The budget puts ABC and SBS on more stable footings - their recovery is now down to them
The budget puts ABC and SBS on more stable footings - their recovery is now down to them
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade, on the morning after the Federal budget. Today, we examine the implications of the budget for the media industry and recount another droop on the Unmade Index.
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Stopping a riot
Tim Burrowes writes:
Back when I used to go to government press conferences in the UK, the journos used to have a huddle afterwards to compare angles. It led to groupthink, I know.
One journalist had a catchphrase when he reflected on the minister’s announcement: “Nothing to start a riot, nothing to stop a riot”.
Which is also a pretty good summary not just of the overall impact of yesterday’s budget, but of its effect on the media and marketing industry in particular. However, there were a few details worth pulling out.
ABC and SBS switch to five year funding cycle
The most significant thing confirmed in the budget had been telegraphed since the election.
The funding of the ABC and SBS will switch to five-year cycles rather than the previous three-year arrangement. In theory that will be less political and give more planning certainty.
The ABC will get $1.1bn per year and SBS $334.9m. By comparison, the running cost of Nine’s broadcasting, streaming and publishing businesses is about $1.5bn per year, while Seven spends about $1.2bn.
There will be an extra $72 million over four years to extend three projects which otherwise would have ended, covering regional news gathering by the ABC, support for non-English language SBS audiences and audio descriptions for vision impaired viewers.
There’ll also be $8.5m to expand the ABC’s broadcasting infrastructure in the Pacific.
The mood music about the public service broadcasters, and the ABC in particular, has changed since the election.
After the Guthrie-Milne leadership disaster which saw managing director Michelle Guthrie and chairman Justin Milne ousted five years ago, the ABC disappeared into the doldrums. At least in part this was because of a funding squeeze from the Coalition government.
But the result was an organisation which went from behaving like it was open to the outside world and a new media leader under managing director Mark Scott to an embattled, insular one. The choice of insider David Anderson to steady the ship after Guthrie was pragmatic, but it also created an organisation which hasn’t shown any new energy at the top.
The Australian reports today that the budget papers show that the ABC’s digital audiences have actually declined, from 17m weekly active active users to 13.4m - that was despite setting a target to grow the number to 19.2m.
The ABC is an organisation which has been haemorrhaging audience. If it took a lead in podcasting, as it may have done, we don’t really know - it still hasn’t joined the Podcast Ranker despite committing to do so on several occasions. The reason seems to be technical rather than political, but in itself that says a lot about the organisation’s ability to get stuff done in the digital sphere.
The challenge for the ABC now the excuse (and truth) of spending uncertainty is over is to treat is as a fresh start. Spending that billion dollars as it always has, will only deliver the same result.
More for niche media
While the budget lacks (at first look, anyway) the gifts for the big commercial media players which was a trademark of the Coalition years, there is some money for areas where the market is not sustaining journalism.
Newswire service the Australian Associated Press gets $5m “while the News Media Assistance Program is developed to guide news media policy intervention, and support public interest journalism and media diversity.”
News MAP, as it’s known, will be primarily focused on hyper local journalism where business models have not emerged to pay for it. With due respect to News Corp’s executive chairman Michael Miller when I quizzed him on this point during the Unmade podcast, that feels like local democracy’s main hope.
Scam callers crackdown
A further announcement in the communications space: “ACMA will receive $10.5 million to establish an SMS Sender ID Registry for brands to record their primary and associated names used in text message headers. The initiative will help telecommunications companies prevent scammers from spoofing industry or government brand names – such as Linkt or myGov – in text message headers to deceive Australian consumers.”
As regular readers will recall, Unmade was a victim of one of those type of spoofing scams which saw our bank account cleared out last year, so the topic is close to our hearts.
However, it is a failing on the part of the telco giants, that if creating this infrastructure is possible for the relatively small cost of $10.5m they haven’t already implemented it on the interests of protecting their customers.
Profit offshoring
The tax crackdown on the digital platforms offshoring local revenue to low tax territories seems to be one of those things constantly promised and never quite delivered. It was promised again yesterday.
It’s still urgent. As the Australian Financial Review reported last week, Google and Facebook pulled in $8.3bn in local revenue last year, but booked most of it as reseller revenue so avoided the local tax. Google paid income tax of just $93m, while Facebook paid $35m.
That’s an effective tax rate of 1.5%. That should be enough to start a riot.
Unmade Index slips again
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
The Unmade Index fell slightly yesterday, leaving our measure of the performance of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks at 640.1 points, a fall of 0.5% from the day before.
Falls were seen across almost all the Index; the biggest loser of the day was communications agency holding group Enero, dropping 4.09%.
Nine, Southern Cross Austereo and IVE Group also saw drops in their share price, falling by 1%, 1.82% and 1.26% respectively.
The sole winner on the Index was Seven West Media, after a week of consecutive falls. It saw a 4.35% rise in its share price yesterday.
Time to leave you to your Wednesday.
We’ll be back with more tomorrow.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media