IT’S a sad day when the only daily radio program dedicated to rural issues and broadcast into metropolitan areas is axed.

The ABC’s Bush Telegraph has been with us for 15 years, bringing news about bush politics, bush business and the lives and enterprises of people who live beyond the tram tracks, into all corners of the nation.

As interest in how food and fibre is produced, and how animals are treated is becoming increasingly critical, it seems odd that the very program that delivers this information into cities gets the chop.

By Christmas five positions — including presenter Cameron Wilson’s — will be made redundant, wiping the experienced and long-serving team from ABC Rural. That is unless they can find jobs elsewhere in the organisation. And with job cuts widespread across the ABC those chances are slim.

Regional Australia is sharing the pain, as a result of the Federal Government’s bid to cut $254 million from the ABC, while it ramps up more costly online and digital production.

How will Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra ever learn about the issues around developing agriculture in Northern Australia? Who will explain why farmers need to hunt deer from their properties? Why letting cats loose in the wild is devastating for the nation or what attempts are being made to keep our rivers clean and flowing? And how will our city cousins ever know how the seasons have gone.? The axing of Bush Telegraph feels like the bridge crossing the rural city-divide just got bombed.

Yes, there are other programs dedicated to rural reporting on ABC radio. Countrywide, Rural Reports, Country Breakfast and Country Hour — all produced by ABC Rural — are broadcast locally and statewide. But none cross that city-country divide daily and nationally like RN’s Bush Telegraph.

About half the Bush Tele audience is regional and the rest are international and metropolitan. It’s clear that going online is building city audiences. But with digital disconnectivity challenging a blackspot ridden rural Australia, going online might cut out rural audiences. What an irony that would be.

Bush Tele’s demise is sad for country and city listeners, sad for agriculture and, in my view, a retrograde step for the nation unless we can be sure that something else is going to bridge that city-country divide and do an equally good, if not better, job.

We’re yet to hear the detail around this.

Internally a new division is to be created in the ABC. It will be called the Regional Division and it will include all country radio staff across ABC Open, rural and news divisions. Its head, to be based outside Sydney and Melbourne, will sit alongside other executives reporting directly to Managing Director Mark Scott.

Vale, Bush Tele, and thank you. You did us proud.