Transmission interrupted: Australia’s international television broadcasting

ABSTRACT

Australia’s efforts to pursue public diplomacy through a government-funded international television service have been sporadic and ineffectual. The reasons for failure lie in the way such efforts have been pawns in other political conflicts and relationships – conflicts between Coalition governments and the ABC; conflicts between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard that dominated the Labor government from 2010 onwards; and the wish of key players in both major parties to please Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. The Abbott Government’s 2014 axing of the ten-year contract with Australian Television slashed Australia’s international broadcasting capacity. Domestic agendas have repeatedly trumped what should be a tool of international policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• ABC
• international broadcasting
• radio Australia
• Australia television

Soon after radio became a widely diffused medium in the 1920s, it was discovered that short-wave radio signals could be heard half a world away, and so began what one participant called the great game of the airwaves (Heriot 2022, 1) as governments sought to project broadcasts beyond their own borders. During World War II, international broadcasting was a substantial endeavour (Ribeiro, Wagner, and Morriss 2020) and enemy broadcasters such as Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose gained infamy in the West. International broadcasting continued to grow through the Cold War, and with the growing emergence of independent Third World countries, so that by the early 1980s according to a leading scholar in the field, around 150 countries were broadcasting internationally (Browne 1982).

The constants in international broadcasting during these four plus decades until the 1990s were the delivery medium (short-wave radio) and that it was overwhelmingly a state-directed enterprise.

International broadcasting was and is inevitably caught up in presumptions about a country’s national interest and its views of its target audiences. The Australian government of the 1950s, for example, did not think the BBC model of independence would work for Radio Australia because ‘Asian audiences ‘needed to be addressed in simple terms’.’ They were ‘poorly equipped to grasp subtlety, irony and differences of opinion.’ ‘Asian audiences would become perplexed, ‘a state of mind ideally suited to the communist purposes’’ (Walker 2019, 236). Similarly official guidance on the treatment of aborigines included ‘integrating in this atomic age a left-over fragment of prehistory’ and ‘one of the most primitive of the world’s peoples’ (Walker 2019, 229–230).

The audience is the touchstone of effectiveness in international broadcasting, and such anachronistic views, already obscene to many by the 1950s, were dramatically out of touch with Radio Australia’s changing audience, and obviously could not be a recipe for continuing success. So pragmatism, let alone professionalism, meant the original crudity of the propaganda in international broadcasting demanded more persuasive and credible approaches.

The emerging conception of how a more enlightened role for international broadcasting could still be in the national interest was encapsulated by a phrase coined by an American diplomat/scholar Edmund Gullion – public diplomacy (Rawnsley 2016, 42). Gullion invented the term in the 1960s to describe and in some ways to legitimise the work of the United States Information Agency (Cull 2006).

The term has since been used to describe a wide range of activities – leaders’ visits, cultural promotions and exchanges, scholarship programs, scholarly and political exchanges and meetings, and not least international broadcasting. While there are dangers of conceptual stretch and multiple meanings, at its heart public diplomacy is a recognition that formal state to state relations is now a smaller proportion of total international relations.

For a broadcaster such as Radio Australia, it helped to envisage a dual role, to serve state interests but also to be an editorially independent democratic exemplar (Heriot 2022), with the opportunities, tensions and ambiguities that the two mandates presented.

The early 1990s brought a new era of ferment in expanding opportunities for television services. Domestically the advent of subscription television services delivered by cable and/or satellite promised the expansion of channels beyond what had been available through terrestrial transmission. Internationally, the role of CNN during the Gulf War of 1991 had focused attention on how easily news could now cross international borders. International television services via satellite immediately became important while in future decades the digital revolution further transformed peoples’ access to information from domestic and international sources.

In the early 1990s, among potential players, ‘there was a perception that if the broadcasters hesitated, a commercial or public service rival would beat them to regional audiences and thus to regional influence’ (Atkins 2002, 145). Unlike the era of short-wave dominance though, where states acting out of foreign policy imperatives were the dominant players, now most new players were business ventures (Atkins 2002, 37)

In Asia, the biggest prize for these corporate players was China, with its huge population and dynamic economy. Rupert Murdoch was one such keen player. In a speech in London in September 1993, he proclaimed that ‘advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere’. But Murdoch was a victim of the technology he was lauding. His remarks were aimed at a Western audience. However, according to Bruce Dover, when they were reported to Chinese Premier Li Peng, he was incandescent with rage. Murdoch had bought the Star satellite service five months earlier, and his primary target was to penetrate the world’s largest emerging market: China. Dover, then a senior executive with Star, joked that word for word these remarks were probably the costliest ever uttered by an individual (Tiffen 2014, 76). There followed years of effort by Murdoch to placate the Chinese, and to assure Asian governments that Star would be ‘friendly and useful’ (Atkins 2002, 121). ‘Initially it was hoped that “global” satellite TV news, like CNN, would shape more progressive forms of cosmopolitan politics’ (Wright, Scott, and Bunce 2020, 609), and some new voices, most notably Al Jazeera (Seib 2008), emerged. Quickly, however. it became clear that commercial profitability and state control could comfortably co-exist. The new broadcasters emphasised light entertainment, and the most successful Chinese language venture, CETV, later purchased by AOL Time Warner had, as its slogan: ‘no sex, no violence, no news’ (Atkins 2003, 473, 477).

Especially in the contemporary world, international broadcasting faces many challenges – the dynamic technology, the changing tastes and habits of its potential audiences, the uncertain international environment, and the very different journalistic traditions and patterns of government-media relations (Hanitzsch et al. 2019) in target countries. Gary Rawnsley’s summation is apt: ‘the history of international broadcasting since the 1920s is one of actors playing ‘catch-up’ as technological development gallops ahead and new geopolitical problems demand new communication responses’ (2016, 44).

Such an environment calls for strategic clarity, the cultivation of expertise and a constancy of commitment. Nearly every serious commentator on Australia’s international broadcasting at some stage reaches the same conclusion as O’Keeffe and Green: ‘To succeed such a fresh approach would require a significant commitment in the medium to long term from government’ (2019, 3). Instead, the last three decades of policy-making has delivered the opposite. Indeed, in the last decade international broadcasting slid further down the government’s priorities. Unlike the 2003 Foreign Policy White Paper, the 2017 White Paper contains no mention of international broadcasting, although education and sports diplomacy, for example, are included as important soft power tools (O’Keeffe and Greene 2019, 10).

