There is an untold story concerning Peppa Pig and Mark Scott, the ABC's managing director. Scott has three daughters but they are older than the target age group for the British-made children's cartoon that rates highly on ABC2. So when Scott wanted to understand the phenomenon last year, he turned to Twitter, as he so often does, to appeal for an explanation. Soon he received a reply tweet, complete with a video. It showed the sender's 20-month-old child using an iPhone to find Peppa.
There was a moral to this story, Scott concluded. If even toddlers were adapting to the possibilities of new technology and getting their entertainment on demand (Peppa Pig is the ABC's most viewed program on iView), millions of other Australians must be doing the same. They wouldn't be prepared to sit around and wait for programs to be delivered to boxes in their lounge rooms at a time of someone else's choosing. They would want them whenever – and on whatever platform – that suited them.
Any media outlet that failed to recognise this switch in audience power, Scott reasoned, would be doomed to irrelevance.
The tale of Peppa Pig continued on Wednesday when Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull invoked the cartoon as he announced that the government would be slashing $254 million from the ABC's budget and $53.7 million from SBS over the next five years. Reasoning that the public broadcasters could make the savings through back-of-house efficiencies, Turnbull argued the ABC would be "cowardly" if it resorted to axing Peppa – or any other program – to deal with the 4.6 per cent budget cut.
Although no one is seriously suggesting that Peppa will get the chop, many mere mortals at Aunty will not be so fortunate. On Monday, Scott will announce cuts to the service that the ABC provides in response to the shrinking envelope. At Senate estimates on Thursday evening, he said the number of redundancies would be "very significant".
The expected bloodletting has been nervously anticipated and widely reported: the loss of 400 to 500 jobs; foreign bureaus to be squeezed; state-run current affairs programs on Friday nights to be abolished; Lateline to drop its newsy focus to cope with a cut in its staff from 18 to 14 or 15; the end of program production in Adelaide, meaning all of the ABC's non-news and current affairs shows are made in Sydney or Melbourne – or more likely, outsourced.
Scott has already made, and will make more, back-office cuts. But he heartily denies Turnbull's claim that all the savings can be found out back. "There are content impacts of making efficiency decisions," he says. He also argues he has no option but to slice into traditional program budgets because he cannot afford to squib on investment in the ABC's future: the online and digital platforms to which the audience is rapidly drifting. In the past year, Bananas in Pyjamas attracted almost 3 million "likes" on Facebook.
There are some – such as News Corp Australia chief executive Julian Clarke – who say that the ABC should not be redirecting funds to the digital space, reasoning that it should focus on radio and TV and leave the online world to commercial ventures. The ABC in turn would argue that it cannot afford not to be in the digital space. And that its charter explicitly says it must provide "digital media services".
The 'efficiency review'
They say that if you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one and tell it often. In the case of the Abbott government, perhaps the maxim could be applied to breaking election promises. Within the space of 14 months, it has defied Tony Abbott's election eve blockbuster undertaking, in which he promised "no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST, and no cuts to the ABC or SBS".
In the May budget, more than $43 million was cut from public broadcasting and the ABC was stripped of its $223 million contract for the Australia Network international broadcasting service. But this week, Turnbull made sure the broken promise was an even bigger one. Critically, there is no extra funding for redundancies, which are expected to cost about $75 million.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has argued these are not cuts but "efficiency dividends" and Turnbull curiously tried to argue that Abbott's September 2013 comment had been taken out of context. But the Coalition will have to do more wiggling than that. As the ABC's Leigh Sales shot back at Turnbull on Wednesday, "when someone says 'no cuts', you think, 'no cuts'." It is telling that YouTube videos of Abbott pledging "no cuts to the ABC or SBS" (among all those other things) have been viewed more than 110,000 times.
The cuts to public broadcasting are "high stakes for the government", Sydney University emeritus professor Rodney Tiffen says. From parents who rely on the ABC's kids programs for a moment of peace, to teenagers who listen to Triple J and older Australians who stay connected to the community through Radio National, you would be hard-pressed to find a voter – or someone very close to them – who did not have a personal interest in the future of the ABC.
Indeed, the ABC's combined national weekly audience reach across television, radio and online was an estimated 71 per cent of the Australian population in 2014, according to its annual report. A 2013 Essential Media survey found the ABC was Australia's most trusted media outlet. SBS was the second most trusted, before a big dip to other outlets.
