We are told by Paul Fletcher staff that he is a stickler for figures but...

NO ONE IS LAUGHING, like in the days of The Fax of Life, a play that tanked — "something of a nightmare" for a small crew of fresh-faced uni graduates (of which Paul was one)... One does not know how a budding actor becomes a bullshit artist for the Liberal Party, but this is what Paul Fletcher says in his humour laced report on the ABC funding: Yet, 

There has not been a cut to the ABC’s funding
Some ABC journalists and Labor politicians argue there has been a “cut” to the ABC’s funding. They

cite the outdated May 2018 budget papers. Here’s what that budget paper says4:

In order to ensure the ABC continues to find back-office efficiencies the Government will pause indexation of the ABC’s operational funding. This will result in savings to the Budget of $83.7 million over three years from 2019-20 to 2021-22.

To cite this as evidence of a “cut” in the current triennium is wrong. 

FUCK!... THIS IS A CUT OF FUNDING!... BULLSHIT FROM FLETCHER! And this has been going on since Tony Abbott promised not to cut the funding to the ABC and straight away cut it... This is why the ABC has had to sack more than 400 staff over the budget of the Liberal Government (that is hell-bent in destroying the ABC) and recently as much as an extra 87 senior people got the boot... Please don't talk shit, Paul, even if you say it with a dash of humour...

"Back-office efficiencies" at the ABC have already killed many jobs to the bone... and the ABC is now ill-funded to the heart... Fletcher's argument is complete crap...

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by Quentin Dempster

Empty chairs at empty tables …where my friends will sing no more. (Les Miserables - the musical).

The departure of many of the ABC’s most experienced journalists, producers and presenters has immiserated the public broadcaster.

Eighty-six have gone or are going from newsrooms and current affairs programs in the latest round of budget cuts. They are among up to 250 staff made redundant as part of an ABC Board five-year restructure said to continue the ABC’s transformation to a digital content creator and distributor.

Many of the departed are in late career and are taking personal financial advantage of industry-standard redundancy packages based on years of service plus accumulated long service leave. But many also are in early or mid-career and, given the vaporisation of media jobs through both digital disruption and the COVID-19 pandemic, inevitably, will be lost to journalism and content creation forever.

This is the reality of the Liberal budget "increase" (cuts) to the ABC...:

https://www.abcalumni.net/news-and-views/killing-the-abc-in-a-time-of-emergency

If Fletcher were smart, he would give the ABC far more money so it could compete much better on creating local original content... That would be a better way to control the "Big Techs"... but it looks that Paul is still living in the days of his absurd days on stage...

The national broadcaster is again calling on the federal government to extend special funds for journalism or risk putting more jobs on the chopping block.

ABC managing director David Anderson has raised concerns state border closures could hurt the broadcaster’s ability to move staff around to cover extreme weather over summer.

At a Senate estimates hearing on Wednesday, Mr Anderson answered questions over whether the ABC’s funding was increasing or decreasing.

He said the broadcaster’s current $43.7 million enhanced news-gathering services funds would expire in the 2022/23 financial year.

The money was spread over three years and supports 74 jobs.

The broadcaster first received the package in 2013 and it has been extended each time it’s due to end.

Mr Anderson said that without knowing in advance, it was hard for the ABC to plan.

“The funding has enabled us to deliver more tailored and local news to communities and to bring news from across the country to a national audience,” he said.

“Prior to the expiry of the initiative we will continue to make the case for this funding to be permanently incorporated into the ABC’s operating funding base.”

The ABC has felt the impact of an indexation freeze on its funding, which results in its budget increasing but not in line with how much it would have if indexation continued.

“They (funds) are not increasing to the tune in which our costs would be increasing, hence we’ve had to find ongoing savings,” Mr Anderson said.

The broadcaster planned for 250 job losses this year because of the funding cut, but Mr Anderson said instead 229 people have been made redundant.

He thanked his team for shifting focus this year to boost the ABC’s bushfire and coronavirus coverage.

“But this doesn’t mean we can always please everyone,” Mr Anderson said.

“Our critics relentlessly try to make us part of a cultural debate most Australians do not find relevant or helpful. The ABC is bigger than this debate.”

-AAP

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/10/21/abc-facing-cash-crisis-warns-more-jobs-will-go/

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The minister for communications Paul Fletcher has asked ABC chair Ita Buttrose if the Four Corners program which alleged inappropriate conduct by two ministers met the standards of accurate and impartial journalism.

