West Australian broadcast company Cybervale has had further fallout from the ABA decision to rescind its commercial broadcast licence (see last week’s story).

This week General Manager Sherryl Chilcott reports several more incidents. She told radioinfo:

Radio Great Southern 1422am went off air on Monday afternoon for a period of half an hour or so. Upon checking on why this occurred we found a Telstra contractor was sitting in a ditch next to his ditch digger, with a bunch of Telstra cable pairs in his hand (our broadcast line included).

When we asked him what he was doing he said, “I read a newspaper article and thought you guys were off air, so I didn’t think I had to notify you.”

“This situation was another spin off from the ABA’s disregard of the BSA section 180 when they published the News Release on 25th November,” says Chilcott.

Chilcott also says a local newspaper “The Great Southern Herald” in Katanning printed a third of a page article on the Section 40 decision.

Sam Reilly the reporter responsible for the article made contact with the ABA for their take on the decision and now they say they can’t comment on it until after the 19th of December because Cybervale Pty Ltd has yet to respond to them on whether they publish the decision or not.

“The ABA has been happy to talk about up until now. If the ABA believes it hasn’t done anything wrong in what they published then why are they not saying anything now?” says Chilcott.

“The ripple effect from the ABA publication of their decision so far is huge. They will publish more on the 19th, December 2003, but I wonder what further damage could they hope to inflict.”