The focus of this article is the failure of any government commitment to international television services to be sustained. It traces the history of Australian international television from its beginnings in the early 1990s to its privatisation under the Howard government; its rebirth in 2001 up to the chaotic tender conflicts under Rudd and Gillard, and its closure by the Abbott Government. It then analyses the reasons for failure and concludes with some observations about the difficulty of policy-making in such an area.

Australia television 1993–1998

Section 6 (1) of the ABC Act of 1983 says that the Corporation should ‘transmit to countries outside Australia broadcasting programs and television programs of news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural enrichment that will:

1. encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs; and

2. enable Australians living abroad to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs.’

The radio part of this charter requirement was fulfilled by Radio Australia, which began international short-wave broadcasting in 1939, and has been continuously part of the ABC since 1950. By the late 1980s, Radio Australia was broadcasting 49 h of programming in nine languages each day, primarily transmitted through short-wave. Australia ranked thirteenth among about 150 international broadcasters (Browne 1982, 30) in terms of hours broadcast (345 per week), well behind the leaders, the USA (2360) and the Soviet Union (2257). It had approximately 220 staff, and comprised somewhat less than three per cent of the ABC’s total budget (Tiffen 1989).

However, the directive to broadcast television programs abroad had simply been ignored by the government and by the ABC Board and management. Radio Australia had proposed to the ABC that it should provide a daily television program of news and information for Pacific Islands stations to broadcast, and had submitted to a joint parliamentary inquiry that it be able to move from short-wave radio into emerging technologies, but without success on either occasion (Heriot 2022b). No-one seemed bothered by this apparent failure of the ABC to meet its charter, and certainly no-one was proposing to fund the potentially expensive new endeavour of international television.

ABC Managing Director David Hill was keen to advance the ABC towards both the new possibilities. His efforts on pay TV were initially thwarted. Both the Keating Labor Cabinet and the ABC were divided on the international venture. The ministers pushing hardest for it in Cabinet were Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and Communications Minister Bob Collins. Keating reluctantly agreed, but several ministers expressed doubts. ‘How are we to prevent the ABC going berserk and buggering up everything in foreign policy?’ asked Simon Crean (Inglis 2006, 288).

In late 1992 there were communications back and forth between Cabinet and the ABC Board. Cabinet was adamant that the ABC service carry advertising, both to finance it and to promote Australian enterprises in Asia (Inglis 2006, 286). The Labor Government was, by this time, operating under tight budgetary guidelines, and wary of any new ongoing spending commitments.

Hill argued to the government that after an initial seed grant, the service could be self-supporting through advertising and subscriptions. It was therefore the first ABC broadcasting venture to carry advertising. From the outset, this made Australia Television (as it became called) controversial within the ABC.

Australia Television (ATV) was launched in February 1993, via Indonesia’s Palapa B2P satellite, with a government grant of $5.4 million (ANAO 2012, 34).

It had been decreed that no funds could be diverted from ABC domestic programming to the new venture. However, ATV had been launched on the basis of unrealistic projections for both income and expenditure. There was widespread suspicion within the ABC that domestic resources were being diverted. There was also a suspicion at Radio Australia that MD Hill had hopes of diverting large parts of RA’s budget to Australia Television. As ATV’s debt increased, a crisis was looming, especially as the time neared for a new transponder leasing agreement. In 1994, the Board decided that it would draw on domestic funds as a loan which the international service could repay later. This angered the new Minister Michael Lee (Inglis 2006, 314–5).

Hill left the ABC in February 1995. His successor Brian Johns viewed the ABC’s entry into pay TV and Australia Television as two large distractions from his commitment to a renewal of the national broadcaster (Inglis 2006, 353).

Nevertheless by 1996, Australia Television’s prospects were much better, although it was still making a loss. In October 1995, the government had promised a new grant of $6.2 million a year for three years. It was operating within budget, and revenue was increasing substantially, as, it seemed, were audiences. A Senate committee in 1997 concluded that ‘in only four years Australia Television has, through satellite transmission and rebroadcasting arrangements, made its mark in the Asia Pacific region’. A December 1995 study showed that its penetration of the Asian market equalled that of CNN and BBC and was second only to Hong Kong Star Television. What is remarkable is that Australia Television has achieved this for a cost of between six and eight million dollars a year. In fact, ‘after subtracting revenue, Australia Television cost only $2.38 million in 1995-96’ (Senate Committee 1997).

However, the advent of the Howard Government brought unanticipated threats to the ABC’s international broadcasting. Before the election the Liberals had promised to maintain the ABC’s funding and said they were ‘strongly supportive’ of the ABC’s international services. However the post-election discovery of a ‘budget black hole’ made cuts in many areas more politically palatable.

In a paper to the Howard Cabinet (Inglis 2006, 382), the Minister for Communications Richard Alston frankly admitted: ‘Options examined in the submission are inconsistent with government election commitments to maintain ABC funding levels but will assist achievement of the government’s fiscal policy strategy.’ Alston also told cabinet colleagues that the impending cuts would enhance the government’s ability to influence the ABC (Inglis 2006, 395).

Then, in July 1996, Alston announced that Australia Television would be sold. This was a complete shock to the director of Australia Television and to ABC management. It was a decision made at the Government’s Expenditure Review Committee, and the initiative came directly from the Prime Minister. A rumour which gained considerable currency at the time was that it followed suggestions made by a business figure close to the Liberal Party interested in buying the service. Whatever its antecedents, it was a decision made very quickly by government, and without any preparatory work coming from any section of the bureaucracy (Personal communications by participants to Revill and Tiffen 1997).

Alston also publicly announced the ABC would be cut by two per cent that year and 10 per cent the following year. In the same July 1996 statement, he announced a review of the role and functions of the ABC. He said ‘the Government is seeking a more focused role for the ABC … In examining the ABC and the very significant future funding pressures which its many activities are likely to place on the Budget, the Government has decided that the current level of funding cannot continue indefinitely … There is a need therefore to review ABC activities in line with the new funding levels.’ The inquiry was headed by a prominent business figure, Bob Mansfield.

