Media Report

Humphrey B Bear re-runs at least 4 times a day on ATV,in major cities like Jakarta. But no more. Australian Television International or ATV - the service which Channel 7 broadcasts into South East Asia has closed down.

Originally the brain-child of then ABC Managing Director, David Hill, ATV started beaming into Asia in the early 90s. In 1998,it was bought by Kerry Stokes' Seven network. The station continued to lose money, but Mr Stokes kept the station running when the Howard Government announced a tender for a $50million, five-year subsidy for a new, fresher ATV.

Seven has pulled out of the tender process despite being the front-runner leaving the tender process unresolved.

Why was the ABC not asked to submit a tender, and what is the fate now of other tenderers such as Imparja Television.

That's one of the stories, this week,on The Media Report.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Mick O'Regan: Welcome to The Media Report.

This week, Australia's television service to the Asia Pacific was finally turned off, when Channel Seven pulled the plug on Australia Television International.

It means no more endless repeats of Humphrey B. Bear in Hong Kong, but it also means a significant gap in our communications with the region; it seems engagement with Asia will not be televised. At least not immediately, which is a pity, given it's taken so long to get over local reservations about Australia.

Mark Armstrong: Well we've now travelled a long, long way from where we were in the early '90s with the vision of an Australian service that embraced the rest of the Asian region and helped people to understand, frankly, that we're not just the white trash of Asia. I'm very sad that although Seven gave it their best shot, it's not commercially viable, but I'm not totally surprised that it isn't commercially viable; the ABC never planned this as a commercial service. We were misrepresented in some quarters. I don't know whether anybody can make it a commercially viable service.

Mick O'Regan: Media consultant, Professor Mark Armstrong, who was ABC Chairman when the Australian Television story first flickered into life. More from him later in the program.

And a story of a different network: Sydney's leading commercial radio station, 2UE, home to Alan Jones and John Laws, is reportedly sold, creating a new significant commercial radio network. What will it mean for the stations that dominate the airwaves in our biggest radio market?

That's coming up here on Radio National's Media Report.

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Mick O'Regan: Broadcasting television to Asia has been part of the grand Australian plan for 'engagement' during the past decade. In 1992 the Federal Government funded the ABC operation, Australia Asia TV, a service beamed into the Asia-Pacific.

According to the Keating Government, such a service was 'a key element in the strategy of forging closer relationships between Australia and countries in our region.'

The ABC ran the service until the Mansfield Inquiry in the late '90s, recommended it be sold. The Seven Network took the operation over with government funding, but has struggled to make it commercially viable. Seven indicated as much as long ago as last August.

Despite this, our interest in the region hasn't waned. Earlier this month the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, stated the fluidity and instability in our region demands our continuing attention and response, and his office has indicated that the government is 'considering urgently' other possible options to provide the service.

The ABC's London correspondent, Phillip Williams, spoke to the Foreign Minister about the demise of Australia Television.

Phillip Williams: Mr Downer, Australia Television International, off the air now after many years on air; is this the end of the government's attempts to secure its future in Asia?

Alexander Downer: No, it's not. I think it's important we do have a television service into Asia, and we're discussing a replacement deal with another organisation at the moment. We hoped that it will be possible to negotiate a successful agreement between Channel Seven and SBS; unfortunately the negotiations between Channel Seven and SBS fell through; that was something that was beyond our control. But anyway, that's happened. Channel Seven don't really want to continue with the process with SBS. We do think it's important Australia has a television presence in Asia, and we're now negotiating with other groups to provide a replacement service.

Phillip Williams: Can you say who that is?

Alexander Downer: No I don't want to do that, I don't think that's fair that I get into that. But we did put the service out to - well, we put financial support for the service out to tender, and there were a number of bidders, so we're talking to the other bidders now.

Phillip Williams: So the rumoured $10-million to $15-million, that's still on the table? That's not being altered in any way with the new configuration?

Alexander Downer: No, we're still offering financial support for an appropriate service. In the end we felt that the Channel Seven service wasn't good enough, and Channel Seven weren't getting big enough audiences. Their audiences were really very small, and so that's why in the first place we tried to get that service reinforced. We hoped that the negotiations between Channel Seven and SBS would work out; they didn't work out, we accept that. But we do want to see a service and so we'll be negotiating for an improved service with others.

