Strengthening Multiculturalism and Building Social Inclusion

Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to address the 2009 FECCA Conference.

Before I begin I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Yorta Yorta nation and pay respect to their Elders both past and present.

I am heartened by the increased commitment by Australians to recognising the contribution of Australia’s first people through Welcome to Country ceremonies and formal acknowledgements at events such as this.

The more commonplace it becomes, the more it helps broaden our understanding of the unique and rich history of Australia. It is important that we continually seek new ways to educate ourselves about our history, our people and where we have come from. It helps to flesh out our national identity.

I was proud to be at the helm of SBS when we aired the ground-breaking documentary series First Australians last year.

It took six years and an enormous amount of hard work and dedication from the producers to bring this epic series to fruition. I truly believe it has earned a place in the Indigenous narrative of this country.

I think it will help, and has helped, more Australians understand the struggle of Indigenous Australians throughout history and the contribution they have made to the fabric of the nation.

However, as the series neared completion, it became clear to me that the story could not end with First Australians.

Equally as important was exploring the stories of our Second Australians – the many migrants who, often times in harrowing or difficult circumstances, came to this country and made it their home.

Second Australians

So last year I announced that SBS would partner with Screen Australia to develop a series that documented the multicultural journey of Australia.

This series will tell the stories of migrants who overcame Government policies, community indifference and even detention centres in their quest to make a better life for themselves and their families.

The migrants who built businesses, communities and homes; who made Australia a culturally rich and complex place. I felt it was important –  even imperative – that we told the story of multicultural Australia.

While there are many positive stories, there are also confronting ones in the history of multiculturalism in Australia. There are many tales of triumph over adversity but also entrenched patterns of resistance to multiculturalism by some sectors of the Australian community.

In many respects, the history of immigration here is the story of who was deemed desirable to come into this country and who was shut out under the guise of approaches we find abhorrent today, such as the White Australia policy.

Like First Australians, Second Australians must be a frank account of history – the good and the bad – the very best and worst of our national psyche.

Told well, this story could be the next account of our collective experience that helps us better come to terms with our history.

In a similar vein to First Australians, we expect this series to be landmark television that strikes a chord with viewers from all walks of life. It will be a cross-platform experience that will live on as an historic and educational resource with a significant online presence.

Second Australians is only one of a number of initiatives SBS is currently  developing which focuses on Australia’s multicultural history. We hope to partner with Screen Australia to get these projects into production to air in late 2010.

One of these projects  stands to shine a light on the experience of refugees in Australia. Already, through our award winning news and current affairs programs like Dateline and Insight, we regularly explore issues like migration and the plight of boat people.

But this new program, provocatively titled ‘Go Back Where You Came From’ , promises to be something quite different. Blending reality television with a reality check, four Australians with conservative views towards immigration will be plunged headlong into the life of the refugee.

They will undertake a dramatic journey that consigns them to live as illegal aliens in Australia, deports them to East Timor in a fishing boat and transports them to their final destination, Africa, where they spend a week in the world’s largest refugee camp with 400,000 people who have fled the civil wars in Somalia and Sudan.

At each stage of their journey, the participants will be paired up with refugee ‘mentors’ who will give them an unprecedented insight into their lives. The participants will not be mere observers but will be fully immersed – living, eating, sleeping and working beside refugees.

This has the potential to be incredibly powerful television and particularly potent considering the currency of immigration as a political issue in Australia.

The face and voice of multicultural Australia

I don’t think it’s too bold a statement to say that this type of content can only be made by SBS. With First Australians we proved we had the commitment and the tenacity to stick with a challenging production over many years.

With Second Australians, the synergy is even stronger. SBS is synonymous with the journey of multiculturalism in Australia; it makes sense that we are the broadcaster to document that journey.

SBS has long been considered the face and the voice of multicultural Australia; broadcasting in a multitude of languages to the most diverse audience of any media organisation in Australia – if not the world.

68 languages on radio, more than 48 languages on television representing 136 cultures on SBS ONE and now an expansion of content and languages on our digital television channel SBS TWO.

Since our creation we have been charged with communicating with and for people from a diverse range of backgrounds and we have been committed to helping the broader Australian community better understand the world and our multicultural community.