Mansfield reported in January 1997. In many ways, it was a positive document for the ABC, certainly when compared with the fears surrounding its formation, and judged against the hints and leaks coming from the government about the possibility of yet more savage cuts. Mansfield endorsed the continuing need for the ABC, acknowledged the strong public sentiment in its favour, affirmed that it should remain wholly funded by government subvention rather than by advertising, and while endorsing the feasibility of the previously announced cuts, warned against cutting further. He commented on the valuable role the ABC played in our national life and commended the management re-structure under Managing Director Brian Johns announced the previous December.

His major recommendation for cutting expenditure was to abolish Radio Australia, at an estimated saving of $20.5 million. Mansfield argued that ‘the current ABC charter accords overseas broadcasting equal priority with domestic broadcasting. I do not believe that there are compelling reasons for this to continue … The ABC cannot continue to maintain its domestic services and also provide an overseas broadcasting service within the funding allocated to it from 1997-98, particularly given the dual requirement to downsize and to invest in new technology. Put simply, maintenance of an overseas broadcasting service will be at the cost of domestic programming’ (Mansfield 1997).

He refrained from commenting directly on RA’s value or performance, preferring to rest his case on asserting the primacy of domestic over international priorities. Nevertheless he also scattered adverse comments or raised questions, never pursuing them systematically or in depth. He insinuated rather than argued that there were problems with the service, and there may be a case for closure.

In addition, Mansfield endorsed ‘the Government’s decision to tender Australia Television to the commercial service. With more than 100 satellite television channels operating in Asia, I do not consider that the ABC should be allocated funding to enable it to operate competitively in the Asian market. If no acceptable relationship with the commercial sector is found, I believe the service should be closed down. This decision should be made by June 1997.’

Meanwhile, also in 1997 but in another part of the Howard government, a White Paper ‘In the National Interest’ foreshadowed that Australia was likely to become a weaker rather than stronger state relative to others in the Asia region. It argued that Australia would need to marshal economic, cultural and other assets to meet the challenge, expanding its expertise, for example, in Asian studies and Asian languages (Heriot 2018, 17).

The proposal to shut Radio Australia brought a strong public rearguard action. The Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, Sir Julius Chan, suggested that $1 million be cut from that country’s aid budget and re-directed to Radio Australia (Inglis 2006, 402). Fortuitously, the key meeting of the ABC Board was to be held at Southbank, where RA was headquartered, and thousands of letters of support were strewn across the floor to welcome the directors into the building. Radio Australia survived but with huge cuts to its staffing and services (Revill and Tiffen 1997).

ABC international television 2001–2010

Kerry Stokes’s Seven Network won the contract to take over the ABC’s international television service, and began broadcasting in February 1998. It closed three years later in March 2001, unable to make a profit. While it is unlikely that it ever would have succeeded commercially, any prospect of profitability disappeared with the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s.

In the same period, the politics surrounding international broadcasting in Southeast Asia also changed. Indonesia had been ruled by President Suharto since 1966 but, following widespread unrest, he had been forced to resign in May 1998. There had always been a conservative constituency within the government – often dubbed the ‘Jakarta lobby’ – that thought Radio Australia through its large audience and the credibility it had with Indonesian audiences annoyed the Suharto regime, and that this was detrimental to Australia’s interests.

Following the fall of Suharto and the failure of the Seven venture, the Australian government became keen to revive the international television service. It called for tenders for a new contract. The government subsequently undertook what the National Audit Office called a ‘limited selection process’ involving four bidders, with the ABC and one other shortlisted for selection. Lauded as ‘innovative’, and for recognizing the ‘strategic dimensions’ of international television, the ABC proposal succeeded despite costing 11 per cent more than its rival (Heriot 2022b). The government announced in June 2001 that the ABC would be funded to establish the service under a $90.4 million five year contract, supplemented by whatever it could earn in advertising (Inglis 2006, 556). The ABC began the service, now titled ABC Asia Pacific, on 31 December 2001.

In 2005 a new tender process was initiated with the ABC and the Australian News Channel (ANC), a company of Sky News, being the two contenders. The ABC was the preferred tenderer and commenced a second five-year contract, which was to finish in August 2011 (ANAO 2012, 13).

The decision to call for tenders 2010

In 2010, a decision had to be made about what would happen with the service from August 2011. In November 2009, Managing Director Mark Scott publicly proposed the ABC play a larger role in Australia’s soft diplomacy, and that the Australia Network should become part of the ABC just as Radio Australia had been since 1950. In the same month Communications Minister Stephen Conroy submitted to Cabinet that the ABC should provide the Australia Network service on a permanent basis, integrating it with Radio Australia (ANAO 2012, 36).

The Minister for Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith was briefed by his Department in early 2010. He requested them to undertake an industry submission process to be completed by April. Fourteen submissions were received, and the majority argued against tendering for the contract, and considered that if the purpose of the Australia Network was to act as a tool of public diplomacy, the service should remain with the national broadcaster. Several submissions noted that it was unusual for an international broadcasting service funded by a government to operate under a commercial arrangement (ANAO 2012, 37–8). In addition, DFAT presented its review of the Australia Network on June 28 (ANAO 2012, 38). Overall it concluded the ABC had consistently met or exceeded most of the established Key Performance Indicators. Factors beyond ABC control had affected some, and these had been raised with DFAT at the time. Nevertheless the Department strongly endorsed the ABC’s performance, giving it what journalist Daniel Flitton called ‘a gold star’ (Flitton 2011a).

The first puzzle is why Foreign Minister Smith felt unable to make a decision about the future of the service at this time. He had his ministerial colleague Conroy’s view that it should go to the ABC, his own Department’s report had recommended it should stay with the ABC, and the weight of opinion from the industry submission process had also recommended not to call tenders. Some in the ABC have speculated that Labor had promised News Corp it would go to a tender. Perhaps Smith felt that with an election likely in the next few months, the government did not want to antagonize News Corp.

Smith’s decision to delay was to have drastic consequences. The Australian political environment changed dramatically on June 24, when in a coup notable for its speed and decisiveness, Gillard replaced Rudd as prime minister, which set in train three years of fierce conflict between them. Gillard called an election for August 21, which saw Labor reduced to minority government.

