Prime Minister Tony Abbott is expected to break a key election promise by cutting funding to SBS and the ABC in the May budget.
Mr Abbott said on the night before the 2013 election: “No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”
However, as revealed by Fairfax Media this week, the Prime Minister and his colleagues on the expenditure review committee are considering a number of proposals for reducing the ABC’s and SBS’s budgets.
One of the options discussed involves introducing an efficiency dividend to the ABC budget – an annual funding reduction used to achieve deep and continuous cuts to government agencies.
The ABC was allocated $1.03 billion in the 2013 federal budget. The ABC is one of only three government agencies, along with SBS and Safe Work Australia, currently exempt from the efficiency dividend.
The Abbott government does not consider an efficiency dividend on the ABC to be a broken promise, since nearly every other government department has one.
Government ministers such as Treasurer Joe Hockey and Communications Minister Mr Turnbull have refused to repeat in the recent past Mr Abbott’s promise not to cut ABC funding. Mr Turnbull also refused to commit to maintaining ABC funding when asked directly by the ABC Friends lobby group in a meeting earlier this month.
Source: Fairfax Media
