Australia’s publc broadcaster
Why do we go on subsidizing the Murdoch media?
Australians spend about $4.7 billion a year subsidizing commercial media. By comparison the ABC costs about $1.1 billion.
Those figures are a response to a News Corporation claim that taxpayers are forced to spend their taxes subsidising the ABC even though few people watch it.
ABC Chair Kim Williams rebuts the claim that the ABC is some niche outfit reaching only a small percentage of the population: ABC Chair Kim Williams responds to News Corp claims of budget wastage.
John Hewson too responds to the claim, defending the ABC in a Saturday Paper article Why the ABC matters. He explains why we should take this assault seriously:
The thrust of this Murdoch position is to commercialise the ABC – either having the broadcaster compete for advertising revenue in a dwindling market or be fully privatised. The danger is the current Coalition – which Murdoch outlets are so strongly supporting – will take this as instruction from the associated publications and ranting commentators.
Hewson also addresses the claim that the ABC has a left-wing bias. As a former politician – he was leader of the federal Liberal Party in opposition – Hewson has had a great deal of experience with the ABC. A left bias is an age-old complaint. He has not experienced such a bias: rather he finds that the broadcaster has stick to its charter, seeking “balance and truth”. He goes on to note:
The staff is made up of a diversity of views, which is both important and valuable – unlike Murdoch’s employees, who are obviously employed only on the understanding that they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.
To come back to those estimates of who pays for what. We know what and how we pay for the ABC: it’s all published in budget papers. It’s a bit harder to find what we spend on commercial media, but one of the advertising industry’s trade journals reports that out of around $25 billion of advertising spending this year, $3.48 billion will be spent on TV advertising and $1.24 billion on radio advertising. That total, $4.7 billion, is in line with rough estimates in other sources.
While the ABC’s $1.1 billion is collected by the Australian Taxation Office, through a mildly progressive taxation system, that $4.7 billion is collected essentially as a sales tax in private markets. Unless we choose to lead the life of a Trappist monk, or retreat to a self-sufficient rural commune, we can’t avoid paying this sales tax.
Those who never watch or listen to commercial media pay this tax, ungrudgingly and generously. That is part of the social contract that advocates for right-wing media choose not to understand: I pay for some things you enjoy that I don’t, while you pay for some things I enjoy that you don’t. For those who tune into commercial media that’s a pretty good bargain, because for every dollar collected to spend on the ABC, four dollars are spent to support commercial media.
Turnbull calls out the ABC for its pusillanimous self-censorship
Malcolm Turnbull has not hesitated to call out Donald Trump’s behaviour. He has publicly referred to Trump as “chaotic, rude, abrasive and erratic”, to which Trump has called Turnbull “weak and ineffective”.
Turnbull has raised difficult questions about our relationship with the US – questions our government did not want raised while there was still a faint hope that Australia may be exempted from steel and aluminium tariffs.
He knows that AUKUS and the whole US alliance are on shaky ground. (If you’re in doubt, listen to Hugh White on Global Roaming last week: Is Trump’s America still our friend?)
As a retired prime minister, who still commands respect among voters, Turnbull is in an ideal position to raise hard questions that elected politicians are too timid to handle. He accused our politicians of “bipartisan gaslighting” in their sycophantic approach to Trump. Not that he’s confining his criticism to Australian politicians: he’s observing a worldwide phenomenon.
He is also concerned that the ABC has been too timid in its reluctance to call out Trump’s behaviour, a point he stressed in an interview on 730 on Monday night, and again on Radio National Breakfast on Tuesday morning.
Turnbull, who has experience in dealing with Trump, noted that our government made the best attempt to get a carve-out for Australia that any country can make, but he was sure that our request will be knocked back. The attempt was futile: they may as well not have bothered sending a delegation to Washington, but for domestic political reasons they had to. “Albanese is being set up to fail” he said, because Dutton was ready to argue that a Coalition government would get a carve-out. As Dutton wants us to know, he and his cronies are much more skilled in trade negotiations, and they have an easy rapport with Trump. (The latter part of that belief may actually be true, but the first part is bullshit.)
