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ABC staff in move to new ABC Parramatta site

Journalists & presenters to move to Parramatta Square as part of wider vision to relocate up 75% of ABC staff from Ultimo by 2025.

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The ABC has today announced the signing of a Heads of Agreement for the Lease for a new workplace at Parramatta in western Sydney.

ABC Parramatta – located at 6-8 Parramatta Square – was selected following an extensive procurement process.

The relocation to western Sydney is part of the commitment of a Five-Year Plan to see 75% of content makers working outside its Ultimo head office by 2025.

This will entail relocation of journalists and presenters from ABC Sydney, ABC News and ABC RN from early 2024, but it isn’t clear if it could also lead to some staff resignations.

David Anderson, ABC Managing Director, said: “Establishing this new facility in Parramatta is a significant step in meeting our commitment to be more local and engaged with the community and less centralised in the Sydney CBD.

“As a new facility, ABC Parramatta provides a rare opportunity to build something from the ground up. It will be a home for innovation and collaboration, designed and equipped to help us better serve Australians, now and into the future.”

“The ABC will become an integral part of Parramatta Square, which is welcoming all of Sydney as a great place to work, live and socialise,” Parramatta Square has Executive Chairman Lang Walker said.

“ABC staff will have access to state-of-the-art workspaces above excellent cafes and restaurants in the plaza as well as some of the best transport connections, with access to trains, buses, light rail, ferries and the future metro.”

It is anticipated that the process to develop the Parramatta workspace, confirm teams and roles to be based there, and relocate approximately 300 employees, will be complete by 2024.

This initiative is one part of the ABC’s plans to locate more content-makers closer to the communities they serve.

ABC recently expanded its regional and rural coverage following the recruitment of 57 regionally-based journalists.

The final lease agreement for Parramatta Square is expected to be concluded by the end of August. The next stage will then be review of the proposal by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works.

ABC says it will continue to consider a range of options in respect to its property holdings, operations, and production in other state capitals and in regional Australia.

8 Responses

  1. Hmm, it’ll be interesting to see how this works out. Local councils in my area are amalgamating their depots/offices into central locations due to logistic/management constraints. Maybe things are different in the media/entertainment industry?

  3. … look, I understand the explained rationale, but when I first joined the ABC, it was scattered all over Sydney … then came Ultimo which allowed everyone in radio and admin to be in one spot and then the desertion of Gore Hill which brought everyone together under Brian Johns’ mantra “one ABC” … the same thing happened all over Australia with admin, radio and television finally cohabiting in all the other capital cities, which made a lot of sense … in fact, one of the reasons stated for moving Classic FM from its original home in Adelaide was to ensure that everyone could see and talk to each other … so now at the same time that Melbourne has finally gotten under one roof, Sydney is going to split up … if the whole shebang was to move like they are talking about doing to SBS, that would at least make some sense …but this?

  4. What a waste of money!
    They should of moved to the Sydney Olympics site when it was offered to them for free just after the Olympics. Too late now.

    1. … er there was nothing at the Sydney Olympics site to move to … the IBC was a warehouse with a temporary fit-out that reverted to a warehouse when we packed up and left !!!

  5. The communities they are supposed to serve. Most ABC staff, and their guests are based close to the CBD where there is public transport and they can afford a taxi home. For years they referred to Ashfield as a Western Suburb of Sydney, because they drove past West Leagues Club there on the way to Strathfield. Whether they will move out to West we shall see. From Whitlam on when most government or corporations move westward most of their skilled staff have taken redundancies, and only those without any value outside the organisation are forced to move.

  6. What a waste of money and typical Sydney Centric Broadcasting Corporation decision. So ABC Sydney will now have 2 major production facilities. The idea at first sounded great moving a large proportion of production out of Ultimo (Sydney) and sharing it around the rest of Australia. To move it 50km down the road isn’t really sharing with the rest of the country is it. It’s still Sydney.
    Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin and Hobart hardly contribute anything to the national broadcast that comes out of Sydney and looks like HQ plan to keep it that way.
    What’s next? The equivalent in Melbourne would be ABC Frankston! LOL

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