The 2025 Rod Wallace Memorial Lecture
MARGARET SIMONS SPEAKS ON PUBLIC BROADCASTING: THE GREAT TRANSITION
20 October 2025 Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive
In the 1920s a series of Royal Commissions wrestled with how Australia should cope with the extraordinary new world of broadcasting, with its potential to conquer distance and bind a nation. The decision was made to create a non-commercial national broadcaster, funded by taxpayers. The ABC was part of what journalist Paul Kelly has called the Australian settlement – a consensus that government should be involved directly in providing services, security, and in enriching the life of the community. The Australian Broadcasting Commission, as it was then called, was of a piece with railway commissions, electricity commissions and all the other machinery of nation building.
But media provided by an arm of government has proved more durable, through these economically rationalist times, than government owned airlines, banking, electricity, health insurance and telephone services.
Today, the ABC is not only a “broadcasting” corporation in the traditional sense of the word. Within our lifetimes we will probably see the end of terrestrial television broadcasting – that is, delivery of moving images via the airwaves. Instead, we will stream.
Already, audience figures show that many households watch traditional television, if at all, only until the end of the daily current affairs programs. Then, it is off to Netflix and its competitors.
In this lecture, Dr Margaret Simons, who is writing a history of the last 20 years of the ABC, reviews the recent history of the public broadcaster and discuss why it is still needed, and what publicly funded “broadcasting” means for Australian film and sound, now and in the future.
The video recording is at https://youtu.be/sLFlLYptMfo
The text of the lecture is here: /images/Margaret%20Simons%20text%2020%20Oct%2025.pdf
