ABC to cut national head of emergency broadcasting position despite bushfires success.

Extract from ABC News

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

ABC management wants to eliminate the national position and instead run emergency broadcasting on a state-by-state basis

Ben Butler, Calla Wahlquist and Elias Visontay

Thu 25 Jun 2020 18.16 AEST Last modified on Thu 25 Jun 2020 20.31 AEST

ABC photographer Matt Roberts reacts to seeing his sister’s house destroyed by a bushfire in Quaama, NSW. The ABC plans to make its national head of emergency broadcasting redundant. Axing the national role will leave the ABC in a similar position to state fire agencies. Photograph: Sean Davey/EPA

The ABC plans to make its national head of emergency broadcasting redundant following a deadly fire season during which Australians credited the organisation with saving lives.
As part of cuts announced by the national broadcaster this week, ABC management wants to eliminate the national position and instead run emergency broadcasting on a state-by-state basis.
Axing the national role will leave the ABC in a similar position to state fire agencies, whose parochial approach to information distribution caused confusion and misinformation in the border between New South Wales and Victoria this summer, the royal commission into national natural disaster arrangements has heard.

Australians in bushfire-ravaged areas relied on ABC emergency broadcasts during the summer’s firestorms, with 60% of people from affected regions who were surveyed by the broadcaster saying it provided information that helped ensure their safety.
About half of those surveyed relied upon the ABC as their main source of information during the crisis.

It is understood that with the national manager position abolished, responsibility for coordinating ABC broadcasts with emergency authorities would be borne by broadcast managers in each state.
The crucial role of the national broadcaster in providing information about fires that cross borders was made clear this week at the bushfire royal commission.
Two megafires formed over the border in the 2019-2020 summer, one jumping the Murray River from the foothills of the Snowy Mountains near Corryong and a second forming from blazes burning in far East Gippsland into the NSW far south coast.
But the mobile phone apps run by the emergency services in each state do not track fires across borders or even use the same colour codes for warnings, which councils in the border region said caused confusion among residents.
“So if the fire originated on the NSW side of the border, the [Rural Fire Service] maintained the fire information until it crossed the border and then it didn’t maintain that information. And vice versa in Victoria, so there were significant issues about the movement across the border,” Snowy Valleys Council chief executive Matthew Hyde told the commission on Tuesday.
The NSW Rural Fire Service and Victorian emergency services also use different radio networks, as do the aerial firebombing planes contracted by each. The only emergency service that gave residents the full list of warnings across state borders was ABC radio.
ABC management is currently consulting with staff about the changes.
An ABC spokesman refused to confirm or deny that the national position was to be made redundant.
“There are absolutely no plans to change the way in which we cover emergency events,” he said.
“In fact, we are proposing to improve the service with closer ties between our emergency broadcast team and our local and regional teams. This would ensure our local teams have greater control over this coverage during emergencies such as bushfires.

“The ABC will continue to prioritise the delivery of these services.”
It comes as the ABC confirmed to Guardian Australia the decision to rebrand its ABC Life site was made despite the section exceeding its performance targets.
Under the ABC’s five-year plan, the life section will be rebranded as ABC Local, taking a new editorial direction to source “content from across the ABC, including outer suburban and regional areas”.
It is understood that nine staff will be made redundant.
However an ABC spokesman said ABC Life had surpassed the targets set when it launched in 2018, almost doubling the intended audience.
“It set an audience target of one million active users per month, which it reached within six months of launch. Since then the site has grown steadily and now reaches around two million active users each month with the majority of its audience being female and under the age of 45,” the spokesman said.
Osman Faruqi, the former deputy editor of ABC Life, criticised the ABC over the decision, writing in Guardian Australia that it was done to appease critics who said the government should not be funding a website that competes with commercial lifestyle outlets.
The axing of ABC’s 7:45am news radio bulletin has also fuelled speculation that some of the cost-cutting initiatives announced this week have been made to send a signal about the depth of recent government funding cuts, as the bulletin has no dedicated staff.
The ABC later disputed this assessment saying the staffing resources associated with the 7.45am bulletin were significant the cuts represented a substantial saving to the news budget.

“The suggestion any of the proposals is intended to “send a signal” is mischievous and demonstrably wrong,” an ABC spokesperson said.