After the election, Rudd was returned to Cabinet as Foreign Minister, and he was briefed by DFAT on October 1. Again, the Department recommended against putting the contract out to tender. A contrary view was put by Treasury and the Department of Finance, which both argued that the case for ongoing government support of the Australia Network had not been established. It is not clear what evidence they had for questioning whether the Australia Network was not providing value for money. They have no specialist knowledge of either foreign affairs or media. These two departments almost as a matter of ideology are in favour of contestability for government services. As the veteran economics editor Ross Gittins (2021) once observed: ‘Using ‘contestability’ to turn a public good into an artificially created market is the econocrats’ version of magical thinking.’

Rudd decided there should be a tender process and got Cabinet agreement on November 22 to initiate the process. The tender, for a contract of ten years and a total cost of $223.1 million, was announced in February 2011, and to be completed by June.

The Australian National Audit Office produced a penetrating review of the process surrounding the tender. There is however a vacuum at key points. The original tender document has never been made public. Nor has the detailed reasoning of why the Tender Evaluation Board chose as they did, much of which has been treated as commercial-in-confidence.

The ANAO does, however, give some strong hints: ‘As a government-funded national broadcaster, the ABC is subject to specific legislative and policy requirements relating to editorial independence’ (ANAO 2012, 57). The Managing Director has ‘ultimate editorial power and responsibility – a potential conflict with the proposed contractual obligations for the Australia Network. Under the proposed contract, and in line with government policy objectives, DFAT anticipated a high degree of editorial control and could require the service provider to refrain from broadcasting particular programs or content. Consequently, the ABC considered that the application of these controls limited its ability to agree with all of the conditions of the proposed contract for the Australia Network.’

Press reports at the time and since suggest that the terms of reference may have been loaded against the ABC. Journalist Hamish McDonald noted there were two key aspects that made it more difficult for the ABC: One was a demand for an ‘upfront payment to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade by the successful bidder. This ‘contractor contribution’ would have been, in effect, a kickback to the budget-straitened DFAT for handing out funding allocated to it from Treasury, especially for the network. It rigged the tender immediately against the ABC.’ ‘The second feature was conditions that would have given DFAT effective control over programming and commentary, again difficult for a BBC-model public broadcasters with independence in its charter, but apparently not hard for Sky to swallow’ (McDonald 2011a).

So a tender process was launched with two applicants, the ABC and Australian News Corporation (ANC), based on Sky News, which in turn was part-owned by News Corp.

This was an extraordinary decision. No other country in the world out-sources its international broadcasting in this way, and when the Howard Government had done so in 1997 (the sale to the Seven network) the result was a failure. Moreover, the central element of the corporation to which it was considering outsourcing was foreign-owned.

News Corp was a company with a very chequered record, and the government’s decision-making process involved a determined myopia not to look at its activities beyond Sky News. In July 2011, the News of the World phone hacking scandal began in London, where evidence of News Corp criminality was on bounteous display. Indeed, in Britain, News Corp was forced to withdraw from its bid for 100% of BSkyB, while around the same time in Australia a government committee was voting to give it a government contract carrying heavy responsibilities about how the country projected itself overseas.

While there had long been criticisms of News Corp’s professional ethics in America, Britain and Australia, there was also one directly pertinent action that by itself should have constituted a black mark against any involvement by a Murdoch company. In 1994, Murdoch dropped the BBC News Channel from his Star TV satellite service into China. Despite company denials that it was to please the Chinese government, three months later Murdoch told his biographer, William Shawcross, that he had pulled the BBC in the hope of soothing bad relations with Beijing: ‘I was well aware that the freedom fighters of the world would abuse me for it.’ The Chinese leaders ‘hate the BBC’, Murdoch said. In 1995 he told US journalist Ken Auletta, ‘the BBC was driving [the Chinese leaders] nuts … It’s not worth it. We’re not proud of that decision [but] it was the only way.’

In 2007, Murdoch changed his tune. Faced with opposition to him acquiring the Wall St Journal, and specifically from that paper’s journalists covering China, Murdoch indignantly denied that he had removed the BBC to please the Chinese Government: ‘I don’t know how many times I have to state that I did not take the BBC off Star TV for political reasons (Tiffen 2014, 10–11).

One might have thought that having engaged in political censorship in order to advance his commercial interests and then later lied about it would have been sufficient to disqualify a Murdoch company from serious consideration. But none of this was deemed relevant to the tender process.

A decade later it is even clearer why it would have been a foolish move to give Sky the tender. In 2011 Sky was a broadly respectable news organisation; now Sky at Night is a shorthand for irresponsible and extreme right-wing commentary. Also while closeness to Chinese authorities was seen as an asset in 2011, by 2021 relations had deteriorated sharply, and such closeness could have led to nasty complications.

Internal labor conflicts and the tender process

After the terms of reference had been set, Rudd recused himself from the process, and instead the approver was to be the head of DFAT, Denis Richardson. The Department had recommended that Minister Rudd should be the approver, but he thought that to avoid conflicts of interest the Secretary should assume the role. The Tender Evaluation Board (TEB) consisted of four people, one nominee each from DFAT, Treasury, Finance and Communications.

The conflicts and suspicions at the heart of the government even manifested themselves in disputes over what procedures had been agreed. These disputes first became explicit in May 2011, when DFAT and its head were made aware of ‘unhappiness within government with the decision to put the Australia Network service out to tender, and there was an expectation that the tender outcome would be brought back to government for further consideration or endorsement.’ Given this, the Secretary of DFAT considered he was not in a position to make a decision on the preferred tenderer, which in turn led to a new delay of several weeks.

The internal conflicts came to a head in June, following a meeting between Gillard and Rudd. Cabinet Secretary Mark Dreyfus disagreed that the Foreign Minister’s and the Prime Minister’s offices had agreed on the approval process. He briefed the Prime Minister that ministers had agreed at an October 2010 meeting that the decision was to be made by Cabinet, and at the time of the November 2010 decision to go to tender, Rudd had agreed to bring a further submission to Cabinet. Dreyfus also said there had been no officials-level agreement regarding the process.

In turn Rudd wrote to Gillard, and said his advice was that Cabinet collectively could not be the approver, and that bringing the matter to Cabinet entailed policy, political and potential legal risks. Rudd said there had to be an individual as approver. If the Government wanted a minister to be the approver, he would not do it because of his stated support that current arrangements were best from a probity perspective (ANAO 2012).

