(image from Lars Klove for The New York Times)

Last Tuesday night, the Federal government relieved the besieged fortress of Australian public broadcasting with a modest wagon train of supplies. This moment will remembered for a long time, alongside the Fraser razor gang attack on the ABC, the creation of SBS, the first Howard budget of 1996, and the pulse of money from Keating’s Creative Nation that set up SBSi.

For the ABC, the news is great but not terrific, but SBS will be left to lick its wounds, and find somewhere quiet to heal. What will come out of the cave, is at the moment unknown. The ABC pulled off a coup which has been a long time in the making, while SBS was left with its pleas and schemes in the dustbin of history.

Both the ABC and SBS went into this budget looking for significant increases. The ABC had a powerful weapon – the ALP had said it should adhere to the commercial channel’s drama quota of 100 hours per year, and the Rudd government is disinclined to break public promises. Meanwhile, SBS was making an argument to necessity – it needs to fund its new digital channel, had lost the four million extra from the Libs that compensated (if I remember rightly) for the end of SBSi funding, and has to pay for the digital transition.

With a current government allocation of $422m/year, the ABC asked for funds to add an extra 70 hours of drama and a new digital children’s channel but was remarkably coy about the amount; SBS bluntly told the feds it needed an extra $70m per year. Given that the federal government provides around $92.7m for SBS TV in 2008-2009, that is a huge increase. In return, Brown would deliver an extra 100 hours of local programming per year by 2012, and four digital channels by 2013, starting with SBS world in 2009, containing the “best of overseas content”. SBS World News would be mostly subtitled, ehile coverage of the Asia-Pacific would be expanded. The second channel will also allow children’s programs in languages other than English, and a strand of English language tuition. It was an intelligent and enticing bid.

Both channels appealed to the independent production community for support. SPAA, the producer’s trade association, trekked to Canberra several times in their behalf, although the focus seemed to be on the ABC, with that handy electoral commitment.

The budget saw the ABC gain an extra $167m over three years, broken down as $67m for the children’s channel, $70m for drama production, $15m for new regional broadband hubs, and $13.6 million in capital supplementation in 2009–10.

The ABC puts in around 60% of the budget for projects commissioned from the independent sector, and all the drama money will be spent outside the Corporation. So this immediately increases the demand on Screen Australia, the State film agencies, and the international presale marketplace. By 2011-12, the ABC should be investing around $37m into seventy hours, which means producers will look for about an extra $21m. With the new producer rebate available from the tax system, I think that means a demand on Screen Australia of around $10m. In turn, that is about a quarter of the production budget, which is being reduced anyway.

So the ABC has become a much bigger player in the entire screen production system.

By contrast, SBS got $20m altogether, is expected to find an efficiency dividend as well, and is facing a declining level of advertising revenue. I’ve heard one informal estimate in this very inexact space of up to $8m/year. SBS is very unhappy with the situation, and has already announced that it will continue to fight.

The effect on the independent community is serious. CEO Shaun Brown has circulated a letter which says, in part, “Over the coming weeks and months SBS will need to reconsider its commissioning strategy for the next three years and take some tough decisions. This will mean some programs will not be made, even if development funds have already been invested.”

Fans of The Circuit and East-West 101 should be braced for disappointment. Some new shows will go as well; this hurts creators, but broadcasters cancel programs in development all the time. However, the net increase in television funding puts a golden glow on present travail. And cynics would say that producers can simply shuffle sideways to the ABC, get rid of that pesky multicultural agenda, and breathe a sigh of relief that the programs won’t be chopped up by advertisements.

However, the situation is a bit less simple than that. The one area in which the ABC and SBS are both handily ahead of the commercial license requirement is in documentaries. This means that the ABC has no direct incentive to increase its documentary output, while it will be hard put to find the drama money. I guess the documentary output will be static. At the same time, SBS will have to reduce its documentary commitment, so we can expect downward pressure on levels of factual production. There are no certainties here – the international market is very unstable, and the ABC is fond of its true life programs.

Also, it is a fact of life that SBS seems to be commissioning more edgy and interesting drama output; at the same time, the ABC has been a bit dull of late, though Dirt Games was an adventurous commitment, for which Auntie deserves kudos. The real creative energy in ABC commissioning can be found in its light entertainment and factual output, like Spicks and Specks, The Gruen Transfer and The Chasers...

