The ABC should have a guaranteed five-year funding cycle and its budget and board should be at arm’s length from government influence, former competition tsar Rod Sims has said in a speech.
Ahead of Tuesday’s budget, when the ABC will have its $84m indexation restored, Sims called for “strong and clear” ABC governance and stable funding for the public broadcaster.
“The ABC is a vital institution that should continue essentially as is, and that certainly should not be narrowed in its focus or, worse, privatised,” the former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chief said at the Melbourne book launch of Who needs the ABC? by Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins.
“That would represent extremely poor economic and public policy.”
“Damage the ABC and Australia is damaged,” he said.
The ABC has a triennial-funding cycle that Labor has pledged to extend to five years to safeguard the ABC and the SBS against “arbitrary ideological cuts and political interference”.
Since the Coalition came to power in 2014 the ABC has lost $526m in funding, resulting in the loss of 640 jobs, from 4,704 staff to 4,064.
Sims’ call for stronger governance, including no tied funding, comes after the Morrison government demanded that the ABC and SBS add a new layer of accountability in the form of new reporting conditions.
The move has been blasted by Labor as “regulation by stealth” that could lead to a loss of independence.
Sims, who is a professor in public policy at the Australian National University, said there had to be a new process to ensure apolitical board appointments.
Several recent appointments to the board were made after the minister bypassed the independent nominations panel.
Sims said he couldn’t remember a time when the ABC was under as much strain as it had been in recent years.
“The government of the day should seek to nurture the ABC. Who knows, they might even get better coverage, human nature being what it is,” he said.
“The book describes at length the growing criticism of the ABC. If I reflect back over my lifetime, I do not remember criticism of the ABC being so prominent or so strong as it seems in recent years.”
Sims said the ABC board should also “ensure the ABC is not going out of its way to ‘poke the government in the eye’ unnecessarily”.
Journalism held the powerful to account and all of society benefited from it, Sims said, adding that the ABC was more than just its journalism.
“With all such public goods there is a certainty that public interest journalism will be under-provided if left to the commercial sector alone,” he said. “Therefore, virtually all nations provide some level of public funding for journalism.”
