Perpetual Crisis: The Politics of Saving the ABC

Abstract

In recent years there has been a rally to ‘save’ the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This paper explores the assumptions about the national broadcaster which often inform such rescue attempts. The ABC seems to have entered a state of ‘perpetual crisis ‘following government funding cuts, political accusations of bias, issues of structural change and the Mansfield inquiry. Even more than usual, the identity, functions and future of the national broadcaster have become a public issue. While fully supporting a strong national public broadcaster as a space for public contestation, I argue that saving the ABC should not render it ‘safe’, returning it to some prior privileged state and established identity. Rather, drawing on an ‘agonistic model of democratic politics’. I argue that the ABC needs to be conceptualised as a site which produces ‘dilemmatic space’ and that the crises of the ABC are those which necessarily constitute the institution as a public broadcaster.