Image: Gerard's World / flickr

08 August 2011The latest cut hurts, says Quentin Dempster in the Sydney Morning Herald, but it's not the deepest in an already de-skilled ABC.

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At last the hidden agenda has been exposed. The outsourcing of ABC television production to the commercial sector now covers all drama, documentary, natural history, most feature programming and, increasingly, studio-based light entertainment.

The ABC's explanation that resources from arts and other programming needed to be diverted to support prime-time content is disingenuous. In the digital revolution, prime-time is dead. Audiences can download programs at any time.

The anguish now felt inside the ABC from the latest program cuts would not arise if there was a genuine mixed production model with the ABC retaining the capacity and leverage to make the full genre range of copyright programs itself by developing its own talent and skills base.

But through a long and deliberate board and management policy to dismantle and de-skill internal television production, the ABC is now totally dependent on the commercial television production sector for almost all Australian non-news content.

What's wrong with that? Our creative independence is being crushed out of us along with a conduit for diversity and originality nurtured in a creative training ground. The ABC cannot be truly independent unless it has a capacity to create and produce its own original programming. The public trust in the ABC is based on an expectation that we are independent of commercial influence. We are not.

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Photo: Gerard's World / flickr