Address by ABC Chair Kim Williams AM
National Press Club
27 November 2024
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to be back at the National Press Club. After an absence of more than a decade, it is welcome to catch up with old friends and colleagues and hopefully to make new ones.
I commence by offering acknowledgement to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the traditional custodians on these ancestral lands and recognise their enduring connection to the land and waterways around us. I pay respect to Elders past and present and to the Elders of other communities in Australia.

FACING DOWN THE TSUNAMI

Colleagues,
As a true believer in Australian creativity, I start with an image from one of our most celebrated works of literature.
In George Johnson’s masterpiece My Brother Jack, set in the 1930s, the narrator — a journalist named Davy Meredith — has the task of boarding the great steamships arriving in Melbourne every Monday morning to interview important visitors from Europe to get first-hand accounts of what was going on in the rest of the world, 12,000 miles away.
This had been a standard Australian news-gathering technique since before the submarine cable and the radio had turned it into an indulgence. Even by the 1930s, the information and views the visitors brought was already weeks old. This “news”, Johnson writes, ”rather than being something that was actually happening now, had the quality of the light of a distant star.”
This scene, taken from Johnson’s own experiences as a journalist at the Argus, reminds us there was once a time when the news of the world drifted towards Australia with such tepid velocity that we felt compelled to go out to meet it.
Not so now.
We are a geographically large country at the bottom of the world whose language is the lingua franca, English. We can receive, read and absorb almost everything, instantaneously. This gives us great advantages. But it also leaves us uniquely vulnerable.
Where once we couldn’t get enough information . . . and where once that information was mostly factual and reliable . . . we are being flooded with content, some of it dubious, some of it downright lies.
That trickle of information we once rushed out to bring ashore has become a Tsunami, breaking through our feeble levees, washing over us, surging through the streets to potentially reshape our mental landscape, especially the minds of our young.

Like all Tsunamis, it drags ashore sharp, dangerous objects.
Misinformation — false information spread due to ignorance, error or mistake, sometimes without intention to deceive.
And disinformation — the deliberate spreading of false information and narratives to achieve malicious intent. The products of Vladimir Putin’s bot farms. Andrew Tate’s poisonous misogynistic videos. AI tools in the hands of our enemies and criminals. Lies intended to spread confusion, exploit vulnerability, sow division, destroy resolve.
Australia and similar countries have recently started to realise the profound damage this can cause — especially in an era of increasing global tension and military conflict.
As French President Emmanuel Macron remarked earlier this year when speaking of Europe: we are living in an era of cultural clash, driven by digital social networks and the digitisation of society, in which we are losing our capacity to produce our own national narrative, making it impossible to build our own future.[1] In the digital world we all now inhabit, Macron argued, information has become an issue of national sovereignty.
Let’s be clear . . . if we do not provide our people with trusted information, we will increasingly tell ourselves stories that are not really about us, but part of an extended global imaginary — our own story disappearing under the waves.
It’s already happening.
That Tsunami of overseas-generated content breaching our information defences is now competing for the affections, hearts, minds and aspirations of our people. Most dangerously, it is targeting the next generation of Australian children, teenagers and young adults, compromising their confidence about and knowledge of Australian history, Australian stories, Australian accents and Australian values in ways that may harm our future.
This is damaging our social cohesion, weakening the links between our regions and cities, generating unnecessary cultural conflict, weakening us.
We must counter it.
Our first line of defence is to create an environment in which facts from credible sources predominate. Strengthening our nation’s news capacity is essential.
The ABC’s news output is already impressive. With some 16,000 original content news items published monthly and with engagement scores that exceed 660 million minutes on the recently measured monthly figures in April with a profusion of audio and video offerings amounting to several thousand a month. And with significantly increased reach and engagement.
But we must make it even stronger.
This will require extra investment. But also a commitment to the most important quality of journalism: objectivity.
That’s why since taking the job of Chair of the ABC I have been insisting that all our journalists adhere, always, to the highest standards of objectivity and professional ethics.
We do not serve causes at the ABC, we serve the truth. This is non-negotiable.
We will sometimes make mistakes. But when we do, we will acknowledge them, correct them, and redouble our efforts to avoid them in the future, as we have done in recent times. Our processes are and will remain robust and under vigilant editorial review.
Our nation more broadly is beginning to focus on the dangers of the information age — examining potential new defences, including a Media Bargaining Code, a digital platform levy, social media restrictions for the young. All of them incredibly tricky and difficult to put in place. However there is a collective sense that action needs to be taken.