Phillip Williams: Is that determination to have that service driven mainly as a window into Indonesia, to ensure that we have that influence through these troubled times?

Alexander Downer: No, it's not specific to Indonesia, it's more generalised than that. We think it's important that Australia does have a television service through the Asia-Pacific region, it shouldn't just be left to the British and the Germans and CNN, that Australia should have a television voice into the region as well. ATV-I has not been successful, the audiences have been very small and they've been almost exclusively expatriate audiences. Radio Australia has had much better penetration into the Indonesian community, for example using Indonesia, and into other parts of the region. But nevertheless we want to work at getting an effective television service going because we think that Australia should have a television voice, not just Britain, Germany and the United States.

Mick O'Regan: Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, with the ABC's Phillip Williams in London.

The Federal Opposition has accused the Government of an agenda driven by short-term cost-cutting, and of regularly sending the wrong message to our Asia-Pacific neighbours.

I asked the Shadow Communications Minister, Stephen Smith, what position Labor held on Australia Television.

Stephen Smith: Well firstly in terms of the Government's handling of it, we believe that's been a debacle which has had serious adverse, national consequences for us. Our international broadcasting, both radio and TV, is very important to our standing and role in the Asia-Pacific region, not just for our voice being heard in those relevant countries, but also for Australian nationals or ex-pats who happen to be residing there. And so what we've seen with the most recent developments is the Government hasn't even been able to organise an effective replacement to Channel Seven when the current contract expires on midnight on Thursday of this week; it's not as if they haven't had plenty of notice, so their handling has been a debacle. So far as our approach is concerned, our approach has been we could see no good reason why this wasn't a matter for the national broadcaster, and my starting point, if we're elected to government, would be that my preference would be, my policy preference would be that the national broadcaster, the ABC, do this as part of its international broadcasting roles. My difficulty of course will be that if in the event a contract is signed with an alternate provider in the meantime, then I'll obviously have to wait until the expiration of those contractual arrangement before I'm in a position to do something which I would regard as being preferable.

Mick O'Regan: Realising of course that you are in Opposition, can I just ask you though about the maintenance of a subsidised scheme whereby the Government would provide public funds that would aid a commercial operator establishing a viable television service in the way that the current scheme has been set up, would you continue with that subsidised arrangement?

Stephen Smith: Well I might have no choice in office, because of the contractual arrangements, we'd need to wait and see. But certainly that form of arrangement would in my view be better than the service simply fading to black. But if the government is going to make a contribution, or the taxpayer is going to make a contribution, then my starting point is that the most effective taxpayer-subsidised or taxpayer-funded contribution is through our national public broadcaster, the ABC.

Mick O'Regan: And would a Labor government commit sufficient funds?

Stephen Smith: Well now you're running me up very close to being put in a position of making an express, detailed financial commitment, and as we've made it clear, and if Simon Crean is listening to this, he'll be listening very carefully, we've made it clear that in terms of our detailed financial commitments, we will make those well-known between now and the election, but we're not sufficiently enough advanced in the electoral or the budget cycle to be able to go into details. So once the May Budget is out of the way, once we get closer to the election, which we expect in October/November/December, then we will have an express detailed commitment. But so far as my recommendation to my colleagues, or my aspiration is concerned, international broadcasting by the national public broadcaster both through Radio Australia and through Australian Television International, is one of my priorities; I think the government made a very serious mistake in the way in which it denuded Radio Australia of funds, chucked Radio Australia off the Cox Peninsula, leaving our footprint into the Asia-Pacific region really quite impaired. And just by way of passing, people should understand that one of the consequences of Australia Television International essentially fading to black, midnight on Thursday, will be that Radio Australia is as we speak, currently running around desperately trying to ensure that it has alternate transmission arrangements for some Pacific and Asian countries like Papua-New Guinea, Fiji, Hong Kong, cities like Jakarta and Phnom Penh and some Pacific islands like the Solomon Islands and Tonga and Vanuatu, because currently Radio Australia piggy-backs on the Australian Television International transmission, and so if we're not careful, Radio Australia at midnight on Thursday will also fade to black in those areas. The debacle started with the Mansfield Report recommendations in this area, and the government's very foolish adoption of them. And I think it's true to say that you would have noticed at the end of last year, the government backfilling some funds for Radio Australia to, in part, make up some of the funds that were taken away. It hasn't been a complete restoration, but that of itself, I think, was an acknowledgement that particularly in light of difficulties in East Timor in particular, in Fiji, in Papua-New Guinea, that this was an essential national service and they had foolishly essentially cast it, in part, aside.

