Tag: Neutral country

The government agreed to do this in the form of an inquiry into the ABC’s competitive neutrality – and broadened it to include SBS. And now we know the shape of this competitive neutrality inquiry. This all seems perfectly reasonable, until you remember this is mainly about online media. Read more: In the debate about Australian content on TV, we need to look further than the ABC Mark Scott foresaw this when he was managing director of the ABC and drove the broadcaster hard into the digital sphere. There, it refers to the requirement in the ABC Act that the ABC “take account of the broadcasting services provided by the commercial and community broadcasting sectors of the Australian Broadcasting system.” In other words, the ABC is discouraged from just replicating what the commercial broadcasters do. Just its news services. That’s the part of the ABC that Hanson detests. Yet, if there is one category of program content that most obviously and unmistakably distinguishes the ABC from commercial broadcasters, it’s news. Time for responses Then the issues paper asks “other stakeholders” – basically the ABC and SBS’s commercial broadcasting rivals - a range of questions about ways in which they think they may have been harmed by any undue competitive advantage enjoyed by the public broadcasters. Read more: The ABC is not siphoning audiences from Fairfax It also acknowledges in the issues paper that it has to dance its way between a number of other current inquiries, including the Australian and Children’s Content Review, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry and the broader Treasury review of the country’s overall competitive neutrality policy.