Platform Papers > Issue 01: 'Our ABC' a Dying Culture?

'Our ABC' a Dying Culture?

by Martin Harrison

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ISBN: 0958121249

"The ABC is not fulfilling its Charter obligations to the Australian arts A long history of poor management appointments, poor policy decisions, government interference and a lacklustre board lies behind the declining significance of ABC television, radio and on-line services… But nowhere is the problem of decline more strongly felt than in the area of the arts." So begins Martin Harrison’s analysis. ‘Arts programs on TV are now rare. On radio talk-back abounds, but informed specialist discussion is confined mainly to non-arts programs.

Nothing could symbolise the cultural difficulty more readily than the debate about the need for a ‘right-wing Phillip Adams’. "Why does offering a Liberal Party spokesperson solve the issue of opening up a wider cultural and critical debate? This is insulting to ABC viewers and listeners and suggests the ABC is itself intimidated and partisan. Worse, it insults the ABC’s long-lived, glorious tradition of liveliness and intellectual independence. What we are witnessing today is a whole tradition of long-lived engagement with the world of arts and letters being destroyed."

But Harrison is no reactionary. He examines our fast-changing habits and argues forcefully for new cross-boundary broadcasting, a new kind of ABC, recognising and embracing inter-active viewing and listening practices—and above all, for a new channel for a new world; and a radical community approach to funding it. Is not this, after all, the responsibility of our ABC’?

Martin Harrison was founding producer of ABC Radio Art in the 1980s and presented the writers’ program Books and Writing. He has written extensively for radio and is a widely-published poet. He is currently the recipient of an Established Writer’s Fellowship from the Australia Council.

Responses to Martin Harrison by John Cleary and John Carmody appear in the October edition.