ABC managing director Mark Scott's visions of world domination have raised a few questions. B1 and B2 diplomacy anyone?

ABC managing director Mark Scott's visions of world domination have raised a few questions. B1 and B2 diplomacy anyone? Photo: Glen McCurtayne

ABC managing director Mark Scott last night delivered a speech in Sydney that outlines a bold new future for the national broadcaster: as an arm of Australian soft diplomacy.

Show the world what we're like, he argued in the Bruce Allen Memorial Speech presented at Macquarie University, and they’ll respect us. More importantly, they'll want to be like us.

It's a sales pitch directed firmly at the Rudd government, with a hefty price tag attached. At its heart is a message that is as simple as it is appealing: Australia can help topple the banana republics of the world merely by beaming B1 and B2 to their living rooms. But even if it were that simple, is this really what the ABC should be doing? Propaganda?

There are two things that stand out about Scott’s speech, the full text of which you can read here. First, it is vaulting in its ambition (some might say messianic, even). And second, it evokes a sense of a nation at war.

First, the ambition. I wrote recently that the ABC is shape shifting, evolving from the radio and television broadcaster we've known for so many decades to become a digital broadcaster whose mainstream is the internet. In this new world, the ABC's TV, radio and print arms are mere tributaries, feeding the ever-expanding flow of the online (and, to a lesser degree, mobile) entity.

Whether or not I've read this shift correctly, I'd be astonished if anyone could peruse or listen to Scott's latest speech and not be struck by the ambition he has to expand the ABC's remit in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, when the corporation was struggling in the face of the Howard Government's enmity and funding cuts.

There is no doubt that in Kevin Rudd, Mark Scott has found a sympathetic audience. The ABC received a $167 million boost in triennial funding in this year's budget, and Scott's enthusiasm for all things digital dovetails very nicely indeed with the PM's plans for a national broadband network and, more broadly, for a technologically advanced Australia.

Now, Scott is appealing to Rudd's vanity, his desire to be seen as a player on the world stage. "As a nation, we feel we have a contribution to make. That is certainly the view of the Government," Scott says in his speech.

A bit later: "Australia is seeking to not only be a participant but a leader."

And later still – now twisting the thumbscrews a little – Scott says: "Our partners on the G20 – those who we would want to sit alongside in terms of global influence: the French, the Germans, the Italians – are showing no reluctance to make the necessary investment."

In other words, if you want to be dealt in to the main game, Kev, you're going to have to up the ante.

Scott paints a picture in which soft diplomacy – in very crude terms, the dissemination of Australian images, values and worldview in order to influence global affairs – is not just an option but a necessity. Drop out of the game and others – India, France, Japan and above all China – will fill the void. Can we afford to let them set the agenda?

This is where the "nation at war" rhetoric kicks in. "The ABC proposal is not just about expanding our influence in our backyard but protecting it. Is it perhaps a question of not whether we can afford this expansion but whether we can afford not to be present in this way."

Scott invokes the origins of Radio Australia as a wartime counter to enemy broadcasts in the Asia-Pacific region (it came into being in 1939), and adds: "When you look at the expansion of international broadcasting as an arm of soft diplomacy, governments are using their public broadcasters to do this work. You shouldn't outsource your diplomatic efforts."

Here, Scott is no doubt making a play to have the ABC reappointed as the content provider for Australia Network (the contract expires in 2011), as The Age's Ari Sharp has pointed out. But this leads to a central internal conflict in the argument.

On the one hand, the ABC is "scrupulously independent" and editorially pure, Scott argues. "When the ABC walks in the door, there are no other agendas or business relationships operating as a sub-text. We have no other commercial interests or ambitions but this work we are doing on behalf of the Australian people, our 100 per cent owners."

On the other, the ABC is putting itself at the service of the Australian government, to do its foreign policy bidding. It may well be that this is not an incompatible position in practice, but in principle it seems enormously problematic.

And there's a further issue here, one that perhaps the average punter might feel more acutely than all this high-falutin' talk of changing the world through broadcasting. It's the very simple one of how much can the ABC do with the money at its disposal?

Talking recently about the planned December launch of ABC3, the new digital TV channel for kids, director of television Kim Dalton told me that the ABC had been "busy buying up the back catalogue" of children's programs. Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with screening 10-year-old episodes of Playschool to toddlers who've never seen them before, but there will be an awful lot of program makers and viewers who'll feel deeply swindled if new broadcast channels don't translate to significantly expanded production slates (the same argument applies, by the way, to the expansion of commercial free-to-air networks).

Perhaps in the end all this leads to a far deeper consideration. If the ABC is willing – indeed, desperate – to see itself as an arm of Government policy, and if there are limits to the money at its disposal, and if there are non-publicly funded broadcasters willing – indeed, desperate – to occupy the entertainment space, is entertainment any longer a game the ABC should even be playing?

News, current affairs, education, and the unprofitable areas of broadcasting that its charter compels it to cover (the arts, for instance) are clearly and rightly the ABC's concern. But imported episodes of Midsomer Murders? Home-grown light entertainment such as Spicks and Specks? Perhaps these are luxuries it will no longer be able to afford.

The ABC under Mark Scott seemingly has ambitions to be the broadcaster that ate the planet. His plan would see it spreading its sphere of influence in four stages, first deeper into the Asia-Pacific, then to India and China, next to Latin America and the Middle East, and finally to Europe and North America. Maybe that's a legitimate ambition, and maybe it really is in the national interest. But at some point, you'd have to think, something's got to give. And we have the right to ask to what extent that should be the taxpayer.