“Defund The ABC” Petitioners Demand Government Stop Funding Public Broadcaster With Already The Smallest Indigenous Affairs Unit In Its History

SYDNEY – A petition campaign trending under the hashtag #DefundTheABC reached top-ten national status on X over the weekend, with signatories demanding the federal government withdraw funding from a public broadcaster whose Indigenous affairs unit has been progressively reduced across multiple budget cycles, whose dedicated First Nations programming runs largely on the smell of an oily NAIDOC sausage… and whose Indigenous staff numbers remain a closely guarded statistic for reasons sometimes attributed to “operational confidentiality” and sometimes to “yeah, it’s bad.”

The campaign cites concerns that the ABC has “deviated from balanced reporting,” “promoted left-wing narratives” and at one point in 2024 allowed senior journalist Laura Tingle to describe Australia as “a racist country” at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, a description that prompted FamilyVoice Australia to launch a defunding campaign and that prompted no observable reflection on the question of whether the description might be, on the balance of evidence, accurate.

Petition organisers were able to mobilise tens of thousands of signatures within weeks. Indigenous community broadcasters in remote areas of NSW, Queensland and the NT have, over the same period, been informed that licence renewal decisions on community radio frequencies remain “in process” and that funding allocations under the Indigenous Broadcasting Program have been “under review since 2019.”