While the government’s decision to again put to tender its international television service is a seen as a “win for Rupert”, the government has thrown a bone to the ABC by extending the forthcoming contract to ten years. In its current form, the contract has twice been let for five years.
Putting together the tender for the service is a substantial task that involves taking several people “offline” for several months, a cost the ABC would prefer not to have to bear. Nonetheless, it will do so knowing its main competitor, Sky News, hasn’t got a hope in hell of winning the tender, and they won’t have to do it again until 2020.
Running even a barebones international television service is expensive, and Sky will require a subsidy or mates’ rates from its owners, Seven, Nine and News Corporation to be faintly competitive. The fact that the ABC has now been running the service for a decade, and succeeded in having its contract renewed by the Howard government in the face of fierce lobbying by News Ltd in 2006, guarantees it has the contract, currently worth $20m per annum, sewn up.
Nonetheless, delusions run deep in News Ltd, and few run deeper than the idea that Sky is in with a chance of knocking off the ABC.
The current version of the service is the creation of Alexander Downer, who convinced the Howard cabinet of the need to undo some of the damage done to Radio Australia in the 1997 budget by reviving the faltering Australia Television service about to be closed by Kerry Stokes. Having been coaxed by the government into tendering, the ABC set about establishing a solid, if small-scale, international television service, driven by the great work of the late John Doherty who was tireless in efforts to get the service onto platforms throughout India, Asia and the Pacific.
But even at that stage, the proliferation of cable TV in the region meant the chances of even a lavishly-funded service wielding the influence of a CNN were remote; the spread of new media has since rendered a TV-based service even less relevant — DFAT officials thought in 2005 they could buy more influence for Australia in the region with $20m per annum than via a television news service and they’d be even more correct today. The ABC’s Mark Scott has tried to argue that there is evidence for the network’s effectiveness, and it may well be an effective complement to Radio Australia in Pacific nations, but you’ll look in vain through the DFAT annual report for hard evidence of the impact of the network beyond the number of homes and countries it’s available in.
There was always a sneaking suspicion among officials that politicians wanted an international TV service so they could turn on something Australian in their hotel rooms while on regional visits. In an age of proliferating media platforms, that remains about the most compelling reason for funding an international television network.
*Bernard Keane worked on the 2000 international television tender process in the Department of Communications.
Bernard Keane has a point -and whoever decides on the next management of Australia’s international satellite service needs to think beyond any assumptions of “influence in the region” and consider what actual day-to-day programming really does to Australia’s image abroad – unless of course it is really only intended for homesick expat Australians!
Certainly, despite some wild “audience-reach” claims, expats are the only certain viewers now. For the rest of Asia, it is easily-ignored, buried in local cable operators’ lists of subscriber options, a little battler amongst dozens of other channels including several other state-sponsored attempts to somehow carry a message from or a whiff of the culture of their country of origin – mostly with a similar lack of impact.
Living in Asia for years until the end of 2009 meant I watched Australia’s international TV service under all its manifestations: the original ABC-run effort, then the Seven-managed version, then back to the ABC. I waited for someone, sometime, in any of the countries I dealt with to offer a comment about my country’s international effort – but they never did. The fact that no one cared it was there provided some relief too – since the programming output, under all three managements, was frequently odd and sometimes embarrassing.
Some old (and I mean old!) Australian programs, some weirdly inappropriate programs (some interesting US and British drama and documentaries, but how did they meet the brief?), programs that had already been seen on better-watched, adjacent cable channels (blurring the brand a bit and also a bit off the brief?)
And weekends of non-stop Rugby League and AFL, kindly provided by the commercial networks, spectacular in their coverage but incomprehensible to any accidental local viewer, since they were presented without the slightest attempt to explain proceedings to a non-Australian audience.
At least ABC has tried, more than did Seven’s management of the channel, when it comes to news and
current affairs. (The content of the relayed Seven Sydney 6pm bulletin could be a bizarre sight indeed, when seen from a few thousand kilometres away.)
But the ABC’s news and CA effort remains “worthy, but dull”. It is competing with some big international operators and it shows. It is also often let down by the failure to translate domestic references into those understandable to an international audience. Its bulletins vary wildly, sometimes an Australia-centric emphasis, sometimes appearing to under-play Australian issues.
News staff apparently suffer, like the channel as a whole, from uncertainty about who is the target audience.
The minister or the tender panel needs to ask itself, and the bidders, what exactly the channel’s content is intended to convey and who the audience is supposed to be.
Or maybe a website offering video for the homesick might do the trick, for millions less.