ABC Chair Kim Williams AM addressed to the Melbourne Press Club at a lunch today, Thursday April 3, saying ‘with every passing day, it’s becoming clear that democracies need to talk, urgently, about how to maintain and protect a free media.’
He spoke of maintaining journalistic standards, the importance of truthful election coverage as well as heaping praise on Australian journalists who covered Cyclone Alfred and its ongoing after effects.
Photo: Emily Jagot Kulich/Melbourne Press Club
The full transcript is below:
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners on these ancestral lands and waterways of the Kulin nation on which we gather today. I pay my respects to Elders past and present and to the Elders of other Indigenous communities in Australia.
I also take this moment to acknowledge the diverse peoples and cultures who have been welcomed to this nation, along with the laws, freedoms, rights, and faiths they have brought or represent.
Recognising this plurality is crucial, given the never-ending assault on difference which too often permeates our society today.
I have had the privilege to address the Melbourne Pres Club on a couple of previous occasions and always enjoyed the engagement – I thank the club afresh for the invitation today, just over a year into my role as ABC Chair
INTRODUCTION
A few weeks ago, apropos of nothing, someone sent me the following image:
Well, why not? I’m sure the mayor of the City of Frankston thinks it a good idea.
And if the Bayside News wants to call it “Port Philip Bay”, the mayor can ban the paper’s reporters from the Council Chamber on Monday evenings.
If we live in a world where the truth is whatever those in power say it is, we can call anything, whatever we like.
We can call Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator.
Call his countrymen Nazis.
And call his nation “part of Russia”.
The truth matters.
Because when the truth is replaced by lies, democracy and people are in danger. The truth shines light on autocracy. Hence the Washington Post’s slogan: Democracy dies in darkness.
I happen to agree – as I am sure most of you do too.
We live in a world in which a strong, free media is needed, like never before.
And a moment when a strong free news media is struggling to survive, like never before.
Revenue streams have been choked off by the inexorable march of the tech titans – Meta, Google, Amazon, X and the rest. Now we can’t complain about technology change and innovation, however there are many things with which we can take issue.
Newsrooms have been slashed. Long-respected mastheads have thinned or closed. Journalists laid off in their dozens. Content cut back.
The press is facing eye-wateringly expensive lawfare to prevent them reporting truths powerful people want kept quiet.
American legislators have threatened to widen libel laws to scare editors and proprietors into submission.
To make things worse, media oligarchs are busily undermining the integrity of their publishing to advance their wider business interests.
Jeff Bezos’s behaviour is increasingly appalling. Preventing a presidential election editorial. Effectively censoring the op ed page. Paying $40 million to the president’s wife for a documentary series.
And – maybe the greatest crime against humanity of them all – putting 15-year-old re-runs of The Apprentice on his streaming platform Amazon Prime.
If the newspaper that uncovered the Watergate scandal and published the Pentagon Papers can be forced by its proprietor, against the will of its journalists, to toe the line, like this, who is safe?
Politicians are joining the suppression. Membership of the White House Press pool is being vetted, including the banning of the Associated Press.
FBI director Kash Patel says he intends to “come after” journalists.
President Trump wants reporting from MSNBC and CNN declared illegal.
All this in the country known for the First Amendment: lets recall its magic;
Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .
Add to this the manipulation of algorithms by corporations and State actors.
With every passing day, it’s becoming clear that democracies need to talk, urgently, about how to maintain and protect a free media.
You simply can’t defend your freedom without defending media freedom. I have an allergy to slogans however in this case, it is a simple as that – no freedom without the media freedom. Period.
For media freedom, we must maintain strong journalistic standards and find ways to keep our media industry economically viable.
I want to touch briefly on those two things.
MAINTAINING JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS
To the first – maintaining journalistic standards – I make the following point.
The ABC will aim to hold reliably high standards. I don’t want to indulge in grandiloquent terms of being the standard setter – we all know, we all offer human frailty writ large at times. However I do want to hold our journalism to account as having defendable values as to reliable performance consistent with the standards set out in the ABC Act, and I quote: to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the Corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism.
In 2024 the Digital News Report published by the University of Canberra found that the most important factor for Australians in deciding to trust a news outlet was journalistic standards.
At the ABC and elsewhere, the role of journalists is to engage in objective reporting.
Objectivity is a definitional requirement of the profession. No objectivity, no true journalism. We are journalists reporting the truth, or we are propagandists defending untruth, or worse still promoting it.
It is sometimes argued that the job of journalists is to push “objective truth”.
I agree there are great and noble causes writers must defend. But not by sacrificing their objectivity.
Our good colleague Martin Baron, until 2021 editor of the Washington Post, had to grapple with this very issue at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.
He wrote the following in his 2024 book Collision of Power. I quote at length because this is a crucial point:
The Post’s long-standing guidelines were brief, clear and absolute: “We avoid active involvement in any partisan cause––politics, community affairs, social action, demonstrations––that could compromise or seem to compromise our ability to report and edit fairly.”
He continues:
When we lose the perception and reality of independence, we give the public a reason to question our authority as well. They will see us as activists or partisans. As journalists our role should be to observe, inquire, investigate, document and effectively communicate . . . Every profession comes with some constraints, and we have ours.