Mick O'Regan: Federal Shadow Minister for Communications, Stephen Smith.

Over at Radio Australia, the ABC's international radio network, the demise of Australia Television has brought a number of practical problems, as Stephen Smith noted, especially regarding access to the Palapa satellite.

Of course Radio Australia took a hefty blow in mid-1997, when the network bore the brunt of reductions to ABC funding. In fact Radio Australia's staff and transmission resources were effectively cut in half.

I asked the Director of Radio Australia, Jean-Gabriel Manguy, what the Australia Television closure would mean to his network.

Jean-Gabriel Manguy: Well Radio Australia and the ABC, if you want, haven't had anything to do with Australia Television in the past three years. However, Radio Australia has been using and sub-leasing from Channel Seven and Australia Television, some satellite capacity over Asia and the Pacific. And this satellite has enabled us to arrange and to facilitate a number of relays and rebroadcasts throughout the region. This has been a very important part of our strategy to reach new audiences following the closure of the Darwin transmitters and so on. So anything that affects our capacity to have access to the satellite has dire consequences for us.

Mick O'Regan: Who won't hear Radio Australia now?

Jean-Gabriel Manguy: Well if we don't access to the satellite, a number of live relays in Papua-New Guinea, in Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Nauru, Tonga, Samoa, Kiribati and also in Asia in Jakarta, in Phnom Penh and in Hong Kong, these relays, we won't be able to make them happen. We're certainly actively looking at other ways of ensuring that on one hand we stay on the satellite and that on the other we can keep that service maintained. But if it disappears it will be a very tough situation which we will have to resolve.

Mick O'Regan: So you're in a position now where you're having to hunt round to find ways of getting your material broadcast in a variety of Asian-Pacific countries?

Jean-Gabriel Manguy: The expectation was certainly that Australia Television would stay on air and that the Palapa satellite would remain the satellite used by Australia Television and therefore we could keep on having access to it. As it turns out it has surprised everyone that this will not be the case, and so yes, we have to hunt around. Having said that, I must say here that in the past three, four years Radio Australia has gone out, not only making programs but to find audiences, and as it is we have a number of relays, a number of partner stations in Asia and the Pacific, it's been a very successful story. We have at present 110 stations in 25 countries in our region, which week in, week out, relays some Radio Australia programming, whether it's in English, Chinese, Indonesian and so on. So this is not a new game for us, if you want, but certainly this is unexpected.

Mick O'Regan: So have you been given any guarantee, either by ABC management or by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that measures will be taken to ensure the constancy of Radio Australia's broadcasts?

Jean-Gabriel Manguy: Well at this stage as it is, we know that Australia Television is not going to be on the air; we are now talking directly to the satellite operators, Satalindo, that's an Indonesian company, to see what kind of arrangement we can organise with them. So at least that's where we're at; we're finding alternatives to what was the arrangement until now.

Jean-Gabriel Manguy: Do you get the sense from people who receive Radio Australia and who may have been viewers of Australia Television, that there is confusion about the way that Australia is conducting its external broadcasting policies at the moment?

Jean-Gabriel Manguy: Well we at Radio Australia do not get that sense. As I said, in the past three years we've been very active and certainly in the Pacific we are very present on local airwaves. In Jakarta we are very present on local airwaves every afternoon. What you have to realise is that on one hand Australia Television has been an English-language only service with a lot of Australian content, broadly catering for Australian expatriates. So I would argue, a fairly narrow audience. Whereas Radio Australia, as you know, through the use of Indonesian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Pidgin, is a media organisation that speaks to the region itself, not to expatriates only.

Mick O'Regan: Jean-Gabriel Manguy, the head of Radio Australia.

If there's any silver lining to the demise of Seven's Australia Television, it's possibly the chance for a fresh start, one that might lead to the establishment of a credible network.

Mark Armstrong was Chairman of the ABC when Australia TV was initiated by the national broadcaster. He's now a Director of the communications consultancy, Network Insight.

Professor Armstrong has watched the whole process unfold, from promising beginning to lost opportunity, but remains optimistic.

