Prime Minister Tony Abbott is poised to break a key election promise by cutting funding to the ABC, with the question now being how much money should be cut.

In a pledge his colleagues are now wishing he never made, Mr Abbott said on the night before the 2013 election: “No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.”

But the Prime Minister and his colleagues on the expenditure review committee – the powerful cabinet group responsible for finding billions of dollars worth of budget savings – are considering a number of proposals for trimming the ABC’s budget. All proposals involve cuts to the ABC and conversations are now being had about how deep to cut and what cuts are politically feasible.

Fairfax Media believes one of the options involves introducing an efficiency dividend to the ABC budget – an annual funding reduction used to achieve deep and continuous cuts to government agencies.