We know that FECCA and other bodies feel a strong sense of partnership with and even ownership of SBS; you are all key stakeholders helping to guide our direction and our contribution to meeting the communications needs of Australia’s culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

I thank FECCA and its Chair Voula Messimeri for her continued support and dialogue with me about SBS and our current and future services.  Congratulations on 30 years.

The changing nature of support

For many years SBS’s supporters have been passionate about our existence. However, our supporters at times have also been our biggest detractors.

Academics Ien Ang and Gay Hawkins in their book The SBS Story, released last year, summed up our predicament in this way:

“SBS has been attacked as either too ethnic, or not ethnic enough, too elitist or too populist; its audiences have been dismissed as too small to justify public funding but when bigger audiences have been sought it has been accused of being too commercial.”

Since we began, SBS has had to carefully tread the line between generalist and specialist and battle the perception that we must be all things to all people.

Nothing good can come of SBS spreading itself so thin in an effort to service everyone. If we try to be all things to all people; that would eventually mean that we failed everyone.

Contributing to social inclusion

By exploring Australia’s cultural diversity SBS creates opportunities for inter-cultural understanding, facilitates better participation in Australian public life and provides accessible information about local and international issues.

Minister Evans, in answering questions from Europe and America on reasons for the success of Australian multiculturalism, might justifiably include the role SBS plays.

For a new arrival, the first interaction they have with our services helps them to understand how Australia works.

But over time that relationship changes – they become participants in the Australian community and SBS gives them the opportunity to fully engage in public life.

As Australia’s multicultural and multilingual broadcaster, SBS enjoys a unique position of trust with culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

SBS is the only broadcaster that can speak to all Australians regardless of the language they speak or where they are from.

SBS TV is home to award winning locally produced dramas and documentaries, distinctive news and current affairs services and entertainment and factual programs that can appeal to a broad cross-section of the Australian community.

And we create distinctive local content that reflects the cultural realities of the Australian community.

This content has the very real potential to contribute to social cohesion. By realistically portraying different cultures on our television screens we promote not just acceptance of difference and diversity in the Australian community, but an awareness of how this diversity energises and enriches the nation.

We are the only broadcaster in Australia effectively doing this. Why we are the only broadcaster to accurately portray the cultural make-up of the Australian community is a question that Australian audiences should be posing to the other networks and even the ABC.

Risk to services

But in highlighting the important, let me say critical, role that SBS plays, I don’t want you to think that I am satisfied with our performance, far from it.  We can and should be doing more.  It’s a source of great frustration to all of us at SBS that while technology provides the means to vastly expand our services, we are shackled by a lack of resources.

I have signalled on many occasions that there is a very real risk that SBS’s services are under threat because of a legacy of under-funding. This is compounded by the global financial crisis, the effects of which SBS has not escaped.

We were grateful to the Australian Government for delivering SBS its first real injection of funds in more than a decade. $20 million over the next three year will go towards helping us sustain levels of local content production during the economic downturn.

When I state that SBS should be doing more, I am pointing particularly at one key element of our services.  For while we are striving with some success to adequately serve our ‘multicultural’ purpose; we are falling short on serving our ‘multilingual’ objectives.

A few obvious points to make are:

• The Australian population has changed, yet SBS’s core multilingual services have not.
• We significantly under-serve major or growing language communities.
• At the same we do little or nothing for new, high need language groups.
• And, we continue to largely serve our language communities on analogue radio when our audiences are increasingly turning to online services to meet their communications needs.

This is clearly unacceptable and untenable for a modern media organisation with a remit like SBS’s.

We are falling short on our obligations because the specialist services our Charter compels us to provide – in language content, extensive radio services, as well as local content that reflects the true, multicultural Australia – do not come cheaply.

Couple that with the very evident consumer demand for additional services not required or even contemplated under our Charter – like online services including catch-up television and pod-casts and streaming of audio services – and you have quite an expensive proposition for a public broadcaster of modest means.

Our evolution as a media organisation as well as scarcity of funds has resulted in a fairly static approach to scheduling and servicing of language groups on Radio.

In the past, we did what we could, when we could do it; but very rarely did we rationalise our activity and investment based on need. It was a fairly haphazard strategy.

