Page 4173 - Week 13 - Thursday, 27 November 2014
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here with feigned outrage. Let us not pretend there is anything going on in this place other than political opportunism by those on the left of politics. They are trying to attack the government.
When you look at what Minister Turnbull has done then you can see he has applied an efficiency dividend on the ABC that is reasonable. He actually did a study. He commissioned a study, called the Lewis report, to look for efficiencies. He made sure that the efficiency dividend imposed on the ABC could be done with back-of-house savings. I quote Mr Turnbull:
I asked the Department of Communications to undertake an Efficiency Study to identify savings that could be made by improving efficiencies in the back of house departments of the ABC, in other words savings that could be made without reducing the resources available for programming.
This was a very deliberate move on my part. The easiest way to cut costs in a television network is simply to cancel programmes—and replace them with cheaper ones. More difficult is to go through the way the business operates, line by line and ask if we can do this more efficiently, with fewer people, with fewer fixed assets or other expensive resources.
He goes on:
In other words, it was the obvious the ABC and SBS were going to have to contribute to the overall Budget repair strategy.
I interpolate there. You have got to remember that the federal coalition was told there was going to be a surplus in 2016-17. Do you remember that, Madam Deputy Speaker? Do you remember the federal Labor government telling us how there was going to be a surplus? They swore by it. It was Wayne Swan’s illusionary surplus. Then we had Chris Bowen reinforcing that, saying there would be a surplus. What did the coalition government find when they came in? They found it was simply not true and they faced billions of dollars of deficit.
Mr Rattenbury wants us to just ignore that and have no efficiency dividends. It is the magic pudding that the Greens play by, where you never have to cut anything. You just spend, spend, spend and it is all put on the credit card because they do not have to take responsibility. I go back to Malcolm Turnbull:
Given the findings of the Efficiency Study, we announced a 1 per cent reduction in funding to the ABC and SBS in the 2014-15 Budget. This contributed savings over four years of $38.3 million for the ABC and $8.5 million for SBS.
This was not an ongoing efficiency dividend, but as I stated at the time, a down-payment on larger savings—
And so on. He goes on:
In its 146 pages the Lewis Efficiency Study discusses 48 operational activities across the ABC and the SBS. It identifies five key areas where significant efficiencies and savings can be achieved …
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