GREG ANSLEY reports on the far-from-simple goings on at the ABC.
CANBERRA - At noon on Tuesday the plug was pulled on the ABC, Australia's state-owned broadcaster.
About 4000 staff walked off the job for 24 hours, leaving senior managers to replace normal radio programming with music, the odd documentary, and regular apologies for the inconvenience.
If mass protests and public polling over the past twenty years are any measure, the inconvenience was a small price to pay for the bulk of Australians, who have almost unswerving affection for their public broadcaster - even if they rarely listen to its programmes.
The great perception is that the ABC is under threat as a source of independent and high-quality Australian news, documentaries and drama, and that it may follow other public broadcasters down the road to commercialisation, privatisation or - at worst - extinction.
Australians do not have far to look for examples.
The commercialisation and selloff of public broadcasting in New Zealand, with the attendant deluge of foreign programmes, sends a collective shudder through the many friends of the ABC.
It has not gone unnoticed that the new head of the corporation's increasingly powerful e-commerce and new media division is New Zealander Lynley Marshall, who, until her appointment, was a key person in The Radio Network, Radio New Zealand's former commercial arm.
Her boss, Jonothon Shier, is intent on reinventing the ABC in the face of a tightwad Coalition Government that has since its election displayed open contempt for the broadcaster and the surging world of new technology.
It is not clear yet whether his management plan is to protect and nourish the corporation through arrangements that can ease its absolute reliance on Government funding, or whether the ABC is doomed to commercialisation and possible sale.
ABC staff fear the latter, which is why they poured out of its offices and studios around the country in anger at Shier's inability to guarantee the organisation's essential independence and non-commercial character.
On Monday, before the strike, a clutch of the ABC's best-known and most influential faces called an unprecedented press conference to protest recent sackings and the decision to axe Quantum, a highly- respected science show.
Kerry OBrien, the presenter of the nightly current affairs show 7.30 Report, was blunt.
"We seem to be increasingly operating in a climate of fear," he said.
"We are supposed to be an institution which values intellectual pursuits, the development of responsible and smart creativity, yet to do that in a climate of fear where you don't know what is going to happen from one moment to the next is completely contradictory."
Fear, loathing and periodic descents into despair are nothing new at the ABC, even under Labour governments, which have traditionally been its greatest ideological guardians.
But the advent of John Howard's conservative Coalition Government in 1996 brought with a new and harsher political climate.
From their earliest days in office, Howard and his Communications Minister, Richard Alston, made it clear that the days of chardonnay-sipping lefties were over at the ABC, regardless of any number of Government and independent reports rejecting allegations of bias.
Their election commitment to maintain existing levels of ABC funding was rapidly broken.
While there appears little doubt the ABC was like any public organisation in need of management reforms and greater accountability, the Government has matched a continuous stream of complaints about its professionalism and integrity with a hewing of funds.
The ABC board has had an influx of Liberal supporters, including its chairman, Donald McDonald, a good friend and ally of Howard.
In the first three years in office, despite commitments to the contrary, the Government cut the ABC's cash by $A65 million, sold off its foreign TV broadcaster, Australian Television, to the Seven Network, tried to block its use of digital technology and mused privately about a partial or total selloff.
The recent arrival of Shier as managing director has inflamed passions.
Largely unknown in his native country after 23 years abroad with Thames Television in London and Scandinavia's TV3 network, the one-time Liberal official was initially given the benefit of doubt by his staff. But not for long.
Under his leadership a further $A3 million has been cut from news and current affairs, a tumbril-load of high-profile heads have fallen and a bucket of money has been poured into the ballooning e-commerce and new media division.
The ABC has been negotiating a deal with Telstra in which it would exclusively supply the telecommunication giant's internet and mobile users with news, current affairs and financial reporting.
But ABC's ambitions are still crimped. It can use digital TV to show local news, education, history, social policy, parliamentary broadcasts and the like - but not national news, sport, drama or movies.
Stay tuned.
Very public airing of a bastion's privatisation fears
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