It is because our perceived independence is so central to our role as a public broadcaster, and because the role of a public broadcaster is so easily traduced by its opponents, that we cannot give an inch on this point.
And as long as I am Chair of the ABC, we will not give so much as a millimetre.
The ABC has earned the public’s trust for the better part of a century, and we will not be compromising it under any circumstances.
Guided by Section 6 of the Act – our Charter, and Section 8 of the Act – the duties of the board which speak to the core values of independence, integrity and editorial objectivity, we are above politics and that’s how it must stay. The nation needs to be able to rely on it.
FINDING DOLLARS FOR DEMOCRACY
As to the second point – giving our free media the resources it needs to continue doing its job – there are many things that can be said.
Naturally, the most pleasing way to achieve this is for media companies to innovate to find new ways of reaching larger audiences and in doing so secure that success.
The success of streaming and podcasting and “substacking” demonstrates that people are hungry for great content and willing to pay for it. I’m sure everyone in the audience has their favourite podcasts and substacks. I have many. Too many, maybe.
The problem is that like everything on the internet, these efforts often free ride on news gathering.
In other words, they get free use of the really expensive stuff!
The big issue we must confront, and answer, is how to increase resources needed to create quality news.
Or what I call: an investment for democracy.
Those investment dollars for democracy must be found.
Some have managed. Prior to its most recent difficulties, the Washington Post significantly increased its readership, subscriptions and revenue, enabling it to add many new journalists and double its news division. Pursuing quality news without compromise paid off.
Sadly, I fear the recent compromises to the once-great newspaper’s integrity are seriously endangering its future.
Why would you subscribe to a timid and submissive Washington Post, when you could support a gutsy New York Times?
Perhaps most impressively, the Financial Times, just 20 years ago a declining masthead with a narrowing readership base, now has around 1.3 million subscribers, 1.2 million of whom are digital subscribers.
For good reason, many now regard the FT as one of the highest quality news organisations in the world. Again, I’m guessing that like me, many of you in this room are subscribers. And so to the mighty journal, although they always insist on calling it a newspaper – The Economist.
The FT and The Economist have done it by taking the digital world seriously and by putting emphasis on quality journalism. So has the BBC. These are things we at the ABC are also doing.
For those interested, I recommend the FT’s visionary former leader Lionel Barber’s brilliant account of his time as editor. Compulsory reading for any serious journalist and news editor looking for ways to strengthen their industry.
Here is the challenge for Australia’s media organisations and its government: To find a way of getting a bigger and fairer proportion of digital revenues back into the hands of the people who produce the content. The news.
The Copyright Agency, along with Public Lending Rights and Electronic Lending Rights, prove workable forms of revenue redistribution are possible. Those wonderful mechanisms work.
This is a global issue. A titanic battle is underway to prevent sovereign nations from requiring US-based content aggregators like Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon and X from paying their way.
Critics are describing initiatives like the Media Bargaining Code and the proposed News Bargaining Incentive as forms of “coercive and discriminatory tax” and effectively “non-tariff trade barriers”.
Parliament will have to decide the way forward.
In doing so, it must be clear about the real issue.
This is not just about commercial interests. It is about the future health of democracy. And ultimately about national sovereignty.
One direct way of supporting Australian democracy is before our very nose – to properly invest in the ABC.
We perform as well as we can with the allocations provided, and we are grateful to the Australian government for providing it to enable the ABC to serve audiences.
Last year, our base funding was increased as part of MYEFO. Effectively the Government has now reversed the impact of the indexation pause that the ABC was subject to between 2019-2022. We truly appreciate the stabilisation of ABC funding after years of decline.
But the ABC’s funding level remains extremely low by historical standards. In real terms it is more than $150m per annum less than it was in 2013.
In the Year 2000, funding for the ABC comprised 0.31% of Commonwealth outlays.
Today that is around 0.12%, and we are called upon to do much more with it.
As a result, Australia currently invests 40% less per person in public broadcasting than the average for a comparable set of 20 OECD democracies.
Research published by the ACMA last month reinforces the value and importance the ABC to audiences.
The News Media in Australia report found that
- “The national broadcaster was popular with Australians for news in 2024, with the ABC having the most accessed outlets for all platforms on which it offered a news service.” and that
- “At the news brand level, the ABC held the greatest share of Australian adults’ attention in 2024”
Not only were ABC services used, importantly audiences also said that they relied on them.
The research found that the ABC had the most relied on news outlets on free-to-air TV, on catch-up or streaming, on radio, and for online news.
ABC News Daily was the most relied on news podcast
Never has information been more powerful. Never has the truth been so under attack. Never has the need for proper funding of public broadcasters been greater.
PROVIDING TRUTHFUL ELECTION COVERAGE
We know that today bad actors are using channels of misinformation and disinformation to influence the outcome of national elections.
Highly credible allegations about this have been made about Russian state-sponsored interference in the electoral systems of Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, Georgia, Moldova, and most recently in Romania where an election result had to be annulled and a prominent candidate banned from running.
