As the New Zealand government prepares to pay off its most loyal allies by ploughing tens of millions into the dying legacy media, Kiwis ought to learn a lesson from Australia.
Australians are forced to hand over more than a billion of their tax dollars to a state-funded broadcaster. Despite clear statutory requirements, the ABC is notorious for its left-wing bias. But, would Australians pay for it if they didn’t have to?
In its self-promos, the ABC likes to boast that it is “Australia’s most trusted news source”. Australians asked to vote with their wallets have begged to differ.
The ABC’s back-slapping claim is based on a single survey, which asked respondents to rate which news service they thought was most trustworthy. But there’s one glaring problem: if Australians “trust” ABC news so much, why don’t they watch it? ABC news runs a consistent last place of all the free-to-air news programs. The survey was, in fact, what Australian media studies academic Graeme Turner long ago identified as a kind of “shy Tory” effect: people telling surveyors what they thought would make them seem better or more credible.
But a more accurate representation of how Australians really value the ABC can be gauged by whether or not they’d pay for it if they weren’t forced to.
The news for the ABC is not good.
The majority of Australians believe that ABC television is not worth paying a single cent for.
According to an independent study conducted by True North Strategy, more than half (52.6 per cent) of those interviewed said if they had a choice, they wouldn’t be prepared to pay anything for access to the national broadcaster’s television content in its current form, while the other respondents said they would only be willing to pay (on average) $2.94 per month.
Which is barely one-third the amount Australian taxpayers are forced to plough into the ABC.
The ABC is basically the Rich Boomer Channel – and even they wouldn’t voluntarily pay for it.
Furthermore, almost four out of five Australians (79.2 per cent) would not subscribe to ABC television if it were to become a subscription service like streaming giant Netflix.
Among the ABC’s core audience of those aged 55 and over, just 15 per cent of respondents said they would be willing to pay for a Netflix-style subscription service if it replaced the national broadcaster’s TV service.
So, why wouldn’t Australians be prepared to pay for what they are constantly lectured is a “national institution”?
When asked whether they think the ABC is “more left wing” or “more right wing”, almost two thirds (66.1 per cent) of respondents said the national broadcaster was more “left wing.”
Similarly, that same demographic [those aged 55 and over] was also of the firmest belief — more so than the younger cohorts of viewers — that the ABC was “more left wing” (71 per cent).
Of the respondents who identified as Labor voters, 60 per cent said they thought the ABC leaned “left”; of those who said they were Liberal voters, 71 per cent said the broadcaster favoured the progressive side of politics. The vast majority of Greens-aligned participants in the study (78 per cent) also said ABC TV was “more left wing”.
The Australian
Of course, the ABC stridently denies being left-biased. This is despite other surveys which have shown that the vast majority of ABC personnel are left-voting, including being four times more likely to vote Green than other Australians. But, no matter how many times the ABC trots out the likes of Ray Martin to swear, hand on heart, that there’s no bias, when even Greens-voting boomers overwhelmingly agree that the ABC is biased to the left, the jig is well and truly up.
No wonder the ABC is so terrified of being privatised: they know full well that no one wants to pay a cent for their leftist propaganda.
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