Mark Armstrong: Well there are plenty of options, plenty of positive options for the future. But talking about where we are now, my understanding is (and I haven't had time to go into the details) my understanding is that what the government is still talking about is negotiations for a kind of hybrid service, which a commercial entrepreneur might provide with a lot of government assistance. In fact a lot more government assistance per annum than we could have ever dreamt of when we started it as an ABC service, which is a bit curious I have to add.

Mick O'Regan: Well it seems curious in that the government is now realising, as it were, almost too late, the value of having a television service into the Asia Pacific and is now prepared to spend more money on it, and yet it could have had a better service, better planned, a decade ago.

Mark Armstrong: And I would add for less than half the amount of the subsidy they're now talking about.

Mick O'Regan: Which is in the order of $10-million to $15-million annually?

Mark Armstrong: Well that's what I read about the kinds of figures, they're just media reports; we provided the service which was only ever intended to be modest. No-ones talking about blanketing the whole Asian region and having them all watch 'Home and Away', we're talking about having a presence and being part of this very rich and growing media environment.

Mick O'Regan: And yet when the government identifies Foreign Affairs priorities, recently the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer spoke to the Press Club, and one of the things he focused upon in his speech was the key to our national wellbeing being globalisation. And he actually had a definition of globalisation which talked about the increasing interconnectedness between societies. It would seem that on the one hand Australia has a foreign policy objective of increasing connectedness, but in our practice, using this as an example, we're woeful.

Mark Armstrong: Yes, but full credit to Alexander Downer for trying to support something in the area. Personally I think it's also a bit sad that all the impetus has to come from Foreign Affairs; this is really about the future of our society. It would be much better if some overall consortium, and that's an option, or ideally and unbiased, the ABC had been able to continue what it wanted to do, would provide the service which would probably be the more credible for not having any direction Foreign Affairs connection. I mean people are sensitive to these things, in the region. So I come back to the point that it could be happening now, it could be if the small service we started had been allowed to incrementally grow, it could be very effective and perhaps it will be. But we have to be rather critical of ourselves as Australians about this; we don't particularly like innovation, and when we started that service, we had tremendous support from all sides of politics, but we had a lot of criticism and scepticism, we had a lot of concern among our own staff. On the one hand we had management who wanted to run off with it as a commercial venture, which was definitely not the plan, and therefore we had a lot of our staff and the union who opposed the whole idea as commercialisation, I mean I think it was all so terribly sad when the ABC decided to sell the service. It more or less pulled the plug on a lot of the future shape of the ABC, which was also about aid programs in the region, about the network of correspondence and bureaux that we'd boosted, moving resources in from North America and Europe, which was the old colonial emphasis at the ABC, and I'm personally, and this is just looking from the outside, I'm a bit worried that we're sliding back to the colonial era, with the idea that if it doesn't happen in New York or London, it couldn't be so important.

Mick O'Regan: Well again that's a point that in fact Alexander Downer has made in an interview with ABC television I think, with Phillip Williams, when he actually said that the Asia-Pacific region shouldn't be left to the likes of the British and the Germans and CNN, that it was very important for Australia to have a television presence in our region.

But just picking up on the sensitivities that people in the region might have to government-sponsored broadcasting: does that mean that, say, a television model of Radio Australia might suffer in the eyes of some Asian receivers it wasn't fully commercial but it had a link to government that they didn't like?

Mark Armstrong: Look, that has some detriments, but appearing very commercial equally has detriments. I mean people know that every form of support comes with strings attached. We never encountered the problem in the early days of Australia Television that people were opposed to it or wanting to block it because it was seen as a government kind of service. I think that there's an issue there, but it's a very small one and it's only a distraction. What matters is to have a good reflection of what Australia's about, and even more important, Australia's independence and local perspectives to offer some current affairs and news about our own region. I cannot tell you, because I spent a lot of my time in the Asian region, I cannot tell you how much that is valued, to have a non-threatening country that's part of the region using its skills. I mean in the glory days, even though we only had about $3-million a year, in the glory days there were so many stories of Cabinets, of business leaders, of all kinds of people relying on Australia Television as a very respected source of information. And that's what matter more than trying to sell Australia, or do a marketing job for Australia, it's actually offering people something that they find interesting and engaging. But it's still possible, it's still possible.

