Malcolm Turnbull has a cold. Sipping on herbal tea in his Parliament House office, the communications minister is congested and cranky – a far cry from his ebullient performances on Q&A and question time. It’s no wonder.
Turnbull is about to attack publicly conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, who used his column that morning to accuse Turnbull of destabilising the government by dining with Clive Palmer.
But first, he has the ABC and SBS in his sights.
Rather than complain about $43.5 million worth of funding cuts over four years, Turnbull says the public broadcasters should be relieved they weren’t hit harder in the May budget. And they should prepare for deeper cuts.
''Haven't they read Mr Hockey's speech?” Turnbull told Fairfax Media. “The age of entitlement is over.”
Turnbull’s tough talk has been rammed home this week by a torrent of leaks from a confidential efficiency study into the ABC and SBS.
Since he announced the study in late January, Turnbull has stressed its aim was to find “back office” savings – not to affect programming. That’s true, but it also undersells the significance of the 146-page review.
Taken together, the study’s proposals add up to a dramatic blueprint for change. If implemented in full, Australia would have two smaller, more centralised, more commercialised public broadcasters.
One of the most controversial ideas put forward in the review, led by former Seven West Media chief financial officer Peter Lewis, is selling off the ABC’s television studios. This includes the new studios at Southbank. In February Premier Denis Napthine launched construction of the $176 million project that will see television production move from the famed Elsternwick studios in Gordon Street. There is “significant scope” for savings, the review finds, by making more use of external facilities (except for news and current affairs programs).
If the idea was adopted, insiders say it would mean an effective end to in-house television production. The ABC still makes some programs internally – including Play School, At the Movies and First Tuesday Book Club – but it has not made an in-house comedy or drama for years.
“To destroy what is left of the ABC's in-house production capacity is yet more vandalism,” says ABC presenter and former staff-elected board member Quentin Dempster. “You cannot truly have creative independence if you don't have a capacity to make programs yourself.”
Those who have worked in the ABC’s studios describe them as the best in the country. The ABC leases out its studios to commercial networks and films some outsourced programs on site using ABC production staff and facilities.
Turnbull said this week the broadcaster could use external facilities and equipment while retaining creative control over its programs.
The review also proposes selling off SBS’ headquarters in Sydney and Melbourne and moving the multicultural broadcaster in with the ABC.
Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, whose government created SBS four decades ago, says this would be the first step towards the abolition of SBS. "If SBS has to move in with the ABC then the ABC will swamp it."
Some of the study’s proposals have implications that stretch beyond the ABC and SBS. These include allowing SBS to air more advertisements during its programs – an idea Lewis admits would peeve the commercial television networks, which are competing fiercely for revenue.
So would abandoning digital radio, one of the study’s more surprising proposals. If the ABC and SBS ditch digital radio, Australia risks becoming a radio “backwater”, Commercial Radio Australia chief executive Joan Warner says. More than 1.4 million digital radios have been sold in Australia and 1.6 million people listen to digital radio each week.
“Digital radio is galloping ahead globally – it would be a very backward step to not expand digital radio in this country,” Warner says. “For Australia to become a backwater of analog would not be in the best interests of listeners or the industry.’’
Some who have been involved in the review process at a high level are scathing of it, describing many of its proposals as under cooked and short sighted.
“The review secretariat did not have resources to do the job,” a senior SBS insider said. “It was about looking at numbers on a piece of paper.”
The key question, of course, is which ideas are taken up and which are rejected. ABC managing director Mark Scott is already putting the finishing touches on his own secret overhaul of the ABC, code-named Project 21, which will involve a reshaping of the broadcaster’s internal structures.
In an email to staff this week, Scott stressed that the Lewis review findings were not prescriptive. The government cannot order the ABC or SBS to spend or save money in any particular area.
But it can – and will – slash funding. Unlike many of his colleagues, who openly loathe the ABC, Turnbull is a defender of public broadcasting. But, having helped restructure the Ten Network as a broadcast lawyer in the 1990s, he believes parts of the organisation are wasteful and outdated. Turnbull insists he has done the ABC and SBS a favour by handing them a suite of ready-to-adopt savings measures, rather than hitting them with huge upfront cuts.
Unconfirmed leaks from the government this week put the expected cuts at $40 to $50 million a year – a 4 per cent cut to the ABC’s budget.
It’s easy to forget it was less than a year ago that Tony Abbott gave his famous election eve interview on SBS television, promising "no cuts to the ABC or SBS”.
