Kim Williams, the current chair of the ABC, wants the organisation to be “the last broadcaster standing” and one of his first acts has been to reverse the board’s decision to start reducing the corporation’s radio networks.
“It is not available to the ABC to simply withdraw a variety of broadcast services, like for example Radio National or ABC Classic or Triple J,” Williams told Guardian Australia. “They are part of our responsibility.”
ABC’s managing director, David Anderson, said last year it was inevitable that the audience on some AM services such as RN and NewsRadio will be so small “that we’ll look at rationalising that over time”.
In a broad-ranging interview last week Williams hit out at the ABC’s critics, saying News Corp’s obsession with the public broadcaster is “unbalanced and, at times, fairly unhinged” and should largely be ignored.
Appointed by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in January, Williams took over from Ita Buttrose in March and has wasted no time campaigning in Canberra for better funding. He says his role is to be “an active advocate for the ABC in terms of its secure resourcing”.
“And I make no apology for that”.
When he arrived at the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters, Williams says there were discussions around making podcasts “the delivery agent of the future” and about reducing the number of AM stations in the race towards digital transmission.
“And in my view that’s getting slightly ahead of where the audience is,” he says. “I don’t agree with that. I have reversed that decision.”
The ABC has been preparing Australians to move from traditional broadcasting to digital on-demand services for some time, pouring resources into iview and the ABC Listen app. Last year the corporation announced a “significant transition” towards digital transmission and the reduction of resources invested in AM radio stations by 2028.
It is understood before Williams arrived the board had taken a serious look at various means of reducing the number of talk services (RN, NewsRadio and local radio).
“At the end of five years we expect most of audience engagement will be through a digital product or a digital service,” Anderson said last year.
But Williams says ABC radio has to be available both via broadcast and digital. He also believes radio has suffered from internal neglect for some years and should have a much stronger audience.
“The ABC has an obligation to be a reliable broadcaster for the nation,” he says. “And I would offer the view that we are the last broadcaster standing, because there are a lot of people in Australia who don’t have money. A lot of people in Australia who are elderly and technologically unsophisticated.
“The ABC has an obligation to deliver for those, in addition to the ABC’s absolute statutory obligation to being an innovator.”
(By the way he hates the 2012 rebranding of Radio National to RN, saying it fails to express what the network is.)
Williams’ determination to improve radio and to back broadcasting as a delivery platform has won him some fans. But when a candid briefing he gave to RN staff last month was leaked to media, it caused him some embarrassment.
“That caught me by surprise,” Williams says, following the story’s publication in the Nine papers. “It was a lesson learned, but I do not resile from the things that I say.”
In the briefing he had been critical of story placement on the ABC News website, saying less prominence should be given to lifestyle stories.
But earlier when asked about lifestyle content on the ABC, he told the Guardian the broadcaster catered to all tastes and he “wasn’t in the business of judging the audience for what they want to consume”.
“The ABC’s primary obligations are obviously to what might be regarded as serious news and commentary and to things that reflect a plurality of serious aspirations on the part of the community, or things that are in mainstream entertainment,” he says.
ABC News, which is undergoing a major revamp, resumed its place in June as Australia’s top online news brand with almost 12.6 million unique visitors, overtaking Murdoch’s news.com.au, which had been number one for 17 months.
Williams last worked at the ABC in 1995 when Aunty had 10,000 staff; it now has just under 5,000 but has to provide many more services.
He has calculated that, after years of budget cuts, the public broadcaster is underfunded in real terms to the tune of half a billion dollars compared to 40 years ago.
At the Byron Writers Festival on Saturday, Williams was refreshingly candid during a conversation with former ABC broadcaster Kerry O’Brien. He said the version of the ABC he found was one that is “severely depleted and diminished” and the internal cultural consequences were that it had become more timid and “fractured into a series of tribes”. He took aim at the ABC’s documentary output, saying it was “in a bad place”; said its drama is “less distinctive” than it once was and that ABC news sometimes had a “tabloid sensibility”.
But Williams is upbeat about being able to help turn the ABC around. He is confident management has a strong argument for better funding and it lies in its role in creating social harmony. “I believe in a time of massive misinformation and disinformation the national media organisation has a very special role to play,” he says.
The ABC is also crucial at a time when Australian culture is being swamped by international content on the streaming services like Netflix.
Williams says the government’s failure to meet the deadline of 1 July to introduce legislation for local quotas on streaming platforms is “a bump in the road” and he doesn’t doubt its commitment.
“But there is a very substantial case for investing in the ABC to ensure that there is secure, quality Australian ballast in the national diet when we’re being completely overwhelmed with non-Australian material.
“One must have real concern as to what the children of Australia are consuming and how their hearts and minds [and] aspirations are actually being informed.”
It has been 11 years since Williams resigned as chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, just 20 months after he joined. It was a bruising experience and he has few friends at the company’s Holt St headquarters these days, and even less patience for its culture war.
“There are certain sections of the media, which seem to be concentrated in News Corp, that have an obsession with commentary on the ABC,” Williams says. “I don’t share the view of many that one should respond to every critical comment that’s made.
“I think [ABC] people should generally be fairly resilient and I have a deep skepticism that the enthusiasm that is channeled by News Corp into its neverending stream of attacks on the ABC is shared by the readership.”
In the past few months, News Corp’s the Australian newspaper has targeted political journalist Laura Tingle, who is also a ABC board member, for comments she made at a writers festival. The paper has published dozens of articles critical of her every move.
“I mean, it borders at times on obsession,” Williams says. “If you stand back from it, you would ask, ‘are you really serious?’”