In a lengthy letter Fletcher posed 15 detailed questions and asked the board to explain why a “consensual relationship” between a politician and a staff member which took place before the so-called bonk ban was imposed in 2018 was considered newsworthy in the Four Corners program Inside the Canberra Bubble.

In 2018 the then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull made sexual relationships between ministers and their staff a breach of the ministerial code.

Fletcher made the letter public by posting it on Twitter, but avoided receiving responses by disabling replies to the tweet.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/dec/01/communications-minister-paul-fletcher-complains-to-abc-about-four-corners-program

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See also:

BY Quentin Dempster

The Coalition has a demonstrated pattern of dishonouring election promises to the national broadcaster.

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher is trying to pull what amounts to a confidence trick on the Australian electorate over ABC funding.

By rolling three years of projected transmission and operational funding plus tied grants for regional news gathering into one impressive figure the minister’s announcement of an end to an indexation ‘pause’ was claimed to have finally addressed complaints that the ABC was being punitively defunded by the Coalition government.

“The evidence is clear: the Morrison government has provided strong and consistent support to the ABC,” Fletcher wrote in an article published in The Australian.

But the trick was soon exposed on social media by former ABC editorial standards director Alan Sunderland with a pocket money parable, by The Conversation’s Alexandra Wake of Journalism, RMIT University and Michael Ward of the University of Sydney. Crikey’s Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer, and The New Daily’s finance commentator Michael Pascoe likewise concluded that the minister’s announcement was pre-election spin. The addition to the ABC’s budget, they point out, is trivial. 

Significantly, neither of the ABC’s mainstream media rivals, News Corp and Nine Entertainment, applied the necessary analytical rigour to test the minister’s “evidence”. The operative words in the confidence trick are “the Morrison government”: they cover only the period from Morrison’s Liberal party room elevation from treasurer to prime minister in August 2018.  

All the analysts and commentators I have mentioned looked at the history of ABC funding since Tony Abbott’s hand-on-heart promise in the 2013 election campaign: ”no cuts to the ABC or SBS”.

The Abbott government’s first budget delivered by treasurer Joe Hockey in 2014 reduced the ABC’s three-year appropriation effectively by 10 per cent.   

If you want the Australian National Audit Office figures go to the ABC’s formal answer to Budget Estimates (Environment and Communications) Question on Notice Number 100: “Funding reductions by government, including the return of capital, since 2014 have totalled $526m up to 2021-22, with the ongoing reduction to the indexed funding base in 2021-22 being $106 million per annum”. 

So that is $106 million per annum: gone. 

As a consequence of the 2014 Hockey defunding the ABC Board had to restructure and downsize the organisation, shedding staff, dumping programs, production, acquisitions and services.  

In 2014 then foreign minister Julie Bishop unilaterally terminated the ABC’s 10-year Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade contract after just one year, worth just short of $200m over the remaining nine years, decimating the ABC’s multilingual broadcasting and online services in the Asia-Pacific region, and giving China a free go to win the hearts and minds of our neighbours. 

In 2018 the Turnbull government with treasurer Scott Morrison imposed what then communications minister Mitch Fifield described as an indexation “pause” for the next three years, said to be an incentive on the ABC to drive further “efficiencies”.

The pause, according to Budget Estimates, cost the ABC $83.749m from 2019 to 2022. The “efficiencies” were further reduction of programs, supply contracts and services. Australians might remember the institutional 7.45am 15-minute radio news bulletin introduced by the full Majestic fanfare was discontinued as part of the ABC board’s response. There were more repeats of British drama shows on prime time, and all TV production outside Sydney and Melbourne was terminated. Another 200 mostly experienced program-makers received long white termination envelopes. 

The ABC told Budget Estimates in answer to Question 100: “In addition to the cumulative reduction over the Triennium to 2021-22 of $83.7 million, the ongoing impact from mid-2022 is a reduction to the indexed funding base of $41.3 million per annum.  While indexation to base funding is forecast to return from 2022-23, there will be an ongoing impact on funding in the forward years from the indexation pause.”  Please note this, because herein lies the confidence trick. Ending Fifield’s indexation “pause” will apply from an already lowered base. 

Wake and Ward (The Conversation): “While ending the freeze means future ABC funding will take some account of inflation, it does not address the impact of the freeze itself from 2019. The ABC has said this is a problem. In answer to a Senate Estimates question in October 2021, the broadcaster said this would result in a funding shortfall of just over $40 million annually, which would continue to be felt in future years.