In June there were strong rumours that the tender was about to go to Sky. A paper by Rudd to Cabinet said that the TEB recommendations were unanimous, clear-cut and not on balance. The imminence of the decision brought the government’s internal conflicts to a new peak. Several key members of the government thought that Rudd was supporting the Sky bid. Hamish McDonald reported at the time that Rudd had visited News Corp headquarters at least twice in recent months. He also wrote that cabinet colleagues were ‘appalled at Rudd’s flagrant courting of News’s favour’ (McDonald 2011a).

Among some ministers, there was also growing impatience with News Corp wanting policies that would serve their commercial interests on several fronts – liberalizing anti-siphoning of sports events to help Foxtel, wanting a slower rollout of the national broadband network etc – and using their journalists to advance their interests. Flitton (2011b) reported that the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, made the unprecedented move of emailing to rival news outlets questions sent to him by News Ltd. journalists on these topics.

The Government removed Richardson as the approver, and instituted Conroy instead. It also gave him power to override the Tender committee and added some new criteria. Some of these suggested the government was searching for reasons to change the process. For example, it referred specifically to the changing international environment brought by the Arab Spring – even though the Australia Network did not broadcast to the Middle East.

The TEB was reconvened and met with DFAT seeking guidance around such considerations as contractual compliance and legal risk, as well as the importance of audience growth. The TEB was to consider who represented the best value for money.

By this time the process had become deeply politicized. Both tenderers made complaints. ANC/Sky complained of the apprehended bias of Conroy and tried to mount the case that the ABC was engaging in improper lobbying (Shanahan 2011). They also complained of leaks to the press. Afterwards, when criticising the process, it said ‘The turning point was the Sydney Morning Herald article of 22 June 2011’ (Taylor 2011). ‘That article foreshadowed that the tenderers were going to be asked for an additional criterion and that the ABC’s contract would be extended. It proved remarkably prescient’ (ANAO 2012, 119f).

Terminating the tender process

In November there were again strong and well-founded rumours that the TEB was about to advocate that ANC/Sky would win the contract. ‘While the TEB report had identified a preferred tenderer, the advice to the Minister was that the TEB’s assessment of the value-for-money of the two tenderers was ‘fairly close’’ (ANAO 2012, 101).

Again, the almost comprehensive ANAO report has an important gap. What were the grounds on which the TEB made this decision? What was the winner’s advantage in terms of value for money? The first impression would be that the ABC had an advantage here, able to draw on organizational synergies with its much larger team of journalists internationally and around Australia, and that it already had substantial experience in dealing with Asian audiences.

The big advantage that ANC/Sky seems to have enjoyed was in reaching agreements with the Chinese Government which would have given it much greater reach into that country than the ABC. Flitton (2011b) reported that ‘Sky News proposed setting up a dedicated channel for China to run separately from the rest of the network as a way of expanding Australia’s reach in the Asian powerhouse, where censorship restrictions limit foreign news broadcasts.’ Their agreement with the state television service CCTV meant that Sky news stories will be ‘broadcast in China with reciprocal rights back into Australia.’ In contrast, ‘the ABC has an agreement to share footage with Chinese state television but has baulked at the prospect of sharing stories and programs. ‘‘The ABC is not going to stick on a Chinese documentary about Tibet’, said an ABC source’ (Flitton 2011c).

Before the TEB decision became public, Conroy, acting on the advice of the Solicitor-General and with the agreement of Cabinet, terminated the tender process on public interest grounds. Conroy’s public justification was that leaks had fatally compromised the process. ‘Significant leaks of confidential information to the media’ had compromised the tender process ‘to such a degree that a fair and equitable outcome may no longer be able to be achieved,’ he said (ANAO 2012, 102). He referred the recent leaks to the Australian Federal Police, but – not for the first or last time – they found nothing.

Cabinet made this decision while Rudd was flying to Europe (Lane 2011); but Prime Minister Gillard said the timing was due to the compromised process as a result of leaks and the situation needed to be brought to an end. As the ANAO report noted, there had been a high degree of media interest throughout, and much earlier, in May and June, several articles had appeared which included references to confidential aspects of the tender process.

Soon after the termination Conroy announced that the service would go to the ABC permanently, the outcome he had recommended two years earlier. His statement said that like other comparable operators, ‘the Government believes the service should be provided by Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC.’

After that decision, ‘a News Ltd. paper devoted no less than a front page commentary, three inside news stories, a full page feature article, two opinion columns and an editorial to the iniquity of this trashing of due government process. ‘Clueless, Leaderless and Blind’ thundered one headline’ (McDonald 2011b).

The protracted, messy process also gave the Liberals plenty of scope to attack the government. Alexander Downer in full culture wars attack mode said ‘Of course, the ABC is naturally anti-Australian’. He had long thought it was ‘pumping out negative propaganda about Australia and the Australian government to the region’ (McDonald 2011b), presumably forgetting that as Minister he had twice given the contract to the ABC.

Malcolm Turnbull thought that ‘This is a government with poison at its core because of the deep bitter antagonism between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’ (AAP 2011). ‘This is a shambles, this is no way to run a government.’ George Brandis said the botched process was close to the top of the ‘Richter scale of political scandals’ and likened the government’s handling of the tender to ‘some kleptocracy in darkest Africa’ (AAP 2011).

Sky News had every reason to be angry about the process it had been through. It was expensive for all parties: ANC/Sky said its direct costs were $1.4 million (and it was rightly given compensation to cover this); the ABC said its costs were just under half a million dollars, and DFAT spent $770,000 in external costs, not counting its own staff involvements (ANAO 2012, 23). The tender process consumed senior managers’ time and energy. Moreover, Sky had grounds for believing there was a group within the government which would never have accepted it winning the contract. Although the ABC finally achieved the outcome it wanted, it is possible there was damage to the Australia Network brand in its target countries, and more tangibly during the protracted process it had been unable to pursue long term re-broadcasting rights and licensing arrangements (ANAO 2012, 111).

Cancelling the Australia network contract

The ABC’s rejoicing at the outcome was short-lived. Tony Abbott’s Coalition parties won a great election victory on September 7 2013, a majority of 34 seats in the new parliament. The Prime Minister had very explicitly promised there would be no cuts in various areas of government spending, including the ABC.

