Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, we saw the shocking decision from the ABC to cut 120 jobs across various newsrooms. This has been one of the biggest redundancies that the ABC has seen since 2020. It will result in local bulletins on Sundays being cut across the country. It is a terrible, terrible decision. South Australians deserve their own local news bulletin on Sundays. They deserve it on Mondays, they deserve it on Tuesdays, they deserve it on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Local news is essential, and it is absolutely gobsmacking that the ABC has taken this decision.

I wrote to the minister last week about this, and I'm glad to see that she has sought a briefing. But briefings are not enough. What we do know is that a decade of cuts from the previous government—starting of course with Tony Abbott and the coalition government—the ABC has been under funding cuts for over a decade, and it is time that they are fully reversed. The Albanese government must reverse all of those cuts, and today they still have not. There is a shortfall. So I urge the government to fund the public broadcaster better. And, to the ABC management: cuts to local news bulletins will only see less community engagement, less public interest journalism and more disinformation and rubbish from the Murdoch press. In a time of misinformation and the deliberate— (Time expired)