ABC Managing Director Mark Scott has been uncharacteristically quiet lately, but at lunchtime today he will be getting to his feet to deliver another salvo in the battle to retain the Federal Government contract for international broadcasting for the ABC.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is currently considering — or would be if there wasn’t an election on — whether the contract for the Australia Network should be put out to tender. Everyone knows that Sky News is interested. This is part of the back story to the launch of ABC24, the new 24 hour news television channel, and of course the constant sniping at the public broadcaster from News Limited titles.

Scott, speaking at the Asialink public luncheon in Sydney, opens his speech by talking about the power of media messages in bringing down the Berlin wall. “Nothing can speak to so many or shape public perception on such a scale as the media.”

And that is why, he argues, no government with an international broadcasting presence has outsourced it. Scott argues about broadcasting as an instrument of “soft power” and “soft diplomacy”.

It’s an interesting, and some would say brave, in the Yes Minister sense of the word, conjunction of ideas. East European totalitarianism on the one hand, and government funded broadcasting as an instrument of diplomacy on the other.

But Scott is arguing that it is exactly the editorial independence of the ABC that is the best advert, as it were, for Australia and it’s democratic values. Soft power relies on persuading people to one’s view, on fostering understanding and admiration for one’s national values, he says.

Perhaps most interesting are his quotes from yet to be published Lowy Institute research that found in a study of ten different government funded international broadcasting services most had similar public policy obligations to the ABC, regardless of the ideological character of the government.

The importance of the media is, he says, the reason why public broadcasting has survived the wave of privatisation of public assets over the last few decades.

Commercial media organizations, he argues, can quite properly align their editorial agenda to their commercial agenda. He cites Fox News (but eschews the obvious examples closer to home). But only a public broadcaster can deliver continued credibility, on which soft power relies.

Expect return fire from Sky News and News Limited very soon. I can imagine the line. That free enterprise is also a democratic value. And prepare for a quite different use of the East European totalitarianism parable.

The politicians probably aren’t thinking about this until after the election, but both sides of the Australia Network battle will want to try and make sure that the climate favors them, once the larger election battle is fought and won.