That’s before we get to the activities of Elon Musk’s X.
This is a world in which democratic elections cannot automatically be assumed to be free of foreign interference.
It is foolish in the extreme to believe we will be immune to this global trend.
A strong ABC is needed to ensure Australians are fully and truthfully informed about the workings of their democracy.
We need to flood the zone with truth, to prevent others flooding it with lies.
The 2025 election campaign is a case in point.
Our coverage is of unprecedented scope and quality.
The ABC will harness our network of reporters and radio programs in 67 locations across Australia to find out what really matters to voters.
Our Your Say initiative will ensure their voices are heard in the national conversation.
The ABC’s line-up of political journalists will keep them on top of unfolding events every day.
Vote Compass will show Australians how their views align with those of the candidates and the political parties.
Hidden Campaign will expose the tactics used to target and woo voters while ABC
NEWS Verify will scrutinise misinformation and disinformation on the campaign trail.
The campaign coverage will be available across our television and radio networks, our digital platforms – the ABC NEWS website, ABC iview, ABC listen as well as on the third-party platforms that are increasingly used by audience to access the news.
The ABC also has longer-term plans for strengthening our electoral system, and later this year the inestimable Annabel Crabb will be presenting a new three-part documentary series explaining to Australians of all ages the uniqueness, strength and practical workings of our wonderful thoroughly independent electoral system.
Few countries in the world can boast an organisation as well run and as trusted as the Australian Electoral Commission. Its old-fashioned use of paper ballots and old-fashioned sense of ethics and integrity make it the best. We all need our people to understand it and to feel proud of it. Because it is genuinely free from even the possibility of political interference.
And I want to see our schools especially use this program to teach civics to the next generation of Australian voters as to just what a blessing we have in our electoral system.
It will be another example of how, the ABC is taking, extraordinarily seriously, its responsibility not only to education but also the vital value of civics in our society.
CONCLUSION
I want to end by heaping my personal praise on the efforts of all Australian journalists, particularly those at the ABC, for your great coverage of the recent ex-tropical cyclone Alfred.
Fortunately, we dodged the full force of angry nature. Better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. Nevertheless, as I, perhaps way too often, describe the ABC as the mirror, the microphone and the camera to the nation, the ABC performed as a well-tuned partner across those harrowing days. Our people were outstanding.
Regional and local News and Radio teams across south-east Queensland and northern NSW collaborated on the coverage, including our bureaus in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Coffs Harbour, Toowoomba, Hervey Bay, Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Townsville, Lismore and Port Macquarie.
The Queensland and NSW metro and regional radio teams, supported by the Emergency Broadcast team, collaborated to broadcast more than 200 hours of dedicated cyclone and flood coverage on this event.
I’m confident that had Alfred hit us full on, the Australian media would have been brilliantly positioned to serve the community with the accurate and up-to-date information our people needed to make literally life and death decisions. And by helping keep their chin up in the most difficult times.
As it was, the effects of the Ex-Tropical Cyclone were bad enough. And the information provided was incredibly well appreciated by the people of the flooded regions.
We not only provided accurate warning advice for the Bureau of Meteorology and emergency services organisations, but deployed our audiences in the news gathering effort, receiving updates from those listening on their old-school battery-powered radios, enabling us to help others understand what was going on near to them.
We received many messages of thanks from those in the wind’s and the water’s path. Here are a few:
Dear presenters, our power has just been restored, day 6 . . . Thank you so much for helping us through stories, helping with our decision-making, planning and just making us feel safe. If I could describe unity in a few words, it would be ABC keeping everyone informed. That to me is love personified.
Another:
Thank you for your wonderful coverage. Very helpful as we have no power or internet. Can you please check when power is due to come on for the Northern end of Macleay Island.
And another:
Good morning Loretta and Craig! I just wanted to say how utterly grateful I am to each and every one of you at ABC Brisbane for your special coverage of old mate Alfred. You kept me company, sane entertained and informed, and I feel as though I now have new friends who were with me through some very scary and difficult nights, and long uncertain days.
I could read them for hours. Really, as a news organisation, the satisfaction of a job well done doesn’t get much better.
If the scientists are right, and today’s extreme weather events are but a foretaste of worse to come, there can be no greater illustration of the need for media presence and media freedom.
In times of danger, dependable information keeps people alive.
Democracy dies in darkness. And without accurate, truthful, timely news, our citizens die in floods and fires and cyclones.
I have always been a collector of punchy aphorisms and probably irritatingly quote them a little too often. Nevertheless I could not pass by this observation from Mark Twain which is as apposite and pungent today as it was in the nineteenth century –
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on”.
What we do as members of the press is more than a public service. It is something inseparable from the workings of our nation. We need a strong and well-funded press. We need a strong and well-funded ABC. We are partners together in serving the nation and what it means to be Australian.
Be proud of what you do.
Photo credits: Emily Kulich/Melbourne Press Club
In Europe, finding for public service media is also an ongoing dialog. The European Broaadcasting Union has recently completed a study of the value of PSM, illustrated by the graphic below (click to expand).
The full report is available here: EBU-MIS-Funding_of_Public_Service_Media_2025-Public.