The existence of a door for challenging, idealistic and anti-formulaic programs is very important for the independent community. We need hope and inspiration, to know that ideas can be developed organically, an not as a piece of mimetic Meccano. Without it, the sector withers in subtle ways, rewards timidity, excuses the mediocre even more completely.

However, these SBS decisions were made years ago – the two edgy shows are second series – and SBS has put in place a different team since then, and we have yet to see their preferences. And won’t at all, unless the advertising market improves.

We know why the ABC is getting more money. Lobby groups pushed for output parity with the commercial channels, and for a decent children’s channel. Budgets were a joke, lots of voters like the ABC, the commercial networks are going down the toilet so Auntie can hunt the audience, while the chair, the CEO and the head of television played an increasingly adroit game with the government. I am betting the ABC kept its connections with the ALP running, protected its autonomy even with a Howardian reactionary board, and demonstrated a new willingness to restrict its expansion to soft, non-political areas like children’s TV and drama. It is not as if the ABC demanded a huge increase in its news and current affair budget, though that is sorely needed; this in itself may speak to Auntie’s tactics with government.

But why was SBS whacked so viciously? Isn’t the ALP in favour of those soft, cuddly multicultural agendas? Doesn’t it have an ethnic constituency it wants to soothe?

Therein lies a tangled tale. In 1991, the ALP changed the SBS act to allow sponsorship, thus itself opening the door to commercial revenue. I guess they figured it was a way to allow SBS to roar ahead of its own accord, without turning to the federal government – and SBS’s budget was so staggeringly pathetic it had an argument for a significant increase.

When Keating included SBS in his ambitious Creative Nation program in October 1994, he did not give the money to the network; he set up a new organisation, with its own board, called SBSi. Meanwhile, both broadcasters relied on investment funds from the old Film Finance Corporation – the government did not simply give that money to the ABC and SBS, but channelled it through a weird bit of extra financial plumbing.

I reckon both gestures have the same origin – neither the government nor the independent community trusted the national broadcasters with the money. Even then, the ALP did not treat SBS like its little friend.

SBS always had a peculiar relationship with its audience. It was created by a particular historical moment, which slid away, and trod some strange paths to justify its existence. Was it there to provide content in people’s first language? No, its task was to show a multicultural world to all Australians. That means subtitles. Do most people want to watch subtitles? No. So, its mainstream Australian audience consisted often of people who would tolerate their drama and movies with funny writing on the bottom – Howard’s hated urban elites.

What SBS needed at the time was shows like The Circuit, Remote Area Nurse, East-West 101 and the ABC’s Wildside. Mainstream, no subtitles, pacey and challenging, that felt like the real life we live in today. What it got was shows like Fat Pizza, cos they were dirt cheap and appealed to a new, young constituency. There is a lot of fascinating discussion to be had in here, because most audiences don’t want to be confronted with real life on television – they want a nice, soothing bunch of cliches to take them away from their tired tootsies, whining children and menacing work problems. Getting the electricity of recognition to flow through the cables of escapism is no mean feat, and takes more money and skill than our television production community usually can deploy.

A couple of really interesting things happened once SBSi was set up. It was captured immediately by independent producers with good instincts and a determination to take risks. It had so little money it had to collaborate closely with other government funding agencies. They in turn had little interest in the voracious maw of television, but had strong agendas to develop the sector and emerging filmmakers. So SBS took a funnny swoop sideways into more interesting content, which was satisfying to make, respected complexity, gave chances to new players, and fed the need for experimentation and innovation in the screen sector.

It helped to finance a slate of low budget feature films supported by the AFC. It became the only Australian broadcaster to get its label on an Oscar winning film – a half hour animation from Adam Elliott called Harvie Krumpet.

We are yet to see the full cultural impact of the roughly ten years in which SBSi had independent power. I do know it tangled endlessly with SBS proper, who just didn’t get it, even though they were happy to buy and program edgy cult films with lots of sex late on Friday night, and could understand the notions of theming and countercyclic programming which put good shows on over summer. And they understood both the Eurovision Song Contest and the Tour de France.