Mick O'Regan: Or credibility; I mean one of the frequent criticisms being made of the programming schedule that I understand is now being broadcast, or was until the switch-off, was that there were four times a day 'Here's Humphrey' was repeated, there were large slabs of old Australian sitcoms, there was material that expatriate Australians watching Australia TV overseas, were basically embarrassed by. Has that done us harm do you think, in terms of credibility?

Mark Armstrong: No, I honestly think that's done harm. It may not have done much good for anybody except expatriates, those parts of the schedule because I mean I want to say Seven gave it their best shot, and I don't criticise them for doing what they could with the funds, but with the problem that they needed to get a large audience to run a commercial organisation, and I doubt that something that depends on a large audience can have the influence that this sort of channel needs. It's a matter of being part of the environment, it's a matter of being referred to, used, dipped into to specialise for particular interests. That's the way most television is going, apart from a few major conventional broadcasters.

Mick O'Regan: Mark Armstrong, from the consultancy, Network Insight.

On this story of Australia Television, The Media Report also contacted Channel Seven, and two of the remaining tenderers, but all declined to be interviewed.

This week's feature on Radio National's Radio Eye Sunday edition at 8.30 is 'Living in Negativeland'.

In 1991 the San Francisco Bay Area group, Negativeland, released a single titled, 'The Letter U and the Numeral 2' which contained a mangled version of U2's 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For', mixed with out-takes by a foul-mouthed veteran US radio presenter, Casey Kasem. The ensuing legal battle by all concerned, including the group's own record company, effectively removed the single from the marketplace, but it also confirmed Negativeland as a resilient bit of grit in the machinery of corporate culture.

Woman: We think we're going to have a problem with our clients, we don't think this is an appropriate vehicle for a client's advertising paper.

Man: Making distraction funny is the key to the commercial.

Man: In slow motion it's made the reality of place overcome the long .

Man: Are you one of those that follows the ads?

Man: I don't really follow the ads that much, it's more that it's like I've heard it on the News on TV, I've heard it on the News and the radio and I'm hearing it like right now, and this deceptive marketing ploy by Coke -

Man: Once again

Man: . a lot of free advertising. It's like even Pepsi is putting Coke into their ads because of the fact that they changed their formula.

Man: Once again we hear that voice from the wings, and this time it has a sharply accusing tone. You, it says, are denying the value of motivational research.

Mick O'Regan: And how dare you. A taste of this week's Radio Eye, at 8.30 on Sunday evening, here on Radio National.

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Mick O'Regan: According to newspaper reports, there is movement at the stations that dominate commercial New Talk radio in Melbourne and Sydney.

Southern Cross Broadcasting, which owns 3AW in Melbourne, has apparently added Sydney's 2UE to its stable. The deal would mean common ownership of the commercial front-runners, which may provide new opportunities for advertisers seeking a national market.

I asked media analyst, Bob Peters from the merchant banking arm of the ANZ, about the significance of the deal.

Bob Peters: It's a bit difficult to be too precise with an assessment, given that the terms of the transaction are not known, indeed it's not known that the transaction will occur at all, but if it does, there's a general perception that the radio stations 2UE, 4BC and the SkyRadio group, although they generate very good ratings and revenues, also have very high cost structures, and consequently the level of profit that they generate is not as good as comparable radio stations. Therefore the main challenge for Southern Cross will be to maintain the high ratings and high revenue of the two radio stations that they acquire, but at the same time lowering costs and thereby improving profitability.

Mick O'Regan: Southern Cross are of course the company that owns 3AW in Melbourne. If they can bring 2UE in, do they then really get a stranglehold on the major News Talk radio stations in those competitive markets of Melbourne and Sydney?

Bob Peters: Yes, that would certainly be the case. 3AW holds a position very comparable to the position held by 2UE in Sydney, the dominant station amongst all the listeners, but typically the top or second rating station in the marketplace and for one company to commonly own both stations would greatly enhance their sales appeal to advertisers.

Mick O'Regan: And for the listeners in those respective capital city markets, they're unlikely to notice major changes in what they hear from their radio stations?

Bob Peters: Again there's been nothing said by the company, but I think given the strong ratings performance of the two stations, particularly 2UE in Sydney, in the short term it's unlikely that there would be any major changes.

Mick O'Regan: Bob Peters from the ANZ Bank's merchant banking arm.

That's The Media Report for this week. Thanks to producers Donna McLachlan and John Diamond. I'm Mick O'Regan, thanks for your company.