What would – and should – happen to the ABC under the next federal government?

Who could possibly argue with the idea that the ABC should be efficiently run and produce excellent programs?

No one, you would think. So why, then, has there been immediate resistance to Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s statement that, if elected next month, a Coalition government would “reward excellence” and “keep funding in place” if the ABC is “being run efficiently”?

The fact that Coalition governments – and Dutton himself – have historically been deeply hostile to the public broadcaster is part of it. Many have picked up on the implicit threat that if his government did not find “excellence”, its funding would be cut.

But there’s more than that. For example, who defines “excellence” and “efficiency”?

Second, the ABC is set up by statute to be run independent of government.

Third, the ABC has been subjected to a slew of efficiency reviews, in 1988, 1997, 2006, 2014 and 2018. Overwhelmingly, they found the ABC does more with fewer resources than its counterparts in the commercial media.

For example, in 2006, at the behest of the Coalition government led by John Howard, KPMG found the ABC was a “broadly efficient organisation” providing a “high volume of outputs and quality relative to the level of funding it receives”.

Let’s translate the consulting-speak. The ABC’s annual budget of $1.2 billion costs $43 per person in Australia. The cheapest subscription to Netflix costs more than twice that amount - $95.88 – and of course the ABC provides much more than a single streaming service.

Fourth, Coalition governments’ record of antipathy towards the ABC is most obvious in how they fund it.

As ABC chair Kim Williams said last week, in real terms the ABC’s funding is $150 million less than it was in 2013 when the coalition last came to power. This is notwithstanding the current Labor government’s restoring of at least some lost funding.

Add to this the fear that Dutton is seeking to emulate Donald Trump. Amid the tempest of economic and social measures the US president has brought in since his inauguration in January, his attacks on public and international broadcasting have passed unnoticed by many.

By executive order, Trump has abolished Voice of America (VOA), which began during the second world war. VOA has provided news to nearly 50 countries, including those that did not have press freedom. Its broadcasts are by statute meant to be accurate and objective. It has been an arm of soft power diplomacy for the US.

Trump has also threatened to defund the public broadcasters, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), labelling them “radical left monsters”.

The difference between public broadcasting in the US and Australia is that for the former, the government provides only a small percentage of its funding. Most of it comes from donations from citizens, grants from foundations and corporate sponsorship, according to a recent report in Forbes.

PBS and NPR occupy a smaller part of the overall US media landscape than the ABC and SBS in Australia, but NPR’s reporters in particular have been actively, if dispassionately, reporting on the Trump Mark II administration’s tumultuous first few months.

Like the VOA, the ABC’s international broadcasting arm is largely invisible to audiences in its host country. This means any cuts could well pass unnoticed, unlike, say, if the ABC said it could no longer afford to air the children’s TV series, Bluey.

Through radio, TV, and now online, the ABC has broadcast to Australia’s neighbours since the second world war, initially as an agent to spread democratic value, but in more recent decades to model effective public interest journalism. The ABC, like the BBC, has a charter of independence.

The ABC’s work in the international arena, through Radio Australia and ABC Australia, is vital, not only to bolster national security by providing trusted news and information about Australia and its allies, but by working alongside and supporting local Indo-Pacific news organisations.

The Albanese Labor government appears to have understood this threat, providing some extra funding for the international services mostly in response to China’s increased presence in the region, as Alexandra Wake argued in her 2024 book Transnational Broadcasting in the Indo-Pacific.

Labor’s funding boost remains inadequate, though, to properly broadcast an Australian voice to the region because, she argued, of increasingly fraught relations between nations, and a complex political and media environment.

One of the most pressing priorities now is to extend the Labor government’s Pacific Security and Engagement Initiatives (the original $8 million per year) which is due to end in June 2026. Without this, the ABC will have transmission to the region, but next to no appropriate content.

Australia needed to rectify past mistakes by increasing international broadcast funding and protecting that funding from future government cuts. Australia also needed to adopt the long-term thinking that China displayed if it was to counteract China’s strategic ambitions for the region.

By closing VOA, Trump and his government efficiency wrecking ball, Elon Musk, have actually left open an opportunity for Australia to lean into the unique strategic advantage granted by Australia’s economic and geographical place in the region.

The move to cut US aid supporting journalism extends to smaller outfits such as Benar News Pacific, which recently told its audience it was “pausing operations”.

For the past decade, Benar News (and its parent Radio Free Asia) has been reporting across the region on security, politics and human rights. “The US administration has withheld the funding that we rely on to bring our readers and viewers the news from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, the Philippines and island-states and territories in the Pacific,” it said in a letter from the editors.

Such local news services may be small but are a vital bulwark in the multi-polar world Trump seeks to shape.