Turnbull’s reading of the situation was right. Dutton, rather than supporting our government in a difficult relationship with the USA, made the idiotic claim that he could secure a deal with Trump – a claim widely rebutted across the political spectrum. Our diplomats have enough trouble in dealing with Trump without the added burden of Dutton undermining their efforts, for partisan political reasons.
Turnbull has done our government a service. As a recently-serving Liberal prime minister he has left Dutton looking isolated from the remaining grown-ups in the party, and he has encouraged the government to take a more assertive line towards Trump. It needed a push. He knew that whatever any government could do, there wasn’t going to be a concession. It was better for our government to make that point before the inevitable knockback than as some ex-post explanation.
Yet ABC interviewers – Sarah Ferguson on Monday, and Sally Sara on Tuesday – asked Turnbull if this was the right time for Turnbull to be airing his comments about Trump: Ferguson’s questions could have been scripted in Dutton’s office.
The next day when Sally Sara asked Turnbull if this was “a wise week to be making these comments”, Turnbull replied:
Is this where we’ve got. Has the ABC become so pusillanimous that you’re seriously suggesting that we shouldn’t be free to speak the truth in Australia? For fear of Donald Trump? Is that the depth you’ve sunk to?
He could have worded that last sentence more carefully, to refer to “the ABC” rather than to “you”, because it is unlikely that Sara has much agency in this matter.
The ABC seems to have pre-election jitters, and is reverting to the moral relativism of dealing with every issue in a “balanced” way. Radio National’s political reporter Melissa Clarke is now going out of her way to frame every issue in such a way that tends to accuse Labor and the Coalition of the same offences: if Dutton is travelling to a fund-raiser while his electorate floods, there has to be mention of some misconduct of Albanese’s to balance the story, for instance.
It is understandable that the ABC is nervous: there is a risk that Dutton will become prime minister, and the Coalition has form in its hostile relationship with our national broadcaster. In 2018 the Liberal Party’s Federal Council voted, without a single dissenting voice, to privatize the ABC. Wiser heads in the Coalition government resisted the move, but seven years later the Liberal Party has moved much further to the authoritarian right.
As Turnbull reminds us about Trump, grovelling to bullies provides no protection from their wrath. The ABC cannot protect itself from a Dutton government by reverting to the moral relativism of “balance”.
Let’s not forget about other media
As Cyclone Alfred approached Brisbane last week, many people turned to Facebook for information on its likely path and for advice on evacuations. They didn’t find it but they didn’t think of looking up the ABC website.
That reminds us how social media, designed initially as a means for people to connect to friends and colleagues, has become the go-to for all news, even though they don’t afford social media a high level of trust.
The same source that reveals Australians are spending $4.8 billion a year on advertising in traditional broadcast media, reveals that spending on internet advertising is growing at 5 percent a year, and is now around $18 billion a year.
The ABC’s Jason Whittaker quotes a warning from Washington-based Kara Swisher, who appeared on the Q+A program, that Elon Musk is the new Rupert Murdoch, and a threat to Australia.
In last week’s roundup, where I covered the emerging Australia-US tariff war, I threw in the standard economists’ comment that it would be unwise for Australia to retaliate. A reader, well aware of that traditional argument, reminded me that I needed to update my thinking about trade (it’s no longer just about physical stuff), and put me on to an article by Cory Doctrow: Trumpism is our oil crisis.
Doctrow agrees with the traditional economic argument: “Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn’t a plan, it’s a disaster”, he writes.
But we can respond to Trump’s protectionism:
There’s a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.
He reminds readers how much foreigners are paying the tech giants, a large share of which goes to support the oligarchy that has put Trump and his cronies in power. The rip-off is categorically different from the usual case of monopoly power granted through protection of intellectual property. We are now living in an age of technofeudalism, which calls for new measures. Concerted state action to break these companies’ market power can be a win-win for foreigners and Americans (other than a handful of billionaires):
It’s time for a global race to the top — for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech’s margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world — it’ll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border.