The month after the election, it set up a National Committee of Audit, chaired by former head of the Business Council of Australia, Tony Shepherd, and with four other members sympathetic to the government’s aims of reining in expenditure. The Committee reported at the end of March, six weeks before the government’s first budget was due to be delivered. The Committee made 82 recommendations, among them to cease funding the Australia Network.

The orientation of the Committee was clear from its discussion of the changing international environment. It began by referring to the ‘increasingly globalized nature of the world and the complexity of the relationships that result’. With some echoes of the Howard government’s 1997 thinking, it then followed these conclusions about a more challenging and difficult international environment with recommendations to devote fewer resources to it. The committee thought that Australia should end future involvement in international expositions; re-assess the need for embassies in high-cost locations; review diplomatic resourcing; ‘rationalize’ Australia’s memberships of international organisations; and consider outsourcing passport production. It saw ‘opportunities’ to cease or scale back funding for public diplomacy and thought that ‘the Australia Network is an expensive option for meeting such diplomatic objectives given its limited outreach to a small audience’ (National Committee of Audit 2014, lv, 178).

By the time of the Committee’s report, it was already clear this was the government’s intention. The Australian newspaper had had three ‘exclusives’ in January all pointing in that direction. Partly the Australia Network was caught up in the government’s larger aim of keeping critical heat on the ABC. According to Abbott, ‘It dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but our own, and I think it is a problem.’ It easily followed from this that ‘Cabinet ministers believe the ABC’s coverage of Australia in the region is overly negative and fails to promote the nation as originally intended’ (Shanahan 2014).

An incident in late 2013 probably further hardened government attitudes. Relations between Indonesia and Australia reached their lowest point since the East Timor conflict of 1999 as news spread that Australia had tapped the phone of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife and other senior Indonesian officials. The story broke on the ABC and in the Guardian based on leaks from Edward Snowden, a whistle-blower previously employed by the US National Security Agency. It was projected into the region by the Australia Network and many Indonesian media fed off that. The fact that the story was accurate did not reduce the government’s wrath. Abbott opined that the ABC seemed to ‘delight in broadcasting allegations by a traitor’.

Advancing the national interest is the principal justification for investing public money in international broadcasting, which is often seen as a relatively cheap and effective means of projecting Australian values and features (O’Keeffe and Oliver 2010, 31). But from the beginning competing versions of pursuing the national interest arose. An early example was then External Affairs Minister in the early 1950s Percy Spender writing to ABC Chair Richard Boyer: ‘I think it is important that Radio Australia be looked at as an instrument of foreign policy’ (Tapsell 2014). What Spender and many of his successors, including Casey and Hasluck (Walker 2019, 233, 239) meant by this was that Radio Australia should echo the government’s views, should be a state broadcaster – and Radio Australia spent decades resisting such pressures (Hodge 1995).

The contrary view was first officially put in 1980 by the Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Kim Jones, in the Department’s submission to the Dix Inquiry into the ABC: that ‘whatever temporary embarrassments’ may be caused by the ABC’s international broadcaster, Radio Australia maintaining its independence is the key to its credibility, and hence to its effectiveness (Department of Foreign Affairs 1981). The Department’s submission to the ABC’s 1989 Review of Radio Australia confirmed this stance:

We see it as fundamental to Radio Australia's reputation that the Government be able to assert to the governments of neighbouring countries that Radio Australia is beyond the editorial or programming control of the Australian Government. In the end Radio Australia's independence, along with a record for accuracy, has been the source of its authority and, we judge, a major reason for its large audience. National interest, apart from liberal principles, suggests that we should not interfere with that (Tiffen 1989).

When Foreign Minister Bishop said she wanted news coverage that conformed more closely to the government’s policies, she was wanting a state broadcaster. The government was angry with the Australia Network’s coverage of the bugging of Indonesian leaders, but that was precisely the type of coverage where a public service broadcaster earns credibility with its international audience, reporting material embarrassing to its government, and so demonstrating its independence and enhancing its long-term effectiveness. It is not an argument that politicians in power tend to enthusiastically embrace.

The government’s decision to end the contract was quick and unanimous and it seems clear, as Scott said, that the Government was already set on this course before the election (Bodey 2014). Nobody at the Cabinet table was pro-ABC, said one close observer. The main public reasons given were that, according to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, the ABC had failed to meet its obligations and that the contract was the result of an illegitimate policy decision.

Certainly, the chaotic tender process made the Government’s attacks easier, and ministers frequently referred back to it. According to Bishop, the previous Labor government ‘corrupted the tender process … and prevented a competitive process from occurring [and this] has resulted in ongoing concerns about the contract that was awarded to the ABC’ (Kerr 2014a). Abbott concurred: ‘It i’s well known that the Coalition had enormous concerns about probity issues under the former government when the Australia Network was awarded. I think it was a particularly dodgy piece of work by the former government’ (Aston and Massola 2014). The ever-helpful Graham Richardson thought ‘It is even harder to escape that logic when the tender process is conducted and the loser declared the winner – the only possible result is inferior quality’ (Richardson 2014).

The argument that the ABC was not meeting the terms of its contract was more difficult to sustain. Bishop talked of the negative feedback she was receiving from the target audience, but never elaborated on who these complaints were from or what they concerned, except to criticize its New Year’s Eve program (Kerr 2014a, 2014b). There had been no mention of negative audience feedback in DFAT’s 2010 review of the network.

Similarly no evidence was produced to suggest Australia Television was not value for money. According to a 2010 Lowy Institute report, internal ABC figures put the network’s total reach at over thirty-two million viewers. ‘After nine years of relatively stable funding levels, the Australia Network has managed to achieve a penetration in the region (particularly in the Pacific) which positions it as a genuine challenger to its international counterparts’ (O’Keeffe and Oliver 2010). Scott had argued for years that the Australia Network, broadcasting in 46 countries represents the country’s most cost-effective form of soft diplomacy (Bryant 2014).

The Abbott Government’s first budget was a political disaster: ‘An unprecedented $80 billion cut to health and education spending over the next decade leads a list of tough savings measures affecting age pensioners, seniors concession card holders, family payments and people on the disability support pension in the Abbott government’s first budget’ (Kenny 2014).

