Former ABC chairman Maurice Newman backs One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s call for subscription service

Former ABC chairman Maurice Newman is backing One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s plan to make the public broadcaster a subscription service in the big cities as Federal Government funding was restricted to regional areas.

Mr Newman, who chaired the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 2007 to 2012, said the ABC was undeserving of its $1.2 billion in annual Federal Government funding given it increasingly catered to a hard left audience.

“I’m on the record, for some years now, saying that I thought it should be a subscription service,” he told The Nightly.

“I’ve been fairly consistent in my view that we shouldn’t be paying $1.2 billion a year for something that is ubiquitous on the internet and anywhere else.”

In fact, the ABC was allocated $1.343 billion for this financial year in the federal Budget in May, growing to $1.39m in 2026-27.

He also cited ratings figures to show the ABC has been losing viewers and listeners, making it irrelevant.

“They’re having to preach to a harder and harder core on the left in order to keep whatever they have left and, of course, that means people at the margin are peeling off,” Mr Newman said.

Former Radio National broadcaster Tom Switzer, who is also a conservative, is backing Senator Hanson’s call to restrict public funding to regional broadcasts, arguing ABC journalists tended to be more balanced outside the capital cities.

“To be fair to the ABC, and I’m often a critic of them, you need to distinguish between the journalism in the regional areas and the metropolitan areas,” he said.

“That Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra axis, if you like, is overwhelmingly left-leaning - most journalists who work there are Greens or Labor supporters whereas in the regional areas, they genuinely do try to be fair and balanced.”

The ABC employed just 602 regional staff compared with 4454 in metropolitan areas, a ratio of just one staff member in a rural or remote area for every seven employed in a capital city, its annual report for 2024-25 showed.

He also backed the idea of a subscription approach to the ABC in the big cities, which would revive licence fees scrapped in 1974.

“If the ABC is as trustworthy as the conventional wisdom suggests, then they should have no problem with testing the marketplace,” Mr Switzer said.

ABC radio stations barely rate with Radio National having a minuscule 1.3 per cent audience share in Sydney in market researcher GfK’s most recent survey results released this month.

Its presenters routinely introduce their programs referencing Aboriginal rather than actual names of where they’re broadcasting from.

RN broadcasters in Sydney, for example, say they are on Gadigal land, without any reference to the NSW capital.

“I think it reflects this, sort of, cozy consensus in metropolitan Sydney and Melbourne that is out of sync with middle Australia,” Mr Switzer said.

The national broadcaster’s most popular radio station in Australia’s most populated city, ABC Radio Sydney, had a 4.6 per cent audience share, which was less than half that of AM market leader 2GB, a talkback station, on 11.8 per cent.

ABC news and current affairs fared better in the national TV ratings with the ABC’s 7pm news in ninth place with 1.236 million viewers, based on OzTAM data for June 16, although that was less than half the 2.282m viewers for Australia’s most popular program, Seven News, owned by the Southern Cross Media Group, the owners of The Nightly.

Despite the perceptions of left-wing bias, opinion polls show the ABC is most trusted than commercial media, with market research group Roy Morgan last year awarding it the title of the most-trusted media brand for the seventh straight year, citing “independence and objectivity”, “reliability and dependability”, and “quality journalism”.

The ABC was Australia’s fifth most trusted brand in 2019, but its rank is now in 20th place following a decline in trust since COVID, with Roy Morgan research citing this comment from a focus group.

“I think that their news services are biased toward left-wing figures and agendas rather than reporting in an unbiased way,” one respondent told them.

In a room full of journalists at Canberra’s National Press Club, Senator Hanson announced that under a One Nation government, ABC funding would be restricted to regional journalism and programming as a subscription model was introduced for big city audiences.

SBS would also be defunded, ending its history as a multicultural broadcaster that began in 1975 as a multi-lingual Radio Ethnic Australia service just two years after Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam’s controversial then immigration minister Al Grassby issued a paper titled, “A multi-cultural society for the future”.

The SBS TV service debuted in 1980 under Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government, introducing Australian viewers to extensive coverage of soccer and foreign films with the occasional late-night nudity.

Cuts to public broadcasting are a politically fraught issue with then-Opposition leader Tony Abbott, during the 2013 election, promising no cuts to the ABC or SBS, only to strip $35.5 million from the ABC over four years in the 2014-15 Budget as SBS lost $8m over the same period.

“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,” Mr Abbott told SBS during the 2013 campaign.

Mr Abbott’s communications minister Malcolm Turnbull rolled him as Liberal prime minister in 2015, after the perception of a broken election promise eroded his popularity in opinion polls.

Senator Hanson’s plan to make the ABC a subscription service would also be a case of back to the future with national broadcaster having a licence fee arrangement from its inception in 1932 until 1974.

The UK’s BBC, which the ABC was modelled on, still charges an annual £180 ($340) TV licence fee.