But SBSi slowly succumbed to a more populist version of itself. It wanted to be more light hearted, and less serious. It wanted merrier, more mannered ways of making documentaries. To be more superficially naughty, more self-promotional, more daft. Personally I support this pressure, but I think it needed a much more sophisticated approach than it seemed to get. (The ABC seems to be doing better, by the way, and I don’t think that is just about money).

We will probably not get to the bottom of the changes in SBS until the Board papers are available to historians. It may take some cabinet documents as well. But we all know the Howard government clacked its fangs at the national broadcasters endlessly, and they took a lot of pain on the budget front. The Boards gained those notoriously reactionary obscure Murdoch pundits and academics from the far right. The ABC seems to have minimised their impact, but SBS made some odd deals.

It slowly moved to take advertisements between programs, like most public broadcasters round the world. It didn’t make much money from them. It absorbed a vehemently stated advertising industry message that ads inside the shows were worth real money, and allowed SBS to promote its own programs and therefore increase ratings and therefore get high prices for ads.

It recruited Shaun Brown to be CEO. His Wikipedia entry lays out the bare facts. In New Zealand,

“He was made Head of TV One in 1997. In 2001, he was appointed Head of Television on an annual salary reported to be $340,000, responsible for running both TVNZ channels. Brown held this TVNZ position for nine months before the position was eliminated by chief executive Ian Fraser…

…During his time at TVNZ, the network was accused by New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark of being “shamelessly ratings driven” according to a report.”

Brown ran TVNZ at the climax of a tumultuous time in New Zealand television. Again, Wikipedia can provide some information:

“As a state owned enterprise, TVNZ enjoyed enormous commercial success (sustaining two thirds of the overall audience share) and paid the Crown substantial dividends (over $250 million between 1989 and 1999). However, the commercial success had been achieved through an unabashed pursuit of ratings through populist and tabloid content, and prior to the 1999 election the National-led government was evidently positioning TVNZ for privatisation. Labour-led administrations since 1999 explicitly recognised the market failures of a wholly commercial broadcasting sector (e.g. saturation-level advertising, low levels of local content, heavy reliance on cheap imports and a disregard for quality genres and in-depth news and current affairs) and re-emphasised television’s cultural and democratic functions in their policy thinking.

The government’s highest profile broadcasting reform to date was the restructuring of TVNZ as a Crown Entity in 2003. This introduced a dual remit whereby the broadcaster had to maintain its commercial performance (continuing dividend payments to the Crown) while simultaneously implementing a new public service Charter.

The TVNZ Charter would require the negotiation and reconciliation of potentially contradictory commercial and public service imperatives. The final version of the TVNZ Charter included a range of public service objectives and expectations…”

Brown became Head of Television at SBS in January 2003, Managing Director in February 2006, had his contract extended just before the Liberal government was defeated, and has the job until 2011.

The decision to appoint Brown, at least in 2006, was clearly strategic. The SBS Board wanted a leader who was populist, was comfortable with advertising, and able to run a channel which was strong on the coliseum material of reality TV and game shows. During his tenure, SBSi ceased to be independent, advertising moved inside programs, and the existing commissioning editors moved on.

Wikipedia repeats the central claim that Brown used again and again to justify these manoevers, which were unpopular with some pundits, with audiences, and with some producers.

“At SBS Brown has lifted investment in commissioned programs from around $4 million in 2002 to around $30 million in 2009. During the same period SBS audience share has increased by 22 per cent to a total share of 6.2 per cent..
.
.. While Brown has admitted SBS audiences reacted strongly to the introduction of in-program breaks, since their introduction SBS has increased its audience share to record levels (and increased the revenue raised through television advertising to $46.3 million in 2007-08).”

I am one of those people who truly detests advertising inside television programs. I make rancid jokes about product placement chiselled into the Mona Lisa, or operas with the Louis The Fly song every ten minutes. You either respect the audience or you don’t. If you don’t, you should fuck off.

But I am not sure what the production landscape would look like in that alternate universe in which SBS refused to take that poisoned chalice. Did we really need the Australian edition of Top Gear, which rates less than the British edition? Or Desperately Seeking Sheila?.
SBSi supported “more than 800 hours of drama and documentary from independent Australian filmmakers” before this latest manoever; wasn’t the system working?

