Brown: SBS needs to improve multicultural role

SBS Managing Director Shaun Brown yesterday addressed the Australian Broadcasting Summit in Sydney and acknowledged the network needed to better address changes in multicultural Australia.

Brown says since the broadcaster began in 1980 our make-up has shifted, including big boosts from foreign students.

But he indicated the network was at pains to meet these needs while it remains patently under-funded.

Brown also cited the recent stories on Indian-Australian relations as evidence that it continues to play an important role in media. SBS claims it first exposed the issue of attacks on Indian students and then provided on-going coverage of developments, including a full scale Insight televised debate.

Here are some select excerpts from Brown’s speech:

In 1980 SBS commenced television broadcasting to Sydney, Melbourne and Geelong with Peter Luck’s documentary Who are We which looked at the history of migration in Australia. Then we launched our world news service, showed a Polish film and broadcast a match from the A-league of the day – the Philips Soccer League.

Traditional SBS fare. So in 30 years what has changed? Well, for starters we no longer call it ‘soccer’. And I would like to think that SBS and, particularly, Les Murray and the late Johnny Warren, have had a large part to play in championing football in this country. Their dream to see Australia at the FIFA World Cup, not as an occasional fluke but consistently on the basis of performance, has been realised.

So in June and July, Australians in very large numbers will be tuning into SBS not only to see how the Socceroos fare, but also to enjoy every aspect of the most important sporting event in the world. Our coverage will be unprecedented in scale, across all our digital and analogue TV channels, including HD, on Radio in English and other languages, and, of course, Online.

We still play Polish films – only now we do it across two digital television channels – SBS ONE and SBS TWO – as well as on our wholly owned subscription television channel – World Movies.

—–

Quite simply, SBS needs to do more – we need to have a bigger voice in the noisy media landscape. We continue to have discussions with the Government about how we can best achieve that.

In particular, we are falling short on serving our ‘multilingual’ objectives – across all our platforms.

A few obvious points to make are:

– The make up of the Australian population has changed, yet SBS’s core 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.

This is clearly unacceptable 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 cheap.

There are also technical constraints to what we can deliver, particularly on television. As we head towards digital switchover there is the opportunity for SBS to further expand its services.

We are currently focused on finding more resources to invest in SBS TWO which predominantly carries content in languages other than English. And while we are committed to launching SBS THREE to further broaden and deepen our content offering, technical and funding issues constrain us.

——

Reflecting diversity in our content is one of our strengths as a broadcaster. Sadly it is one of the key factors that sets us apart from other broadcasters in Australia.

Over the past few years we have made a conscious commitment and investment in telling more Australian stories that reflect the cultural reality of the Australian community. Our award winning dramas The Circuit and East West 101 alongside our landmark documentary series First Australians are standout examples of this commitment.

We give a voice to different sectors of the community in our national debates and we enable different voices and different languages and cultures, to be reflected back to all Australians.

Significantly, when we talk to communities around the country (especially those who feel they are misunderstood or misrepresented) we are regularly told that our news and current affairs service is the only one they feel gives a balanced view of the issues that concern them.

—–

Recent research conducted by SBS into attitudes in the Indian community in Sydney and Melbourne reinforces this view.

To help inform our decisions about future services, I have been conducting community consultations with some major language communities across Australia. We have backed this up with targeted research into several communities – including the Indian community in Sydney and Melbourne – to gauge their perceptions of the Australian community and the media in this country.

The findings were not surprising. Participants almost universally acknowledged the recent attacks on Indian students in Melbourne were playing on their minds. They said they felt less secure when they were out and about, particularly at night. They are more wary when they see strangers and when they’re on public transport.

This wariness has led to many behavioural changes as well. One female participant said that her husband calls her 10 times while she is on the train and another participant said they were worried about attending our focus group which was held after hours in Melbourne.

Most participants said they had experienced low level prejudice in Australia. Examples included being called names, jokes at their expense, stereotypes and condescension. But few said they had been physically threatened and many only knew of violence from hearing about it from other members of their community.

The recent attacks in Melbourne have undoubtedly changed the mindsets of the Indian community participants said. Since the attacks participants said they had become more conscious of their Indian ethnicity and felt a strong need to associate more with other Indians and less with Australians of different backgrounds – to circle the wagons if you like.

But most participants said they didn’t feel that the majority of Australians are racist and that the attacks and low level prejudice were the result of ‘a few bad apples’. They said most Australians are warm, friendly and welcoming and that they had never felt there was a problem in Australia until recently.

The reporting of the attacks in India and in Australia was not well received by the focus group participants. Many thought both Australian and Indian media were making the incidence of violence sound worse than it is.

Participants said the media coverage in India was ‘very biased’, ‘very tabloid’ and ‘very unfair’ when it came to Australia. Indian relatives had been in touch with participants questioning why they are living in such a ‘racist’ country.

Similarly, there were low levels of trust in the Australian media with many commentating that both the media coverage and Government and police responses were too defensive in tone.

I was pleased that SBS had a strong level of trust in these focus groups and that we were singled out as being different to mainstream media and in presenting both sides of the story.

—-

Overseas student visas have more than doubled since 2001 while the number of overseas students staying in Australia has more than tripled with India, China and Korea the top three countries of origin.

Based on current projections, SBS estimates that migrants will account for 31 per cent of the population by 2049 with first and second generations Australians making up almost 50 per cent of the population.

This brings into sharp relief the need to ensure that we do all we can to assist new arrivals, as well as established culturally and linguistically diverse communities, to participate in civic life and contribute to public discourse.

SBS was created in the 1970s to ensure that new arrivals to Australia could access, in-language, important information about Government services – health services in particular. Over time our remit has grown and we are now the most diverse broadcaster in the world, broadcasting in 68 languages on radio and more than 47 languages representing 136 cultures on television.

There is a very real need for SBS’s services to not only continue, but to grow. We need to harness the potential of new technologies to expand and deepen our range of services.