The tech giants must be pursued for a cut of their substantial revenue to fund journalism in order to fight disinformation and “navigate the dangerous world”, ABC chair Kim Williams has said.
Last week a parliamentary committee recommended the government impose a tech tax on companies like Meta and Google as well as establish a fund to help traditional news media organisations.
Williams, who took over from Ita Buttrose as chair in March, said with Facebook and Meta gobbling up 70% of the digital advertising revenue, pressing them for a cut is a “mainstream democratic imperative”.
“I urge all parties to continue to pursue the digital titans for a fair cut of the revenues drained from mainstream journalism, the loss of which hurts the regions even more than the cities,” Williams said in his Menzies Oration in Ballarat on Wednesday evening.
Funding local news and public interest journalism was crucial in a world “in which the misuse of information and the distortion of culture poses such a grave threat to democracy”, Williams said.
“The tech giants will complain, of course, but chipping in to the common weal is a small price to pay for the highly profitable privilege of running media organisations in free, democratic countries with modern infrastructure.
“Without truth there can be no democracy.”
Like most big media companies, the ABC received money from Meta and Google through the news media bargaining code which allowed the broadcaster to hire 60 journalists in regional centres.
Facebook has announced it will no longer make payments under the code but Williams has guaranteed those positions will remain.
Williams said the ABC lacked the resources of CNN or BBC but it must set the standard for broadcasting quality, journalistic ethics and factual news.
The ABC’s allocation from government was $941.3m in the 2023-24 financial year, according to the annual report tabled in parliament on Tuesday.
The corporation received an additional $196.3m for transmission and distribution.
Williams made a renewed call for better funding of the ABC to “combat the organised lying by democracy’s enemies”.
He said the ABC, like all media organisations, was not perfect but should strive for the “dogged pursuit of truth” and always check its biases.
The public broadcaster cannot be “left” or “right” but must be about quality, creativity and the truth, he said.
“I do not hold the fashionable position that bias is acceptable and inescapable and that journalists have the right to express their personal political beliefs and pursue their personal political causes in their work as objective journalists,” he said.
“That ‘alternate’ view may sound progressive or liberating, but as I have argued, is ultimately damaging to our liberty.”
A former chief executive of News Corp Australia, Williams acknowledged the ABC had critics without naming them.
In August he told Guardian Australia that News Corp’s obsession with the public broadcaster was “unbalanced and, at times, fairly unhinged”.
He said the ABC’s critics tended to be from the right and he took them “very seriously”.
Williams said he could not ignore the reality that a significant number of those in power “think something is amiss” with the public broadcaster.