The official line from the government is that the ABC and SBS must take a hit – just like everything else – in order to wrangle the budget. In the context of its $5.2 billion budget allocation, South Australian frontbencher Jamie Briggs describes the cuts as a "small change". But ABC staff and supporters argue the broadcaster has already been cut back. "It's just a nice stereotype of the public service that there's all this fat and inefficiency," says Tiffen. "It's simply not true. The ABC has been subject to cutbacks since the 1970s." According to Queensland University of Technology journalism professor Brian McNair, the ABC costs just over one third of the BBC per head of population.
One missing piece of the puzzle is the full version of the ominously titled "efficiency review" ordered by Turnbull at the start of the year and headed up by Peter Lewis, formerly of Seven West Media. While the government is using this to justify its argument that programs do not need to be cut, Turnbull has said the full review can be released only with the ABC and SBS' permission, as they had shared information on the premise the report would remain confidential. Tiffen says this follows a long line of unreleased reports commissioned by governments on the ABC. If the Coalition was "really confident" about its ABC case, it would release the Lewis report, he says. "There's no justification at all for not making it public … let the public see the evidence."
The impact on programming
It has been suggested that the ABC is overreacting about what the cuts will mean. Briggs, for one, is "not at all worried" about how the issue will affect the community, adding, "this is a low priority for most Australians".But there are many MPs who are not so blase about the changes. One in particular is Education Minister Christopher Pyne, who holds the Adelaide seat of Sturt. In a move that has political insiders asking what sort of internal polling the Liberal Party has for Sturt, Pyne took the unconventional move of launching an online petition to save the ABC's South Australian production house. When asked if this was simply a classic case of "not in my backyard," Pyne told Fairfax Media the ABC has charter obligations beyond Sydney and Melbourne. Pyne argued ABC management was simply taking the "lazy way out" amid speculation 150 jobs would be lost in Adelaide.
Western Sydney Liberal Craig Laundy is also keeping an eye on proceedings, noting that "time will tell" as to whether programs will be hurt or not. While Laundy – who holds the marginal seat of Reid – said he had no problems with the public broadcasters being asked to be more efficient, he said he would be worried if the cuts had an impact on the quality of production and programming. "My electorate would [feel] exactly the same."
Then, there are the Nationals, who are traditional supporters of the ABC due to its reach into rural and regional areas. They are concerned about what the cuts will mean for their constituents but not necessarily for the reasons one may assume. Member for Parkes, Mark Coulton, whose electorate covers more than 256,000 square kilometres in New South Wales, has met senior ABC staff in recent weeks . He is worried that programs in regional areas will be axed so that voters pay attention to the cuts, "to help with [the ABC's] argument". "I'm just putting out a warning," he said. "I'll certainly be making a lot of noise about this."
There is also a related view that Scott will be opportunistic with the budget cuts, and use the cover of the efficiency review to carry out changes and cuts that he has long planned but not had the stomach to implement.
The muddy waters
As a broadcaster that receives public funding, the ABC has a long history as a political football. But the ABC footy has been pumped full of air in the first year of the Abbott government. Amid the looming cuts there have been controversies over the ABC's coverage of intelligence leaks, allegations Australian navy personnel burned the hands of asylum seekers and the fallout of that Chaser skit that depicted journalist Chris Kenny having sex with a dog.
In January, in response to the navy claims, Prime Minister Tony Abbott suggested the ABC was unAustralian. "I want the ABC to be a straight news gathering and news reporting organisation and a lot of people feel at the moment the ABC instinctively takes everyone's side but Australia's." In his Wednesday speech, Turnbull singled out the ABC and SBS boards, arguing they needed to take responsibility for accuracy and objectivity at their respective organisations. Or resign.
All of this serves to muddy the waters of the funding debate, conflating the issue of how much funding the ABC "needs" with how much it "deserves". Former ABC foreign correspondent and former chief of corporate planning and governance Geoff Heriot would like to see an independent process set up to review the ABC on a regular basis. The Australian public and the ABC deserve a better quality of scrutiny than they are currently getting, he says. "At the moment, there is such a huge gulf between the assertions of government and of some vested interests groups as to the performance of the ABC, and that of community sentiment. How do you bridge all of that?"
The questions for many Australians however, will not be about efficiencies or politics but simply about what they will see, hear and read on their ABC. Such as why does Stephen Fry's QI appear every week night, sometimes twice and even three times on ABC1? Is it because it is cheaper than making local programs like state-based versions of 7.30 or documentaries about Countdown? And is this the kind of trade-off Scott will have to make to pay for the ABC's brave new digital future?
