The SMH headline last week made it clear: “Radio front and centre for ABC in strategy U-turn”

Australian media everywhere picked up the message – “ABC Radio will be elevated to the executive team and moved to a stand-alone audio division in a dramatic reversal by the chair, Kim Williams, of a major restructure announced by the managing director, David Anderson, last year.”

Well, that should be no surprise really, the new ABC Chair Kim Williams forecast this change months ago, and now he delivers on that promise.

We should now see that Williams gets things done; so, what else might be on his priority list?

When Kim Williams was elected the new Chair of the ABC board back in January 2024, it didn’t take long before we started to see that he had some definite ideas about the ABC’s current status and future.

It had taken some time for Williams to get the top ABC job, but not for lack of trying. When the job as managing director of the ABC came up in the 1980’s, he applied, despite being only 28; didn’t get the job that time. In 1991 he began a short stint at Aunty working for David Hill, but it didn’t end well. After working for, and then being sacked by (a badge of honour?), Murdoch media he was then on the short list for the ABC Chair prepared by the independent selection panel back in 2019 (the men recommended for the job by the independent panel were former Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood, former News Corporation CEO Kim Williams and senior lawyer Ian Robertson AO, the national managing partner of Holding Redlich), but Ita Buttrose was appointed as the direct choice of prime minister Morrison despite the fact she had not been through the arm’s length independent selection process.

Everyone has a view about how that turned out for Aunty.

Spending some months after his January 2024 appointment, watching and listening inside and outside the ABC, around August this year Williams began to outline his thoughts, in confidential briefings to staff (leaked to the press), in interviews with knowledgeable journalists like Kerry O’Brien and to progressive media in The Guardian.

In these interviews Williams gave some clear pointers on what he thought the ABC currently was, what it should be, and what his priorities were.

• Williams was refreshingly candid during a conversation with former ABC broadcaster Kerry O’Brien. He said the version of the ABC he found was one that is “severely depleted and diminished”, and the internal cultural consequences were that it had become more timid and “fractured into a series of tribes”. He took aim at the ABC’s documentary output, saying it was “in a bad place”; said its drama is “less distinctive” than it once was and that ABC news sometimes had a “tabloid sensibility”.
• Williams says his role is to be “an active advocate for the ABC in terms of its secure resourcing”. He has calculated that, after years of budget cuts, the public broadcaster is underfunded in real terms to the tune of half a billion dollars compared to 40 years ago.
• He is confident management has a strong argument for better funding and it lies in its role in creating social harmony. “I believe in a time of massive misinformation and disinformation the national media organisation has a very special role to play,” he says.
• Williams thinks the ABC’s arts coverage is decidedly underdone.
• Williams says Radio National should “be at the beating heart of what the ABC does”, like the intellectually dominant Radio Four is for the BBC, with one in six of the British audience listening in. “It is not available to the ABC to simply withdraw a variety of broadcast services, like for example Radio National or ABC Classic or Triple J. They are part of our responsibility.”
• In the briefing he had been critical of story placement on the ABC News website, saying less prominence should be given to lifestyle stories.
• “The ABC’s primary obligations are obviously to what might be regarded as serious news and commentary and to things that reflect a plurality of serious aspirations on the part of the community, or things that are in mainstream entertainment,” he says.
• “There is a very substantial case for investing in the ABC to ensure that there is secure, quality Australian ballast in the national diet when we’re being completely overwhelmed with non-Australian material.
• “One must have real concern as to what the children of Australia are consuming and how their hearts and minds [and] aspirations are actually being informed.”

So, on top of Williams’ radio focus, the following are all on Kim’s agenda: Arts; Australian stories and content; children’s education and entertainment; serious News and commentary; a trustworthy presence in the midst of mis- and dis- information; less lifestyle emphasis; defeating any “tabloid sensibility” inside the ABC; and a reversal to its “severely depleted and diminished state”.

Many of us are rather pleased with those ambitions. Some have even speculated whether he might, in the David Hill tradition, fill the Managing Director’s job himself in order to get things done his way. However earlier this year, it was reported that “ABC chair Kim Williams has ruled out any possibility of adding the available role of managing director to his existing duties, stating that an international search will be conducted.”

And, on a lighter note, the man also has a sense of humour. He has described himself as “eccentric” and has suggested that his mother was always amused that I was circumcised by Doctor Dick.”