Lyle Clarke, East Ballina
J Rose, (Letters, 29 July), states that I missed the point he made about cuts to ABC funding. I think perhaps his figures must be wrong.
If the funding has been increased, why would the ABC reduce its staff by 250 and cut its programs? I know that ABC funding was reduced by $84 million in the last budget.
I quoted some ABC services to point out that they earned their funding; it wasn’t a gift.
May I also point out that jobs created by the drama ‘Windmill’; for script writers, producers, directors, actors and production crew, will be lost if funds are not available.
I also notice that another ‘Windmill’ was not mentioned – the exposure of corruption and injustice by shows like Four Corners.
Lyle, your efforts at convincing the inconvincible that the cuts the ABC. has been experiencing during the last nine years of Coalition Govt. are very real, are admirable, but I must be honest, you are flogging a dead horse here. I’ve been involved in politics for many years and while there is usually quite an amicable relationship between political operatives of different parties, the stupidity mostly comes from the blind followers of those parties.
Now Coalition Govt. Members know exactly what they’re doing to the ABC.; they are also well aware that the majority of Australians view the ABC. as the most trusted news outlet in the country, even more so in Regional areas. If the real Govt. agenda was exposed, they would be punished at the ballot box, so they go to great lengths to hide it, so they LIE. The Nationals have been raising concerns with their Liberal masters regarding ABC. CUTS for some time now, but as usual they’re to spineless to do anything about it.
Now the fellow in question who wrote the original letter, who you are trying to convince is up to one of two things, he is well aware of his Govt’s agenda of destroying the ABC. and is in complete support and is thus engaging in some very creative hyperbole trying to convince us that black is white. Or more troubling for him, is he actually believes his Govt’s bull$4!t and thus he mistakenly thinks everything is normal with the ABC.
The problem here is Lyle, whichever is true you are never going to convince this fellow otherwise, it’s the same as the so-called climate change debate, we are never going to convince the entrenched deniers that they lost the “debate” some 30 years ago. If they haven’t “got it” by now they are never going to, and there is really nothing we can do to help them.
Hi Keith…. well put. Common sense is all any of
us need to see, know & feel the damn obvious.
Deniers – talking parrots – are aware that they
‘stir the fur’ & that’s why they do it. Four Corners
is not mentioned mostly because you can’t
debate the truth with an obvious lie… not even
Murdoch would try that one on. So, we are
left with silly people & politicians that hyperbole
about our ABC simply because they can. There
is nothing more dangerous than a fool trying to
deliberate. The ABC needs more $$$ in order
to operate its full media output. The ‘plug’ got
pulled to half starve the National commentator
& that’s the truth of it. ScoMo’s afraid of it.
They don’t understand Lyle,
Australia’s inflation rate is low at about 1.43 percent for 2020 this year but on the huge number of services the ABC provides that 1.43 percent is huge in dollar terms. Any business needs growth and growth provides a dynamic stature to the government, the media and to the people of Australia. So growth has to be more than the inflation rate to be about 2.86 percent. To cut that rate down is a cut to expansion and a cut to its business.
So at the ABC the expansion rate is cut as well as $84 million so all services in and to Australia are expanding at about 2.8 percent while the money to the ABC stays near the same as last year and the year before. That is a cut as nothing is without growth in economic terms.
Last year in 2019 average weekly earnings for all Australians was $65,322. The year before in 2018 it was $63,700.
Now in the year 2020 if workers were still only getting the 2018 rate of $63,700 would they not think that was a cut when everything else has risen.