said the corporation was committed to using back-office and overhead savings to fund the $207 million cut from the ABC's budget from July 2015, but said there would also need to be job losses, property sales and program changes and cancellations.

As part of the savings, the ABC will close five regional bureaux, reduce the size of its Newcastle office and axe Radio National's Bush Telegraph program.

The Liberal Member for Grey, Rowan Ramsey, criticised the closure of the Port Augusta office, saying the ABC should look for savings at its bigger sites.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-25/tony-abbott-probably-regrets-pre-election-abc-pledge-liberal-mp/5914988

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We can twist the Turdy events of what happened and are still happening and will happen, it is an UNDENIABLE fact that had Abbott not lied about the ABC, SBS, health and education — and the NDIS — and other issues (more than 50 policy lies) HE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN "ELECTABLE"... So he had to lie a million times and he deliberately did so, to fool us... Yes, we are morons...

And as far as regrets, Tony COULD NOT CARE LESS... though he might lip-sync a "sorry" to please the hordes of idiots who still believe he is honest. Tony Abbott has been dishonest, is dishonest and will be dishonest...

There were many highlights and memorable moments from last Friday night’s (21 November) IA function at the Summer Hill Hotel in Sydney ‒ the food, the drink, the feeling of warmth and camaraderie among 65 people, most of whom had never before met; Peter Wicks discussing his game-changing Jacksonville investigation and then Craig Thomson’s father Jack lauding him at the end of the night as a “secular saint”; Sydney bureau chief Ross Jones surprising the crowd by reading an extract from his almost completed book on Ashbygate, featuring the very hotel in which we were seated; a solemn moment as deputy editor Sandi Keane spoke about the rare and serious illness being battled by senior correspondent Barry Everingham; managing editor David Donovan previewing IA’s soon to be launched 2015 supporters' and members' subscriptions; entertainment editor John Turnbull exciting fans by giving away numerous prize packs, featuring new IA merchandise, books, prints, CDs, original art (and even a rice cooker donated by Indira Devi) ‒ but the undoubted highlight was the short speech by the peerless Bob Ellis, made towards the end of proceedings, which we reproduce here in full after repeated requests:

Here's to IA

In this, the worst of times in our country, when lying is a constant, and looting and cheating a kind of religious pursuit, and nothing we beseech of the heavens is delivered on any day, it is worth having, I think, as it was in the days of Samizdat in Czechoslovakia, and Private Eye in Macmillan’s England, an organ in which a writer, unprintable anywhere else, can point and mock and say his say, speak truth not just to power but those who, under the boot-heels of power, most need to hear the truth of their condition.

Independent Australia is one such organ, and numbered among the very few, and it is oxygen, and clarity, and champagne, and hope, audacious hope, to many who else might be slitting their wrists or out by night with a baseball proposing to injure Andrew Bolt.

It is a comfort, in a time of woe, and a weapon against a sea of troubles which one might seize, and know truly, and be thankful for.

Here’s to IA, and all who sneer and grumble and utter great epiphanous thoughts and all who speak truth in her.

Wassail. 

Thanks to everyone who attended this outstanding and enjoyable event. Thanks also to Sydney chief Ross Jones and the Summer Hill Hotel for their immaculate organisation and service. For people who missed out, IA is planning another similar function in Brisbane in February or March 2015, with other centres after that.

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/bob-ellis-at-summer-hill,7134