There are people who have missed out on being served by SBS and there are others who, due to the dwindling size of their communities, are being served disproportionately to their significance in the Australian community.

Analysis of the 2006 Census data shows that while the top 10 language groups represent around 60 per cent of Australians who speak a language other than English; those 60 per cent only get 42 per cent of the available airtime on SBS Radio.

The population of Mandarin and Hindi speakers has grown by more than 100 per cent in the last 10 years; yet no additional radio services have been offered to those communities and SBS continues to struggle to source a Hindi language television news bulletin to service this growing community.

This is while other language groups have experienced a decline in their populations, without a corresponding decline in their services.

Budget constraints and, until recently, technology constraints on the old analogue platforms, have resulted in SBS failing to move with the times. This is not a situation we can continue to countenance.

It is time for sober assessment of the need for services in the culturally and linguistically diverse communities coupled with radical action and difficult decisions.

For many years, decisions about where to direct our scant resources have been made timidly, for fear of rocking the boat.

The constraints of the analogue platforms – particularly in radio – leant a rigidity to our schedule and provided another (in fact quite salient) technical reason why we could not do more.

But analogue constraints have now given way to digital opportunities on television and radio; and online services open up more pathways to reach previously underserved communities as well as the languages we currently serve.

Funding too has played a large part in our difficulty in delivering more services.

As you will recall we made a substantial pitch to the Government last year to help us realise the potential of digital technologies. I have already noted that we were pleased to receive a funding boost from the Government. However, that increase was not sufficient to allow us to do all the things we want and need to do to properly serve our audiences and communities.

So we will continue to do all we can to increase our funding base to improve our service. That will include taking commercial opportunities where they arise, but the reality is that, in order to provide the range of services that allow us to fully deliver on the Charter we need increased government funding.

In renewing that engagement with Government we hope to be able to draw on your support, again I thank Voula for the representations she and FECCA have made on our behalf.

Plans for the Future

SBS has begun to work through a series of possible initiatives and ideas to put to the Government. In the first instance, we have identified two broad groups with which we would like to work to explore the potential for development of services, especially by exploiting the potential of digital and online services.

The first is the top ten language groups by size that I referred to previously. These include established communities such as the Italian and Greek speakers and newer and growing groups such as Chinese languages, Arabic and Hindi. All of these language groups are underserved relative to their size.

The second, group is those recently arrived migrants with high needs, especially those with substantial numbers of refugees or who have come from war zones or areas of stress and trauma.

Obviously, the types of services that would be useful and applicable to these two groups (and even within each group) will vary. Therefore, we will begin a round of consultations with a number of key communities to seek ideas and to test the proposals we have begun to develop.

Areas for exploration might include:

•    how to tap into the National Broadband Network;
•    the type of content that should be on SBS TWO;
•    the balance between analogue and digital radio and online services;
•    any innovative means of service delivery to get to communities and groups that do not currently tap into traditional media; and
•    means to support existing government and NGO services that serve high needs groups.

At the same time we will need to continue to review the allocation of air time and services on our existing platforms. In the absence of additional funding to exploit new platforms, fairness will require an adjustment of resources. Even with funding, there will need to be a reallocation of time and services to ensure that communities are served adequately in the manner and on the platforms that best serve their needs.

Conclusion:

I acknowledge, in the past, we may not have done a good enough job of keeping all of our stakeholders abreast of our plans. Today I renew my commitment to continue a rigorous calendar of consultations with communities to discuss our plans and how we might implement them.

I ask you to recognise that the time for change has come. Technology offers the potential to deliver more and better services to Australia’s culturally and linguistically diverse communities. The challenge is whether we have the resources to exploit that potential.

So in conclusion there is much that we can and are doing that should delight and excite you and there is much more we would like to do if we can find the resources.

We will continue to serve communities using the analogue, digital and online platforms to deliver radio and television services.

Online offers almost limitless potential to create new services of interest, particularly to younger generations of Australians.

But we realise that, in the absence of additional funding there will be some tough choices if SBS is to reflect the changing needs of Australia’s culturally and linguistically diverse communities..

Any decisions will be made following extensive consultation but will also be based on analysis of appropriate data. I can assure you this will not be done in a vacuum.

I thank you for the opportunity to address you today and wish you well for the remainder of the conference.