Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Corporate media grab: are we already Foxed?
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Shane Elson

Community Broadcasting Association of Australia

I’m Shane Elson, I suffer from multiple deficits, I was born in Tasmania, I’m white and a male. So I apologise for that.

I attended the 3rd funeral of a community radio person yesterday. A gentleman who was a friend, a mentor and a great encourager, in fact who was one of the founders of the community radio station that I’m involved in. He was the third person that we’ve lost in the last 6 months. A little under two months ago I buried a very close friend form our station. It’s led me into a bit of reflection about why these men donated so much of their lives and their passion to community media and attempts to engage their community with the issues that were important to them. So I apologise if I seem a little distracted and under-prepared.

A couple of things have come out in the last few days, which I’ve been following with great interest. One of the things was Steven Fielding, the new Family First Senator and Barnaby Joyce of the Nationals. Some of the comments that they’re coming out with recently, I almost hesitate to say it, give me a little bit of hope for the ABC and other organisations that there may be voices that we have underestimated in their ability to hold back some of the excesses that may be in the pipeline. So that was encouraging.

And then I heard yesterday that Lachlan Murdoch is returning to the country. He’s newly married, has a little baby, wants to come home and buy a mansion on the harbour. His father is very upset that he’s left the organisation. But I did note when I was reading The Age that he’s going to be retained as a consultant to the Murdoch empire. So Rupert is certainly not going to lose his input into the changing media landscape in Australia.

Also, the recent death, death – execution, let’s be up front about that – of Menezes in Britain.

You may be wondering why I’m raising those things, because we’ve had a lot of negative talk this morning and at last night’s session at RMIT, I felt a little bit depressed.

What I want to do is give you an insight into community media in Australia and the potential for you to take back the airwaves, which you are so obviously passionate about. There was a comment earlier about what’s happening in the US and the scene over there. There are some structural difference between community broadcasting in the states and in Australia that I just want to touch on. The establishment of the community sector there was by government decree, similar to ours, but there was a sunset clause in their funding, that was due to run out about 10 years ago, and they would have to go out and get their own money. In the lead up to that time, there were people saying we’ve got to go out and make alliances with the petrochemical industry and all the other bad capitalist businesses around the place in order to get money. So there was a cleavage in the community broadcasting sector. Some stations decided to go down that corporate track and others said, ‘no we’re based here in our local communities and we are going to reject the corporate money and go it alone’. In the last 10 years that part of the community radio sector has become well recognised and accepted within those communities. That sector has become very good at bringing in progressive groups and being able to get their messages out at a local and national level. They have been particularly good at networking amongst stations. The first major demonstration of that was during the Seattle round of the WTO talks. The community sector with the cream of reporters and producers came together for a week and broadcast to the rest of America and online for those of us who could access the two-hour packages that they were putting together every day.

In Australia the community sector is a little different. There are about 340 community radio stations in Australia. About 80 of those are remote indigenous broadcasting services, leaving about 250-60 independently operated radio stations around the country. We have the second largest networked news service in Australia, which is produced in Bathurst by about 5 or 6 people. And that goes out to 90 stations. We’re bigger than Macquarie and smaller than the ABC. Last year, the community sector in Australia ran on a budget of about $45 million all up. Of that, about 17% is government funding, and that’s disproportionately spread around the sector. Not counting the indigenous broadcasting, the ethnic radio stations like ZZZ in Melbourne, and others in Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane, suck up quite a large amount of that 17%. We run on a fairly limited budget.

Last year we ran a survey which calculated that we ran on about $145 million of volunteer time. McNair Ingenuity ran the survey to create a snap-shot of the community sector - asking people when they listened, why they listened, all that demographics stuff. What we found was that 45% of Australians tune in at least once a week to community radio. Of that number about 700, 000 people listen exclusively to community radio. That’s predominantly in the cities, but it’s still a fairly large number of people that listen to community media. The interesting thing from what the survey brought out regarding the ratings in the Green Guide – which usually has all the community media listed as ‘other’ sitting at around 10%. Usually, the surveys don’t list what the stations are, but we asked specifically what the respondents were listening too, by including all the names of the stations that they had access to. That raised the number significantly. The commercial sector jumped on the survey and said, ‘no way, it can’t be right, that many people don’t listen to community radio’. That showed that the community sector is making an impact, and that means that we can make an impact on the potential listening audience out there.

Margo Kingston made an interesting point last night and she’s not here, so she doesn’t have an opportunity to respond to what I’m going to say. I was really disappointed that she talked about us being under the radar. We are not under the radar, we’re out there and we can have an impact on our local communities.

I’m the radio Vice President of the Community Broadcasting Association, the peak body representing community radio and TV. So what I’m about to say now are my personal views and not necessarily those of the organisation.

One of the worrying trends of the last few years is the conservatism that’s growing within community radio. In the last 10 years the number of community radio stations has tripled and doubled only in the last five years. What that has meant is that there is a disconnect in the history of community broadcasting, on why it was established as an alternative to what people could get from other media sources. So there are a lot of new people coming in, attempting to ape the commercial sector, which I find particularly disturbing.

One of the strategies that people like yourselves need to do is find ways of engaging with those local radio stations, many of whom are fairly conservative in their outlook and programming, and find ways of getting in. One of the ways not to do it is to turn up at the door with ‘Marx for Dummies’ in one hand and a bunch of Green Left Weekleys in the other, because it’s just not going to work.

My attitude to community radio, and certainly what that survey found out, is that people churn around the dial. If they’re not happy with what they’re listening to they’ll go somewhere else. I produce and distribute a program nationally and it survives heavily subsidised by my partner and I and by selling tapes, CDs and transcripts of the program. I am astounded at the number of people who ring up and say they want a copy of the program, and we get into conversation, and most of them wouldn’t sit on the same side of politics that I come from but they hear something that resonates and they respond to it. Not because they necessarily agree with the politics but because they hear something that they won’t hear anywhere else and they think that this is important to me, how can I be a part of that, how can I send it to somebody else? There is a lady who always rings me and says, “you’ve got to send this to Alan Jones. Alan Jones has got to get a copy of this!” But there’s not a lot I can do about that!

But what I want to do is encourage you to become involved. If you can talk and have a conversation with somebody, what’s stopping you from getting involved in making media and community radio? To engage with those more conservative stations, like the one I work for, we need to have a strategy. You need to think about where people are at, what the people on the other side of the microphone are thinking. So I hone my message for the potential listeners in a way that they can access from where they are. It might mean that you pull back and don’t say what you really want to say, but it challenges you to find new ways of expressing the age-old arguments.

CBAA website

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