As the poisoned waters of the Tsunami rise, it’s good to get the young especially into lifeboats — they are particularly vulnerable to the flood. Their minds are precious assets, needed for our future success. But lifeboats are always flimsy protections against surging tides. And one day our young will have to swim for themselves in the poisoned seas. So they and everyone else will need to be better prepared.
We must therefore get better at exposing misinformation, correcting disinformation, and arming Australians with the skills needed to counter both.
Just as the founding of democracy in the industrial age required an aspiration to universal literacy, its continuation in the digital age requires universal media literacy.
These will give us strong defences, but defence can only get you so far in the battle against disinformation and misinformation.
We can’t accept that in the current strange era increasingly, nothing is more empowering than ignorance. Ignorance is unburdened by knowledge and the understanding of and respect for history. Ignorance has no fidelities. No sense of social commitment. Ignorance is in divine indifference to a sense of obligations to others and the truth. It invariably serves personal whims, too often fed by narcissism and fantasy. This is profoundly dangerous.
The best policy is to counter-attack — by generating more of our own news, information, discussion, documentaries, educational, children’s, drama and other programming which celebrates and interrogates the rich diversity of our nation and its humanity.
Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum. We need to fill the void before others do.
Most of all, we need to help Australians come up with our, home-grown animating idea.
Everywhere we look across the world, national stories are being contested — and in places like Ukraine literally being fought over.
What is our national story? It is something that we need to develop together.
In a world of increasing hostility, we need a confident sense of who we are, knowledge of the society and political system we want to maintain, a strong grasp of history and science, and an understanding of how our great political, legal and educational institutions work to keep us free.
We need to believe in ourselves, express ourselves with confidence, be creative in our response to big problems, have a set of common beliefs that can bind us together as citizens regardless of where we live, what colour collar we wear to work, what our culture, gender or family origin may be. All the ingredients of what we used to call “patriotism”. It’s an old-fashioned term, but one I like.
We will find it through news and discussion but also from documentaries and on occasion in great drama.
I used to describe this process as finding our nation’s “True North”. But of course for us at the bottom of the world, what we need is a “True South” — an understanding and appreciation of our place in the world, our beliefs and our national interests.
To find that True South we need to invigorate our entire homegrown media industry.
Every media company and every journalist represented here at our great National Press Club can be part of this revival.
Australia’s media companies are not competitors in this task of renewal, we are allies, each approaching it in our own way, with our own priorities.
But the national task will necessarily fall mostly to the ABC.
THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW
We must make the ABC into the best public broadcaster it can possibly be. Not at some far off time in the future, but now.
It is still a formidable organisation:
• Serving Australians by producing a spectrum of news, documentaries, and of children’s, educational, drama and other programming per year in audio, video, broadcast, streaming, on demand and in a myriad of digital iterations across a profusion of platforms.
• And serving our region through ABC International Services, with audiences of more than 11 million people a month across our platforms, with more on social. Playing a major part in our nation’s soft diplomacy.
But, frankly, the forces against us are considerable and they are often overwhelming. We need stronger Australian responses. Despite all we still do, the ABC is in need of attention and care.
Without the ABC, the Australian media would be in a severe situation.
When I was younger, a wise old publisher said something that has always stuck with me.
There are three kinds of people in the policy and commercial world, he said:
Those who make things happen;
Those who watch things happen;
And those who stand back and say: [PAUSE] What happened?
What happened was this: We stood back for the best part of three or four decades and allowed the ABC to lose one-third of its funding in real terms when its services have been needed more than ever before.
In the last decade alone, our operating revenue from government has fallen by 13.7 per cent in real terms or, put in a simple number, an annual reduction of $150 million.
When public investment in the ABC is discussed, it is often observed that its annual budget is over a billion dollars. This is true and the Board takes the responsibility of investing this money wisely very seriously. The fact remains, however, that the budget allocation has not kept pace with rising costs.
Funding the ABC represents a tiny proportion of the budget — and it has been getting smaller. In just this century, we have declined from an overall share of Commonwealth outlays of 0.31% in 2000 — 2001 to 0.13% in today’s outlays — a dramatic decline by any measure.
Currently, Australia invests around 40% less per person in public broadcasting than the average for a comparable set of 20 OECD democracies.
As our nation has become richer, our nation’s broadcaster has become much poorer.
Moreover, in the 1990s, the ABC operated considerably fewer services. One television channel, rather than the four it has today. Its four national radio networks were mostly there, as were local stations, but six digital radio channels were not even a dream. Web services were nascent and there was no ABC iview or ABC Listen. No ABC Apps. No social media accounts. We have also expanded our physical footprint while other media services have contracted. So not only does the ABC have less, but it is more efficient and provides more.
