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After Anderson: Challenges for a new MD

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By ABC Alumni Board Director, and former Editorial Director of the ABC

Alan Sunderland

Previously published on ABC Online.

It is hard to imagine a wilder, more chaotic or challenging situation for someone to take on the job of ABC Managing Director than the one David Anderson faced when he was thrust into the role five years ago.

Lest we forget, the previous occupant of the position, Michelle Guthrie, had been sacked by the Board halfway through her contract and was still considering her legal options.

Then, just days after Anderson sat down in that big office on the 14th floor, the ABC Chairman Justin Milne resigned after being accused (and hotly denying) accusations of compromising the independence of the public broadcaster.

As part of the ABC’s leadership team at the time, I well remember the sense, inside and outside the organisation that the ABC’s very foundations were shaking. What would fall next? Who on earth was in charge?

At such a time of uncertainty and instability, David Anderson was the obvious and ideal choice for the role. A 30 year veteran of the ABC, Anderson had quietly worked his way up behind the scenes of the organisation, from the mail room in Adelaide through a serious of ever more responsible production and finance roles in television until he was tapped on the shoulder by then MD Mark Scott, who recognised his leadership and vision and made him his key strategy executive. Always behind the scenes, always away from the business end of the cameras and microphones, but always thinking, planning, delivering.

Since those febrile days of fear and loathing, if the ABC hasn’t quite been miraculously transformed it has at the very least been put onto a firm and decisive path. Funding has been modestly improved thanks to a new Government, the inevitable controversies and bushfires at Senate Estimates and elsewhere have been handled as calmly and methodically as possible, and in the meantime the long standing shift to new audiences on new platforms continues apace.

Of course, and not surprisingly, that doesn’t mean that a single one of the ABC’s fundamental problems, issues and challenges have disappeared. The next Managing Director will have to answer the following questions the moment they walk in the door:

  • How does the ABC attract new audiences online and on mobile without losing its existing broadcast audiences on radio and television?
  • How does it convince governments to, for the first time in recent history, actually provide the ABC with the kind of funding it needs to do its job?
  • How does the ABC define and defend independent and impartial journalism in the current polarised media landscape?
  • How does it make a meaningful contribution to original drama, comedy, children’s programs and other non-news content when the budgets for such content are spiralling way beyond its reach?
  • How does the ABC convince more Australians that they need to pay for a free public broadcaster when the internet is awash with so much streamed content from around the world?

At the very least, I would hope that those are some of the questions the ABC Board will be asking each candidate as they interview them.

All of which leads to the pressing question of the moment: who should be the next person to lead the ABC?

Already, various pundits and commentators are preparing their lists of preferred candidates, too often based on suggesting someone who suits their own prejudices. The rusted-on ABC fans will be asking for someone who will return the organisation to its glory days of old, when the news could be trusted, the airwaves were awash with quality drama and every radio presenter had a perfect command of grammar and punctuation. The rusted-on ABC critics will call for someone to finally tackle the staff-captured, woke, leftist worker’s paradise and create an ABC for the average Australian. And the hard-line supporters of the Institute of Public Affairs will call for it to be shut-down, broken up or sold off.

As a forty year veteran of public broadcasting, all I can say is that the glory days were never that glorious, there were no shortage of grammar and punctuation errors when I began as a cadet in 1979, the so-called worker’s paradise somehow never managed to prevent hundreds of job losses and less-than stellar wage rises, and it is hard to argue that the most trusted and valued news organisation in the country should be shut down by the politicians.

So putting all of that to one side, who will be or should be the next ABC Managing Director? For what it’s worth, my own view is that it will be someone from outside the organisation. That’s not to discount the many talented people inside the ABC, but history tells us that new enthusiastic Chairs with lots of ideas often look for a fresh new face. Five out of the last seven ABC Managing Directors have come from outside the organisation, and only two of them ended in tears.

I would hope that the search turns up someone who both understands the need to find new younger audiences and the equally important need to preserve and reinvent the traditional values of quality, relevant Australian content and trusted, brave and independent journalism. The role of ABC Managing Director is not a hard job to fill, but it is a hard job to do. Part visionary, part politician and part media strategist, the successful candidate will need most of all to be prepared to listen as much as they speak and to meet the needs of modern Australia for entertainment they value and information they trust.

A sense of humour and a thick skin would help too.

Alan Sunderland is a former Editorial Director of the ABC.


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