Senate debates

Tuesday, 28 March 2006

Matters of Public Importance

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

5:05 pm

Photo of Nigel ScullionNigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The review will be announced in time. Of course, this will take into account ABC’s 2006-07 funding. Those on the other side may notice the date—it is not around the time that one would normally make those announcements, which is towards the end of June, but watch this space. The minister has said time and time again—and he has proved to be correct—and, since 1996, this government has said time and time again that the ABC will not lose funding.

We have from the other side this very poor argument, I have to say, that somehow getting rid of a staff-elected director undermines the independence of the ABC. There have been a number of independent reviews. We have already heard about the Uhrig review from my colleague Senator Ronaldson. I will quote from it. This is an independent review about good governance. It says:

... representational appointments can fail to produce ... objective views. There is the potential for these appointments to be primarily concerned with the interests of those they represent, rather than the success of the entity they are responsible for governing.

I have no problems with that at all. In fact, I can see the difficulty. If I were elected to represent the staff, that is what I should be doing there. Clearly, there would be a conflict of interest. If I were elected to represent the staff of the ABC, my view would be that I should represent their interests and not those of the body I should be representing—that is, the entire board of the ABC. That is why we have such governance arrangements in place. We can ensure that this conflict of interest cannot continue.

Of course, in that environment we had people like Maurice Newman. Mr Newman has resigned. Mr Newman, I would have thought, had a fair bit of credibility in terms of good corporate governance. At the time I understand that he was chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange. That is not something that you would say was just a small organisation which turned over the odd buck. You would have to be very cognisant of the propriety of those processes. Of course, he had to resign simply because he will not be associated with an organisation that cannot show that transparency and good governance. He has a reputation to uphold. So he got out. I can tell you now and I can advise those on the other side that you cannot come by people of that calibre every day. People on the other side are saying that somehow someone of that calibre is a government crony or someone we ring in. Decrying the good name of those sorts of people does neither them nor the people they accuse of poor behaviour any good.

This whole notion that you actually need an elected board member is just absolute nonsense. The managing director of the ABC is the managing director. We have had Senator Conroy on the other side say that the elected director is the only person who can have any clue about broadcasting or the ABC and how it runs. Of course, the facts of the matter are deliberately ignored. I think this is completely misleading. On the ABC board in fact we do have the managing director. The managing director has full knowledge of those matters. He is always a conduit between staff, management and the board.

I think that this line of debate, which has somehow tried to put forward this notion that the government has undermined the independence of the ABC, has fallen absolutely flat on its face. We have ensured that we have maintained the independence of the ABC by ensuring that there are no sectoral interests there to control it. Those people who are on that board are not there to look after the interests of a sectoral group. They are paid by the Australian people to look after their interests and that is what they should do. In terms of the commercialisation of the ABC, all I would say is that you should not look to this side; you should look to history. The Labor Party is on very shaky ground. In 1991, with the SBS Act, they were the ones to introduce limited advertising on SBS.

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