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Monday the ABC forces the NSW Government to review consent laws after the horrifying story of Saxon Mullins. Wednesday, we discover the Federal Health Minister was moved to spend $500 million on genomics after he saw the ABC story of a family whose baby daughter died of a fatal genetic condition. Now the small business ombudsman is inquiring into whether the ATO is targeting small businesses (ABC with Fairfax's warrior Adele Ferguson). Dutton gets tough on Australian fighters in the Ukraine. Uber Eats is being investigated by the ACCC. That's all just a couple of weeks' work for your ABC. Oops. I forgot the way Leigh Sales steered Peter Costello into his ghastly defence of high income earners. And what happened on Tuesday? The federal government announced it would cut over $84 million from the ABC's budget. Those cuts will bring the sum of damage to the ABC to more than $330 million over an eight-year period. Those who work there are distraught. But the Australian public should be more than distraught. We should fight this every inch of the way. Complain to your local member. Write letters. Sign petitions. Join GetUp. Tag politicians on whichever social medium you use. Make sure this government understands that those cuts also damage the 70 per cent of Australians who listen, watch and read the ABC every single week. It damages the one media institution that Australians trust above all others. And if the government doesn't get that, vote it out. Vote it out anyway. These are the people who think 10 bucks a week will make a difference to our material lives. The 70 per cent? That's the sum of us, the vast mass of us who listen to local radio, who love the news, who turn on to discover traffic mayhem and end up listening to some daggy dad teaching his kid the saxophone, who fear fire and flood, who want to get the latest real news on health and science. I'm not even speaking about the niche lovers of Insiders or Q&A enthusiasts, not that there's anything wrong with them. The ABC is the soundtrack to our lives, to the lives of millions of Australians and the federal government is setting out to destroy it. And it is so freaking sneaky about it. It even tried to cover up the cuts in the budget by putting them in a tiny footnote. Director of ABC News Gaven Morris delivered a speech at the Melbourne Press Club on Thursday where he summarised the problem neatly – 11 efficiency reviews in 15 years.They are already screamingly efficient with the little they have – the ABC's per capita funding is 34 per cent lower than the average of other public broadcasters. If you want to compare it to the BBC, for instance, the ABC serves a population one-third the size of the UK with a budget just one-eighth that of the BBC. And scooting around our land mass isn't like taking a day's drive from one end of the country to the other. I'm pretty sure it can't get any more efficient than it is. After all, ABC news spends more than 95 per cent of its budget on content. And what does content mean? That means producing those stories, backing Louise Milligan and Caro Meldrum-Hanna and Sarah Dingle, leaving no grain of sand uncovered. Not everyone loves the ABC and of course the ABC makes mistakes (the fewer staff, the fewer sets of eyes editing stories, the more mistakes). Those mistakes give rivals fuel to feed this government's galloping paranoia about the ABC. But somehow the IPA and the cadres of commentators in The Australian think it's OK to applaud the slicing and dicing of our national broadcaster's news arm, which holds power to account and investigates corporate misconduct. Maybe those folks think it's OK for big business to exploit its workers, to underpay its workers, to rip off its clients. This government gave $30 million to Fox Sport last year. It gave $30m to Rupert Murdoch, who is just about to sell a large chunk of his business for north of $US50 billion. Like he needs the handouts. Nope. This government needs the patronage and it buys it this way. Take from the poor and give to the rich. I can think of a quick way of giving the ABC a boost – ditch the utterly ridiculous $50 million about to be spent on commemorating the 250th anniversary of the voyage to Australia of Captain Cook. Thing is, the ABC can't stand up for itself. At a meeting of ABC news executives on Wednesday morning, Morris, bless his ethical cotton socks, told his colleagues they could report on the cuts but it had to be impartial. Just the facts. So they aren't going to blow their own horns or criticise the government. Worse than that, Morris, ever careful, has also advised ABC employees to moderate their language on social media or not to overly criticise the decision. The vibe inside is that it shouldn't try to prosecute the case against the government because that's too much of an insider story, that it should only rank a story about the ABC below the other stories which ABC consumers think are more important: health and housing, education and pensions. But the problem is that without the ABC, many Australians would never know how any of those matters of importance are changing. Morris reminded the Melbourne Press Club that the ABC had just launched its aged care investigation, to expose abuse in the aged care system. If you have ever walked the halls of a nursing home in the late evening, the calls for help are heartbreaking. Morris's team wanted to know more and asked the public for tips and stories. It now has 4000 responses. Can you imagine what that's like to sort through? And can you imagine having a country where we didn't have the resources to do the kinds of investigations that protect the old, the poor, the infirm, the young girls out at night, the mothers and fathers whose babies died because we didn't have the right genetic testing. Scott Morrison told Buzzfeed that he didn't care where the ABC cuts came from as long as it wasn't Mad As Hell. Shaun Micallef must be so chuffed. I'm mad as hell too. And I love my ABC. Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney and a Fairfax columnist.

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