Part of the intellectual problem is that the challenging material is seen as an alternative to the populist stuff. I have no objection whatsoever to the programs I have just listed; I believe strongly that SBS ought to campaign for higher ratings; I see a fair amount of earnest mediocrity in Australian production. Indeed, I think the screen sector has its own subtle and unidentified culture war, which pits Quality and Integrity against Masscult and Grubby Populism; or Wankers against Entertainers, depending on your instincts.

But I am horrified by the idea that the older agenda of SBSi – the important programs that existed on their own terms, as a response to the content, through a particular sensibility, resisting formula and sensationalism – is being driven out by the need to create this more populist material that grabs ratings.

At this point, we reach a simple “no we don’t, yes you do” conflict. The current management of SBS would deny that they are dumbing down slots and projects; some producers would say they certainly do and will produce gruesome editing room anecdotes; others would say that individual staff members can be surprising and unpredictable. I would add the general fact that documentary filmmakers around the world are being pushed into bombast and faux hysteria, to make large claims in breathless moments of fake discovery. The ABC does it too.

At the moment, SBS can point to First Australians with absolute pride, even though it was commissioned under a previous regime, and the broadcaster had a unique relationship with a project which could conjure enormous respect in both material and working methods. But I don’t know of anything that SBS has on the books now which addresses the national agenda in such a significant way. The History of Racism in Australia, in four parts? Now, that would be a show.

How does this recent history play into the ALP funding decision? Stephen Conroy duelled with Shaun Brown for years in the Senate Estimates Hearings, and threw every piece of crockery he could find over the decision about commercials. He was not impressed, and made that very evident. This is just one exchange, from November 2006, about the proposal to put ads inside programs:

“Senator CONROY—You indicated some degree of support from people who understood that if it were a choice between losing or not making as many Australian documentaries they could live with it. Did I unfairly characterise your earlier response?
Mr Brown—That is correct. … when I took them through the rationale—although their concerns still remain, there is a considerable degree of understanding that if SBS is to continue to carry on with and expand its role then this is understandable and acceptable.
Senator CONROY—It sounds like they were presented with a choice: ‘You can have advertising or bubonic plague, which would you prefer?’ Funnily enough, they chose advertising.”

In November 2007, with the election looming, Conroy replied to an emailed question from Save Our SBS with these words:

“The introduction of in program advertising to the SBS in effect makes the SBS a de facto fourth free-to-air commercial television station and serves to erode the fundamental tenets of public broadcasting- that is, that it should be free from commercial and political influence.”

Again and again, Brown defended the strategy by claiming that ratings were increasing and SBS was harvesting revenue, with forward estimates for 2009-10 pushing up towards $70m per year. The income was spent on Australian programs, and an ambitious strategy to broadcast sport. That was obviously an ambiguous gambit since the government could so easily kiss SBS on its forehead for doing so well, slap it on the bum and reduce its budget. (Indeed, TVNZ is expected to return a profit to the government as its major shareholder, although it also provides a separate tranche for production finance).

Wounded campaigners from SBS were arguing after the budget that Conroy fought for SBS, and had to accept defeat. The ABC gets votes; SBS does not, so could be abandoned in a financial crisis. It is true that a million dollars given to the ABC gets to around three times as many eyeballs as SBS can offer, and that is surely good economic arithmetic in desperate times.

But I am not so sure this was the key reason. In those Senate hearings, the ABC fought the Howard government, and was supported by Conroy, while SBS confronted him, and was rescued by the Liberal senators. It wasn’t a good look, no matter how much it was foisted on the players.

I’ve heard a much simpler story: SBS accepted the Howard economic agenda, and the ABC resisted it. The wheel has turned, and SBS got very little for its position then, and has been given nothing now.

I suspect that outsiders don’t have enough financial data to really work through SBS’s choices. It functioned for a long time on niche audiences with strong funding agency driven programs, with overseas movies and heaps of subtitles, and maybe it can return to that model. But the sports landscape will surely change as SBS has to withdraw from that market.

What really bothers me, though, is an underlying question. SBS is trying to increase ratings, and believes that in-program promotion is valuable. SBS wants to do engaging, challenging and accessible programs, and will say that a lively audience will share that journey.

But I just wonder this: is SBS trying to commercialise to create audiences for what I think of as good programs, or is it actually just happy to make shallow crap for the fun of it?

When SBS opened its gates to Brown and his way of thinking, did it recruit allies, or barbarians?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 1:05 am and is filed under Austrapolitics, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.