“Our research also factors in the ABC’s loss of the 10-year Australia Network contract in 2014. This resulted in a reduction in funding of $186 million, which is represented across the balance of the contract term. 

“Certainly, the ABC does continue to do some international broadcasting, particularly in the Pacific, but it is no longer the dominant broadcaster in the region it once was. Restoring and even boosting the funding that was given to the Australia Network would go some way to improving Australia’s standing in the Indo-Pacific region.

“We found the total lost funding continues to accumulate at well over $100 million annually through 2024-25. In other words, if the government truly wanted to restore the ABC’s funding, it would need to increase its budget by at least 10% annually.”

Since the 2018 boilover (in which then ABC MD Michelle Guthrie was terminated by her dissatisfied board, and days later chairman Justin Milne was forced to resign), new Chair Ita Buttrose and new MD David Anderson had been asking for future funding certainty following the Morrison government’s re-election. 

Perhaps this best explains Buttrose’s relieved response to Fletcher’s announcement: “I am delighted with the Government’s decision to commit $3.3 billion over the next three years to the ABC”.

Up until that announcement Buttrose and her board had no idea of future funding beyond June 30 this year.

Buttrose and Fletcher have had a hostile relationship. In December 2020 the minister wrote a threatening letter clearly implying she and her Board had breached the ABC Act in allowing the broadcast of the Four Corners program “Inside The Canberra Bubble”. The program and other consequent ABC coverage of ‘the Porter affair’ provoked Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger to denounce Buttrose, claiming she had lost control of the ABC and demanding her resignation. The ABC, claimed Kroger, was “throwing acid in the face of the Liberal Party”. 

Buttrose stood her ground and hit back last November with probably the strongest statement yet delivered by an ABC chair, that the ABC was being subjected to intimidation and interference over its complaints-handling process.

Buttrose, her board and management are now waiting to see Fletcher’s “announceable” committed to tabulation in Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s federal budget on March 29. 

Australians are entitled to be deeply sceptical about all this. The Coalition now has a demonstrated pattern of dishonouring election promises. John Howard in 1996 promised to maintain ABC funding, then immediately dishonoured that commitment on coming to government. Likewise, Abbott in 2013. 

Sorry to be cynical, but given this pattern it can be expected that the Coalition’s current commitment will dematerialise if it is re-elected in 2022 and, under cover of a whole-of-government deficit reduction strategy by Cabinet’s Expenditure Review Committee, the ABC appropriation will be further cut.

That is the real politic here.

We can all expect hostilities to resume if the Coalition is re-elected.

Portentously Minister Fletcher has issued a “Statement of Expectations” to accompany his future funding promise. He plans to set up a new “National Broadcasting Reporting Framework” to be overseen by the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority. All content providers, including streaming services, national, commercial and subscription broadcasters will be required to report exactly on the content they produce by genre category. Unlike the commercial TV networks, Nine, Seven and Ten, the global video streamers have no legislated and mandated content quotas. Neither does the ABC.  

Content quotas would remove the current independent discretion of the ABC to allocate resources as the board sees fit in meeting its ABC Act obligation to provide comprehensive services to the public. 

Fletcher wrote: “I have asked the ABC to include in its future annual reports a range of metrics regarding its delivery of rural and regional activities, including the number of ABC staff employed in rural and regional Australia”.  On its face this seems reasonable, but will be resisted by the ABC if it leads to legislated quotas on the ABC and any government-directed deployment of staff.

The ABC could be further wedged and weakened through Fletcher’s “Statement of Expectations” particularly as the trickle of extra money will not cover ever increasing production costs in the years ahead.  

The Albanese Labor Party and shadow minister Michelle Rowland have publicly committed to restoration of the indexation pause money and five years of budgeted funding certainty but with only a promise of a review of ABC funding to meet future content needs.  

This is hardly adequate given the destructive defunding of the ABC over the past nine years. The ALP has been more prominent in its support for the ABC since the 2019 election and recently has been calling on the public for donations based on this ABC support.  

After the 2019-20 climate change bushfires and the Covid pandemic elevated the public’s reliance on and regard for the ABC, the ABC’s survival is now clearly a major election issue.

And as the 2022 election campaign unfolds into an intense battle for marginal seats Australians are entitled to ask all candidates if they support the full restoration and enhancement of funding for our most trusted institution. 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/dont-be-relieved-by-that-abc-funding-promise-its-not-what-it-seems/

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