Online group helps Oz’s ABC
p2p news / p2pnet: Australia’s national public broadcaster, the ABC will get an extra $88.2 million over the next three years under the latest federal budget handed down by the Treasurer Peter Costello, says the Sydney Morning Herald.
ABC Chairman, Donald McDonald described the increase in funding as "the best result for the ABC in over 20 years!"
The extra funds were secured largely thanks to National Party MP Paul Neville and the new online lobby group GetUp, with more than 75,000 members signing an online petition asking for some of the AUD$10 billion national surplus to be spent on the ABC. The Sydney Morning Herald says the, "extra funds will be spent on the production of more Australian drama and documentaries, replac[ing] old studio equipment and boost[ing] regional and local programming."
In recent years, the ABC has suffered from a multitude of funding cuts to the extent it’s had to slash Australian-produced drama from 102 hours a year five years ago, to only 20 hours next year.
GetUp says, "while these additional funds still fall short of the recommendations from the independent consultant KPMG [which was $125 million], they far surpass anything experts were predicting seven weeks ago when we launched our campaign."
The organization has been criticized by members of the Australian government as "spammers" for giving Australians an easy way to communicate with their elected officials. "I’ve no doubt that the bulk of the emails they send will end up in the junk box with other unsolicited material." Victorian MP Tony Smith.
"There are hundreds of thousands of people who care, but it doesn’t mean they want to sit in a cold town-hall meeting," one of GetUp’s founders David Madden responded at the time.
Aussies can sign up to get email updates from GetUp here, which may come in handy as Australia looks to revamp its copyright laws and sees the introduction of a "health and social services access card".
The cunningly disguised national ID card scored AUD$1.1 billion over four years in the new budget, with Democrats senator pointing out that "the privacy commissioner gets a miserly $6.5 million over four years, presumably to protect Australians against the misuse of this new system."
Also See:
Sydney Morning Herald – ABC hails best result in 20 years, May 1, 2006
