The announcement in last week’s budget that the ABC’s funding indexation will be frozen for three years from July 2019 is the latest in a series of extraordinary attacks by a government that displays an unprecedented level of hostility to the national broadcaster. It represents a real cut to the broadcaster’s operating costs of $84m.

Added to the $254m cut over five years announced by then-communications minister Malcolm Turnbull in November 2014, and a $28m cut to the enhanced newsgathering service in the 2016 budget, this brings the money taken out of our national broadcaster since the election of the Coalition government to over a quarter of a billion dollars.

Contrast this with the former Labor government’s approach. In 2009, when I worked in the office of communications minister Stephen Conroy, the ABC was awarded the largest funding increase since its incorporation in 1983, with $136.4m in new money to fund the creation of the ABC Kids’ channel and 90 hours of new Australian drama. Four years later, the ABC was given $89.4m to set up the newsgathering service and enhance the digital delivery of ABC programs.

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In addition to record funding boosts, Conroy, arguably the best friend in government the ABC has ever had, also ensured the ABC charters were amended to specifically require them to deliver digital services; overhauled the board appointment process to put it at arm’s length from the government of the day; and, in a move that enraged the Murdoch empire, created legislation that specified that any international broadcasting service funded by the government could only be delivered by the ABC. This came after the government’s refusal to award carriage of the Australia Network to News Corp in 2011, a decision that was regarded both at home and internationally as common sense by everyone other than the owners of Sky News.

All this is now under attack. The Turnbull government seems determined not only to undo every measure of financial and legislative support implemented by the last Labor government, but to undermine the ABC’s operations so thoroughly that its ability to provide the services its charter requires will likely be devastated.

The legislation passed in early 2013 prevented the incoming Coalition government from reopening the tender process to award the Australia Network to Sky – so they shut it down entirely instead.

Five years later, the Lowy Institute laments that “[o]nce a significant player in what the British Council calls the Great Game of the Airwaves, the ABC’s purpose-designed, multiplatform international services have suffered near-terminal decline”.

We must rise up against this concerted campaign of funding cuts and attempts to limit the activities of our national broadcasters

As far as the board appointment process goes, Turnbull as prime minister and his communications minister Mitch Fifield are doing their best to ignore it: two recent appointees, Minerals Council boss Vanessa Guthrie and Sydney Institute Director Joseph Gersh, were not recommended for appointment by the independent selection panel. Fifield is relying on clauses in the legislation governing the appointment process that allow the minister to appoint from outside the recommended list in exceptional circumstances, but has publicly offered no reason why these candidates were more urgently required on the ABC board than those recommended as more qualified by the selection panel.

It’s also impossible to discover whether the minister has tabled the statement to parliament giving his reasons for ignoring the advice of the selection panel, as required by the legislation. If he has, perhaps those statements explain why Guthrie and Gersh are the most qualified candidates to provide governance of our most trusted source of news.

Despite the selection criteria set out in Conroy’s legislation, the ABC board now includes no one other than the staff-elected director and the managing director, Michelle Guthrie, with media experience and, despite the full board having been appointed by this government, they seem unable to make a case to maintain the ABC’s funding.

But the biggest danger to the ABC is the government’s agenda to reduce its digital services, and it’s here where the ABC – and, in this case, SBS as well – face a truly existential threat. The so-called “competitive neutrality inquiry” into the national broadcasters, currently underway, has ostensibly been launched to satisfy Pauline Hanson’s demands for an inquiry into the ABC in return for her support for last year’s appalling package of media “reforms”, which will reduce diversity and local content across the commercial broadcast media.

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Don’t believe it for a second. While Hanson’s hatred of the ABC will assist any future government moves to neuter the broadcaster’s digital activities, this inquiry is yet another gift to News Corp and the commercial media organisations, who have been baying for the ABC’s blood since it arrived on the airwaves more than three-quarters of a century ago.

The $30m of government money given, apparently with few strings attached, to Foxtel last year was really just “compensation” for the fact that the commercial TV operators got a windfall gain with the abolition of their broadcast licence fees and replacement with spectrum fees. This saves the broadcasters around $90m per year (money which is forgone government revenue, by the way) so, of course, Foxtel had to be similarly rewarded for … running a commercial business in a competitive market.

It’s not yet clear what Foxtel will spend this money on, although some of it may be earmarked to support the nefarious deal it recently struck with Network Seven and Cricket Australia to do an end-run around the anti-siphoning legislation and put a load of international one day matches behind a paywall.

The aggrieved alliance of News Corp, Fairfax and the commercial television broadcasters have now got the government dancing to their tune with an inquiry designed to find justifications to shut down the ABC and SBS’s digital services. As Michael Pascoe has noted, this inquiry is completely unjustified – the Productivity Commission is already equipped to deal with any material breaches of the competitive neutrality principles.

It’s happening because the commercial sector can’t fight off Facebook and Google, so they are trying to remove the competitors they can, through government interference, more easily attack. The ABC’s iView is by far the country’s most innovative and successful online streaming service, and SBS OnDemand – which nabbed last year’s surprise smash hit The Handmaid’s Tale out from under an out-of-touch commercial market to the fury of the major networks (or “bunch of sooks” as SBS MD Michael Ebeid described them) – isn’t far behind.

The issues paper put out by this absurd inquiry attempts to make the case that the advent of digital broadcasting and the internet have created an unprecedented disruption to media markets. But technological change has been disrupting the media, along with every other industry, for over a 100 years.

This latest attempt to nobble the ABC is in the fine tradition set by Australia’s commercial media when the national broadcaster was first formed in 1932. Newspaper proprietors then were outraged that the government would establish a publicly-funded service to provide broadcast radio news, in direct competition to their daily mastheads.

For more than a decade, the ABC was prevented from conducting its own newsgathering, with restrictions imposed to keep them reliant on the newspapers. This campaign against the ABC was led by Keith Murdoch, and only came to an end when the immediate provision of news from the front lines of the second world war demonstrated to the Australian public the superior service available through the national broadcaster.

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It will be only the support of the people that will save the ABC again now. The senate crossbench demonstrated its willingness to prioritise the demands of the commercial media over the public interest when it passed the media “reform” package last year.

If we are to protect the ABC’s ability, and that of SBS, to continue to provide digital and online services to Australian audiences, we must rise up against this concerted campaign of funding cuts and attempts to limit the activities of our national broadcasters through regulatory and legislative changes.

In the lead up to the next federal election, every Australian who values our ABC must take the fight to their local MP and actively campaign for a restoration of support to one of our most critically important democratic institutions. There is too much at stake, and no time to lose.

• Emma Dawson is executive director of thinktank Per Capita. From 2008 – 2013, she was an adviser to communications minister Stephen Conroy on public broadcasting, digital television, anti-siphoning and media regulation