Journalists here today from commercial newsrooms don’t need a similar recitation of their budget declines to know what’s happened. They see it in the empty chairs their friends once occupied and feel it in the extra deadlines they have to file every day. The fat was cut a long time ago. The knife is now scraping the bone.
The Tsunami I mentioned earlier has washed away a generation of journalistic talent, never to return. It’s no wonder that some are saying our commercial newsrooms have reached a critical point and now face an even more rapid decline.
Australia’s newspapers are thinner, our newsrooms sparser, our readers and viewers and listeners more distributed with media fragmentation and commercial realignments. Everywhere you look down, down, down the numbers go.
And as our need to create national coherence and unity has increased, our capacity to build and project it has been diminished.
We have to do something about this, starting at the ABC.
Despite the strengths I have mentioned, real funding reductions at the ABC have taken a very real toll.
Radio Australia’s once great set of services, including probably the best Bahasa service in the region, have been dismantled to the detriment of our nation’s soft diplomatic reach. While ABC International still does a great job with the resources it has, and the Government’s Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Strategy has enabled it to double the number of transmitters in the Pacific and increase first-run content for the Region, there is much more that it can do, particularly in language.
The fine Australian content we once produced in abundance for children and young people has been reduced, along with our educational programming.
Content development and programming in documentaries, science, religion and ethics, drama, and sporting diversity, including more recently women’s sports, have also declined.
Even the scope of the ABC’s superb regional media offerings, which can still boast 58 locations, more than 600 staff, 800 hours of unique radio programming each and every week, and extensive coverage of regional Australian news and culture, are not what they once were. Nevertheless, we have, of course, in recent years boosted the investment in Emergency Broadcasting so axiomatic to purpose at the ABC. And The Country Hour is still going strong and will celebrate its 80th year in 2025.
And great networks like Radio National, Classic FM, the metro capital-city network, and a wide range of specialist audio services have been squeezed tight, to the very public dismay of their passionate audiences.
To put my case most simply: the ABC needs a plan for renewal and re-investment, and it needs it now.
RENEWING THE ABC
Extra investment will allow us to give viewers, listeners and readers what they really crave from their ABC:
• extra trusted, high-quality news services, with an expanded fact-checking capability across all platforms
• more and better children’s programs
• additional educational content that complements school curricula
• stronger diverse audio offerings
• more and better documentaries, arts, drama and comedy programming
• and, crucially, a viable strategy to engage in better ways with younger audiences to give them a brighter future.
SHOWCASING AUSTRALIAN CULTURE: MORE AND BETTER CONTENT
I have mentioned the importance of our news services already, but our viewers of course want better content across the board.
How many times have you sat watching a brilliant overseas-produced drama or documentary series on Netflix or Binge or Disney+ and found yourself thinking: Why aren’t we doing this?
Where are our great Australian dramas? Our great historical and science documentaries? Our amazing music, theatre and dance performances? Why aren’t we producing and seeing more of those?
For example, take documentaries. With an increase in serious television documentaries on national and international subjects of relevance, we could reinforce Australia’s levels of historical and scientific literacy — two things we could use a lot more of right now. We need to challenge Australians to think widely about the world and respond with delight and wonder. We must compete in this vital space again. This is something I regard as crucial for the ABC’s intellectual credibility and the fulfilment of central elements of our Charter.
More ambition too is required to refresh popular understanding of Australia’s great national institutions — our parliaments, our courts, our regulators and public policy processes. And of course, the security offered by the world’s best electoral system. Australians simply don’t realise how good our democratic institutions are. Informing them about this would be the most direct expression imaginable of the ABC as a proud servant of our democracy and our freedoms.
No matter what the programming type, our proposed new investments will pay off with better scripts, higher production values and larger audiences and a sense of pride and wonder in the talent of our creators.
Some say we can never compete with the U.S. and the U.K. on quality programming because our population is too small to sustain it. But at 27 million people, our population is reasonably large by world standards. The tiny Scandinavian countries punch like heavyweights in the world of entertainment content development, while we, with our far larger population, are currently punching like bantomweights. I want Australia to win back its reputation for unsurpassed drama and storytelling. We can do it. We just have to believe in ourselves. And invest in that belief. We’ve already proven it is possible from a wealth of talent in acting, directing, cinematography and all the other precious production skillsets evident with Australians across the planet. They have been superbly developed by our training institutions from Sydney and Melbourne through to Perth.