Hardly noticed amid the carnage was the expected announcement that the Australian Network would cease. The ABC confirmed there would be up to 80 forced redundancies. Scott thought the decision was ‘bewildering’ and noted the Government’s decision ‘runs counter to the approach adopted by the vast majority of G-20 countries who are putting media at the centre of public diplomacy strategies to engage citizens in other countries’ (Jolly 2014, 25). There was no semblance of due process in this ending of the contract, but in reality the ABC had no comeback.

Experts on international broadcasting, Dover and Macintosh (2018), estimated annual funding for all the ABC’s Charter-prescribed international broadcasting activities dropped from around $36 million (including transmission funding) in 2013–14 to around $11 million (excluding transmission funding) in 2014-15. Staff numbers plummeted from 98 to 46 over the same period. So after cancelling the contract, ABC international broadcasting had around one third of its previous budget and less than half the staff.

Although it was the contract with Australia Television that was cancelled, much of the impact fell on Radio Australia. Radio Australia was reduced to three language services, each of them seriously cut. The Indonesian section, having once employed almost two dozen staff, was reduced to three people, as was the Tok Pisin service. Broadcasts to the Pacific continued, but the Pacific content in them was drastically reduced, as they relied overwhelmingly on Australian-generated material (Dobell 2014).

The cutbacks in language services had far-reaching effects on audience size. In Indonesia listenership in that language was almost four times greater than for broadcasts in English. It used to be joked that RA’s Indonesian listenership out-numbered the entire Australian population. Of more than 3 million letters received by Radio Australia over a 12 year period to 1989, just 8.5% were in English (O’Keeffe and Oliver 2010). In 2010 RA’s website received an average of 764,000 views monthly. By 2016–17 it was down to 187,885 (O’Keeffe and Greene 2018, 10).

Nearly three years later, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) decided to cease short-wave broadcasting (ABC 2016), finishing some services that still operated to the Northern Territory and internationally. The ABC, as usual under budgetary pressure, took the view that shortwave was an old and declining technology and it was more important to maintain television capabilities. The end of short-wave services had its greatest effect in the media-poor Pacific region, where in many areas short-wave radio was still an important medium (O’Keeffe and Oliver 2010). The ABC services no longer reached significant parts of the PNG Highlands and islands, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, and ten Pacific Island Forum nations no longer received any radio service from the ABC (O’Keeffe and Greene 2019, 10). When Radio Australia abandoned its frequencies in the South Pacific, Radio China International acquired them (Riordan 2018).

It is little wonder that former ABC international journalist Jemima Garrett (2018) concluded that ‘by 2017 Australia’s broadcasting in Asia and the Pacific had sunk to the lowest point in its history, just as the geostrategic environment began to demonstrate that it was most needed,’ while her colleague Graham Dobell thought that ‘Australia’s international broadcasting service is a wasting and wasted asset’ (2018, 11).

Perhaps prompted by criticism from the region, perhaps by China’s increased presence, in 2019 Prime Minister Scott Morrison suddenly announced a plan to give $17 million to Free TV, the commercial TV lobby group, for programs to transmit to the Pacific. The package included Neighbours, Home and Away and Border Security. Neither Free TV nor the Pacific Islander broadcasters had requested the package. One said it’s like asking for sustenance and getting candy (Watkins 2019). Not surprisingly the programs were strongly criticized as out of touch with their audience (Clayton 2022).

A report by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade in the last months of the Morrison Government was critical and included some references to media elements (Dobell 2022). Then in the weeks leading up to the 2021 election, the Solomons announced a new agreement with China, which gave the government’s mismanagement of relations with the region more prominence than in any earlier election campaign.

Explaining the collapse

How did what was at various times a substantial and promising project come so completely undone? The most basic reason is that neither major party had a strong and consistent commitment to it, and it got caught up in partisan divisions. However the two key destructive decisions were both taken by Coalition governments, both in their first year of government. In 1996 and in 2014, the services were performing well, and there were clear signs of an upward trajectory in programming and audiences, until that progress was disrupted by decisions which essentially closed them.

The politics of international broadcasting in Australia is further complicated by the role of News Corp. Australia has more concentrated press ownership than any other democracy (Papandrea and Tiffen 2016). Moreover the Murdoch press has an ongoing vendetta against all things ABC, and had commercial ambitions of its own in international broadcasting. Governments from both major parties were sensitive – to say the least – to the wishes of the Murdoch press.

Because there was never a bipartisan commitment to international broadcasting there was no continuity between governments of different colours. The outstanding feature of the last three decades has been the lack of a continuing and stable policy. ‘The policy reversals of successive governments, and ABC reactions to them since the mid-1990s, have led to many tens of millions of dollars being expended – and ultimately squandered – on three start-stop iterations of an Australian international TV service’ (Heriot 2018).

One symptom of this instability has been frequent name changes: First came Australia Television (ATV) in 1993, when the Keating Labor government gave the ABC start-up funding. After an unsuccessful interlude under the Seven network, Australia Television disappeared. In 2001 the service returned to the ABC, initially under the name ABC Television International. A year later, it was rebranded as ABC Asia Pacific, and then in 2006 had another name change to the Australia Network. Following the 2014 budget cuts, the Australia Network was closed, and in September was replaced by a drastically cut-down operation broadcasting domestic ABC content, Australia Plus. On July 1 2018, the network was renamed ABC Australia. As Dobell observed, Canberra’s level of interest ‘has been as changeable as the name’ (2018, 11).

A further factor – especially when neither major party has a deep commitment to the intrinsic worth of the enterprise – is that in a time of budget restraint international broadcasting is an easy target. Successive Australian governments have embraced the need for budget stringency, and cuts to international spending are the electorally easiest option, because there is no strong domestic group resisting them. A parallel series of cutbacks saw Australia’s foreign aid radically cut in contrast to trends in other wealthy democracies (Wade 2020, 2021), while Australia had fewer diplomats abroad in 2022 than it had three decades earlier (Fullilove 2022).

