THE Labor Party's populist election campaign promise to depoliticise the ABC board has effectively left the national broadcaster swinging in the breeze.
With two empty seats at the table following the departure of Ron Brunton in February and John Gallagher this month, the board is down to its minimum legal requirement of five directors plus the chairman.
Should any of these be unable to attend meetings for one reason or another, it would be doubtful whether the board would have aquorum.
This is hardly a satisfactory situation for an organisation in charge of an annual budget of hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars. But no short-term solution seems at hand.
In an attempt to address the problem, ABC chairman Maurice Newman is believed to have asked Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to consider making some appointments to run for one year rather than the normal five-year term.
This is unlikely to impress Conroy, who has committed the Government to setting up an independent panel to recommend future board appointments to him. This would be based on the British Nolan principles designed to present board appointments as non-political ones.
While all this sounds very pristine, it is unclear whether any agreement has been reached inside the Government about the make-up of this selection panel, let alone progressing to recommendations for new ABC board directors. And the situation is made more complicated because Conroy has committed the Government to re-establishing the role of a staff-elected board director. This raises the obvious question: will this be a non-political recommendation from the independent panel? And in any case why would the Prime Minister want to push the envelope on an issue that so obviously raises concerns about conflict of interest?
Grilled at a Senate estimates hearing in Canberra this week, Conroy brushed aside criticism over this, saying only that "subject to some tweaking all will be revealed soon". Whatever that is supposed to mean.
The Government may well have logistical reasons for not wanting legislation on this to go forward until after July 1, when the Coalition loses control of the Senate. But there is little doubt that the final word on the membership of this panel and approval for any recommended appointments it makes will rest with the PM's office, where there is already a serious logjam in decision-making.
All of this comes at a critical time for the future of public broadcasting in Australia as the country's television industry prepares for the switch-over from analog to digital, which Conroy has slated for 2013.
Negotiations for the next triennial budgets for the ABC and SBS, which are due in September, will have to play a big role in preparing these national broadcasters for the digital switch-over. While there are significant costs involved in this signal migration, there are also sensible cost savings that could flow from rationalisation of resources between both organisations.
SBS managing director Shaun Brown told the Senate estimates hearing the successful merging of resources in digital radio between his organisation and the ABC was a good model for this.
As this column revealed recently, SBS management canvassed a strategy paper at the Prime Minister's 2020 Summit that outlined the benefits of rationalising the ABC and SBS transmission and distribution services as a first step towards combining the backroom operations of the two organisations. It is understood that savings through a complete backroom merger, which still preserved the editorial identities of both organisations, would be more than $30million a year. It is hard to believe that a staff-elected director would not end up in a situation of conflict when the ABC board started looking at the jobs that would go through this streamlining.
But any move in this direction would inevitably bring down on the Government the wrath of the Friends of the ABC, among others, over SBS involvement in advertising. Last year this accounted for $47 million and is expected to reach $65 million next year, aided by SBS's decision to allow in-program advertising. Conroy, who seems to be distinctly uncomfortable being on the receiving end of persistent probing from Opposition senators in estimates, refused to say whether he supported this move by SBS, reiterating only that it would come up during the triennial budget talks.
However, a lead to the direction Conroy may take on the future of national broadcasting can be found in a forceful paper prepared by one of his staff for the Democratic Audit of Australia research project at the Australian National University on the future of SBS.
Published in February and titled Not So Special Any More: The Demise of SBS Television, the discussion paper by Emma Dawson, from the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, mounts a strident case for a full-scale review of the role of the broadcaster.
In her paper, which at times is scathing in its criticism of SBS management and the Howard government for undermining the organisation's original multicultural charter, Dawson casts doubt about its ability to survive in the face of digital and online competition. She also points out that pay TV has presented SBS with serious competition in the market for international content. The upper middle-class, internationalised audience that SBS created in the 1990s has become the core market for pay TV, where international news and current affairs, cutting-edge documentary, world movies and risky Australian content are all available at a price that this high-income cosmopolitan crowd find more than reasonable, she says.
In her paper, Dawson says Conroy should make a thorough review of SBS a priority in his first term.
In the face of digital broadcasting, the at-a-mouse-click availability of international news and TV content over the internet, and the changing face of multicultural Australia, a review of SBS and of the representation of cultural diversity in Australian media is long overdue, she says.
This review should be comprehensive, non-partisan and government-funded, looking into SBS's charter, policy, practice and its relationship to the ABC.
Dawson is part of a team in Conroy's office that is, according to other staff, working something up on the issue of public broadcasting. It will be interesting to see what, if any of this, filters through into this Government's policy.
My guess is the beleaguered Communications Minister may find it all a bit too hard just at the moment.
Malcolm Colless, a former chief executive of the Herald & Weekly Times, is a freelance writer.