SOCIAL COHESION: LISTENING TO EVERYONE AND TELLING EVERYONE’S STORIES
Anyone watching world politics right now will know how important it is to make every citizen, regardless of their background, feel included in our democracy. Increasing numbers of people are saying the mainstream media isn’t listening to them, isn’t reflecting their needs, isn’t including their perspectives and their stories in their national story. They are hurting. Their dissatisfaction needs to be taken more seriously. Anger can’t be allowed to build up until it explodes. We need to go where these citizens are.
The ABC already has the most extensive network of news and entertainment services for regional and remote Australia, as I have mentioned.
Not so, maybe, for those in the outer suburbs of our cities, some of which are now 50 kilometres or more from where the news industry tends to be concentrated. Our recent initiative with a splendid news and programming centre at Parramatta in Sydney, which will have a final official opening next February, is going to become a beacon for such initiatives elsewhere.
It is time to ensure those who live on the urban fringe can have their perspectives reflected in the news and in our public debates.
With the right investment we could establish new newsrooms in selected suburban and peri-urban population locations — new home bases from which our journalists can gather news and better reflect the views of these sometimes neglected Australian communities. It’s an idea worth pursuing and delivering. After all it is all about the audiences of Australia — our fellow citizens.
ATTRACTING THE YOUNG
I want to address my final remarks to our younger citizens, too few of whom are regular members of the ABC’s audiences. Or indeed of any broadcasting company’s audience.
As Tom Gleeson’s scriptwriters at Hard Quiz forever remind us, the ABC’s audience tends to be older than average. Some of us with less hair even than he has.
This has been the case for so long now that people think it is inevitable and irreversible.
But it is only inevitable if we don’t do anything to reverse it.
Now I admit I am given to saying there is a new fifty-year-old and sixty-year-old born every minute. However, I want the ABC to go after younger viewers, listeners and readers on every platform as a vital part of our civic duty.
Not because I don’t appreciate the audiences we already have ¬– we love our audiences — but as a matter of intergenerational equity. The ABC is for all our citizens, no matter what their age. And because reconnecting with the young is now an urgent democratic and cultural imperative. It is a core aspect of our being owned by all Australians.
I said earlier that we need to do more than create lifeboats to prevent young Australians from drowning intellectually in the polluted tide of disinformation and misinformation swamping their screens. We must give them a rudder and engine so they can steer a course of safety and help us construct a future that is safe for democracy.
This means trying new approaches to include them in our national conversations.
I would personally like to see the ABC attract and train a new generation of young journalists who understand intuitively how their contemporaries consume and think about the media, and know best how to reach them with appropriate expression and perspective on their favoured and rapidly changing platforms.
And I would like to help young and old Australians alike to become more media literate and even media savvy, able to better discern truth in a world of lies. The long-term survival of the idea of the objective truth, which George Orwell once — maybe prophetically — told us is in danger of fading out of the world, rests in the hands of the young. We can do a great deal with our schools to make this happen.
CONCLUSION
I started with the deluge.
Let me end with what comes after.
Because we can help make the waters recede faster if we are smart and show purpose.
Recently, writing in the Financial Times, the Columbia University historian Mark Mazower analysed what he thought was behind the re-emergence of the angry, intolerant and emotion-charged populist politics that the world thought had disappeared for good after the Second World War.
“At least one of the causes is clear [he wrote]: the retreat into information bubbles caused by the lack of a single trusted national news source — a problem much more acute in the US than elsewhere.”
When we are trapped in our information bubbles, all we can see are enemies, all we want to do is fight, and democracy is in trouble.
We are fortunate here in Australia. Our mass mainstream media is far less polarised than in many other countries.
While editorial directions are disputed — usually with passion — the facts are still generally accepted by all sides.
This is an important distinction. It means disinformation and misinformation are yet to completely overwhelm us. We still believe that there is something called objective truth.
And one of the most important reasons for this is the one Mazower identified. Australia still has trusted sources of news.
Most importantly, it still has the ABC, which is trusted by the overwhelming majority of our citizens.
The latest ABC Corporate Tracker data shows the ABC is trusted by 81 per cent of Australians. This compares to 64 per cent for newspapers, 61 per cent for commercial radio, 58 per cent for commercial tv and 26 per cent for facebook.
As the waters of misinformation and disinformation rise, the continuing existence of the ABC as a trusted source of the truth will help save our democracy from the populist damage going on elsewhere.
Yes, we have real work to do. We have standards to adhere to and objectives which must be set high. However, here is a media delivery institution which has evolved as the most reliable national delivery agent across the length and breadth of Australia available with a range of services to deliver for Australians with an almost umbilical link to the heartbeat of the nation.
This makes the ABC one of the most precious assets we have.
We must hold onto it.
And that means we must invest to keep it strong.
Our people deserve it……. and our democracy is worth it.