Nevertheless Australia’s disinvestment in international broadcasting was also sharper than many others. The contrast with the BBC World Service is stark. The British Government gave a new and generous funding package to it (Wright, Scott, and Bunce 2020, 610) while BBC Director-General Tony Hall committed the BBC to doubling its global audience to 500 million by 2022 (Webb 2014, 378). Several other state funded broadcasters – Al Jazeera, and services from China, Japan and Russia – also received increases, although the US under Trump was an exception (Heriot 2018).

A contributing factor is that the international service tended to be caught up in the internal politics of the ABC, an organisation often in turmoil having undergone 12 efficiency reviews since 2004 (Heriot 2018). Dobell (2018) feels that international broadcasting is such a low priority within the ABC that what is needed is a new entity, which he calls the AIBC, Australian International Broadcasting Corporation, an idea which found some support in a parliamentary committee in early 2022 (Dobell 2022). He argues that international services tend to be hostage to whatever else is occurring in the ABC, whose management structures, he points out, have had at least six major realignments since the 1980s (Dobell 2018). Dover and Macintosh (2018) took this a step further, advocating international broadcasting be separated from the ABC, for a ‘more nimble approach’. They state that that such an organisation would need bipartisan agreement and budget guarantees – although it is far from clear that such support would be more forthcoming to a stand-alone entity.

A more important factor is that the international service was inevitably caught up in the external politics of the ABC. All governments have issues with the national broadcaster. In recent decades this has become more acute on the conservative side (Ricketson and Mullins 2022, Ch 3). Prime Minister Howard’s principal adviser Graham Morris described the ABC as our enemy talking to our friends. In the years since, that essentially negative attitude has been manifested in budget cutbacks, hostile Board appointments and an eagerness to publicly criticise its performance. This also points to a final reason why an international television service should stay with the ABC – an international service needs the institutional strength to remain a public service rather than a state broadcaster. A small stand-alone entity would be more vulnerable to political interference.

Mitch Fifield, an IPA cadre-cum Liberal Minister, had the distinction of being the first Communications Minister ever to have called for the privatisation of the ABC, a call he sought to explain away as the act of a ‘frisky backbencher’ (Robins 2015). In June 2018, the Liberal Party Council, in theory a peak policy body of the party, voted to privatise the ABC (Keane 2018), which electorally sensitive ministers quickly said would not happen. None, however, endorsed the principle of a public service broadcaster or offered any praise for the ABC’s performance.

Although the ABC has more problems with the conservative side of politics, it typically also has issues with Labor governments, which affect its policies on international broadcasting. Right from the beginning, Dobell noted that ‘the Keating cabinet’s debates about establishing [an international service] veered off into rant-and-rave sessions about how ABC domestic reporting was hurting the government’ (2018).

On the other hand, the best hope for a high quality international service is in synergies with ABC domestic services. The growth of the ABC’s News 24 channel had spinoffs for the Australia Network. The founding of the Asia Pacific News Centre in 2009, the only newsroom in Australia dedicated to delivering news to and from the region, promised to cultivate greater expertise than either a domestic or international broadcaster alone could build.

In addition, like the British experience with the BBC, Australia’s international broadcasting services have enjoyed a reputational benefit through their association with the ABC, which operates at arm’s length from government. Numerous surveys show that among media the public broadcaster has much higher credibility with the public than do commercial organisations, and also that its consumers are better informed than others (Soroka et al. 2013; Tiffen et al. 2017). It is likely that this also extends to international audiences. So while being part of the ABC has brought considerable problems for international broadcasting, these are outweighed by the benefits.

Problematic policy making

Allan McConnell distinguished between three types of policy success: Process success refers to high standards of consultation and examination of options, and where the policy is accepted by a sustainable coalition. Political success refers to the policy helping the government pursue its agendas and values and enhances its electoral prospects. Programme success refers to whether the policy achieves its goals and produces desired outcomes (McConnell 2010, 40–54).

Decisions on Australia’s international television broadcasting first received strong public attention when it was caught up in the conflicts between Rudd and Gillard, and the process failures at that time made the whole enterprise vulnerable once there was a change of government.

A key lesson from policy making on international television services is that if there are process and political failures programme success will not be judged on its merits. This is especially true in an area such as international broadcasting where there are not widely visible markers success (McConnell 2017).

When international broadcasting is considered as a tool of policy, the most basic questions are is it a worthwhile endeavour, is it working, and is it providing value for money? The most notable aspect in reviewing the policy making over the last three decades is that there was no consideration of these questions. Neither of the big decisions curtailing the ABC’s international broadcasting were preceded by any evidence of falling effectiveness. When the Howard and Abbott governments cut funds for the endeavour, they did not at the same time seek to change the ABC Act under which this was a charter activity of the national broadcaster. Neither Treasury nor the Abbott Government’s National Audit Commission – who both questioned whether Australia’s international TV service provided value for money – seriously considered how one might decide this, what data would be needed or what criteria would be used.

There is considerable data collected by marketing agencies and by the ABC itself, on the potential size of audiences of the TV service, and estimated audience reach, the number of local relays or rebroadcasts of their content in target areas and digital downloads. Several surveys suggested that long term changes in attitudes to Australia came with listening to RA (Heriot 2022).

Robert Entmann wants to go beyond such audience research, and has argued that the ‘literature on public diplomacy lacks a theoretical infrastructure’ (2008, 87). Entmann has argued that even within the US, let alone internationally, there is no clear consensus on how media coverage interacts with public and elite opinion to affect policy processes and outcomes. This is setting a very high – indeed in the real world impossibly high – bar for measuring effectiveness.

In some ways the search for the impact of international television services parallels the differences between commercial and public service broadcasting. The former has a simple definition of success, defined in terms of profits and audience and advertising shares. The latter though invokes much grander ideals and consequently measures of success are much more uncertain with competing and often intangible goals (Broadcasting Research Unit 1986; Born 2014).

Whether or not such impacts can ever be authoritatively gauged, the outstanding feature of policy making on Australian international television services was how little they counted. The common factor in all the foregoing explanations for the collapse of Australia’s international broadcasting is that the key decisions about what should be an instrument of international policy were a by-product of domestic concerns and conflicts.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Graeme Dobell, Jemima Garrett, Geoff Heriot and Mark Scott for discussions of these issues and feedback on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rodney Tiffen

Rodney Tiffen is Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. He has written widely on media and politics. His latest (co-authored) book is How America Compares (2020).