October 07, 2004
The Australian

If the bookies are right, there won't be a change of government on Saturday
and all the huffing and puffing of the past six weeks - and the six months
before - will be consigned to history as the "steady as she goes" election.

Certainly nothing has emerged in media policies that would rock the boat
even if there were a change of government. The Coalition can't sell the rest
of Telstra or change cross-media and foreign-ownership laws, and Labor
won't, so unless there's a radical change of Senate numbers we're set for
more of the same.

Media issues have not figured in the campaign agenda. The Coalition's
policies may be announced today - 48 hours before polling - so they could
hardly be described as being of the highest priority.

But there was one interesting kernel in Labor's foreign policy plans
announced by Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd this week.
Labor says it will spend an extra $6million during the next two years to
rebuild and enhance Radio Australia's capabilities. A key part of this will
be to wrest back the Cox Peninsula radio transmitters from evangelical
religious group Christian Vision.

This takes us back to the 1997-98 budget, when the new Howard Government
stripped Radio Australia of more than half its annual funding - a cut from
$13.8 million a year to $6.3 million. At the same time it also pulled the
rug from under Australian Television International, an ABC offshoot that was
trying to become a self-funding TV service broadcasting into the
Asia-Pacific region.

The RA cuts forced a reduction of staff and services, and the closure of the
powerful shortwave transmitters on the Cox Peninsula near Darwin, which the
Keating government had spent $15million to upgrade in the early 1990s.
It also forced a rethink about how to provide relevant services through a
variety of outlets across a wide and disparate number of nations, time zones
and cultures. Put simply, RA learned to do more with less.

Under Rudd's plan RA will get an extra $6 million over two years to rebuild
its services, and "Labor will investigate the return of the Cox Peninsula
transmitters following the expiration of the current lease between the
Howard Government and the broadcaster Christian Vision".

The lease to CV was wrong in the first place. Public assets should not be
used to evangelise any religion to any foreign countries, but that aside, it
was also a lousy deal for taxpayers.

Although the details have never been made public, it is believed the lease
cost was a mere $2.5 million for 10 years, expiring in 2010, and the lease
deal included the outright purchase of much of the key equipment.

Labor may well investigate the return of the Cox transmitter, but wresting
it away from an entrenched and committed group of god-botherers won't be
easy - especially as the rival evangelists, Heralding Christ Jesus's
Blessings, are in the process of setting up a 31-tower transmitter array to
broadcast to half the world from Kununurra, just across the border in
Western Australia.
In 1997, the RA funding cut was portrayed as cutting waste. But the axing of
ATVI was nothing more than an ideologically driven political payback. The
service had begun under ABC managing director David Hill, a Labor mate, and
had been funded to the tune of $18 million over four years by Paul Keating.
To Howard's warriors, it was tainted and had to go.

The service was sold to the Seven Network's Kerry Stokes, but when he, too,
discovered there was no profit in it, he programmed it with cheap crap and
let it wither as a national embarrassment. When no more government subsidies
were coming, he let it die.

To his credit, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer recognised the value ATVI
brought to Australia in our region and he wangled $15 million in funds from
his own department to support a new service provided by the ABC - ABC Asia
Pacific. This is one of the ABC's quiet successes. It's now in its fourth
year (annual budget $18 million) and it provides an up-to-the-minute diet of
Australian drama from commercial and ABC sources, documentaries, news and
current affairs, and English language lessons.

It is available in 8.7 million homes, attracting an audience of 500,000
non-expatriate, mainly affluent, business-oriented viewers each month.

Next year, with or without an extra $3.5 million funding promised by Rudd,
the ABC plans to reconfigure the service so that it aims three specific
program streams into the Pacific, Asian and Indian markets and time zones.
The growth rate of ABC Asia Pacific viewing is reported to be about 30 per
cent a quarter.

No matter who is in government, this is a media success we should all be
happy to leave "steady as she goes".

Good! Hopefully that means two full hours of Lucky Ocean's "Planet" over Radio
Australia as well!!!