The ABC of squandering
WHAT’S in a name? Well as the famous line goes it doesn’t matter what you call the rose, it will still be as sweet.
But what if names aren’t as superfluous as Mr Shakespeare would have us believe?
The Townsville City Council certainly doesn’t think names are meaningless as evidenced by its concerted effort to dissociate us from the label “Brownsville”.
Safe to say a “harmless” nickname has well and truly permeated the very fabric of a community when the council is specifically referencing it in an official tendering document.
I was well- acquainted with the “Brownsville” tag before I had even set foot in North Queensland.
Almost universally the first thing anyone, local or otherwise, told me about Townsville was that it was “hot, dry and very brown”. To be fair, when the plane comes into land at the Townsville Airport, it’s hard to deny the overall palette of the landscape.
Though I can’t help but wonder if I would have noticed as much if I didn’t already associate the place with “Brownsville”.
North Queenslanders are proud of a lot of things – the Cowboys, the Great Barrier Reef and the fact they’re not southeast Queensland “city slickers” – but few specifically defend Townsville.
It’s hard to expect people to move here or visit when the first thing they hear about the place is a negative nickname.
Highlighting Townsville’s positives and pursuing long- term water security are not mutually exclusive concepts.
We can duplicate the Haughton pipeline, build a water recycling plant and install water efficiency systems all over the city but if we’re still using the name “Brownsville” that’s all anyone else is going to see.
When you meet someone from Sydney they don’t instantly tell you the city looks like a dull, grey concrete jungle. People from Melbourne don’t wax lyrical about the brownish- green colour of the Yarra River.
As the new North Queensland tourism campaign launched by Townsville Enterprise this week shows, the region actually has a lot of nonbrown things to offer.
So it’s about time Townsville picked a few new talking points. BEFORE the ABC shuts down anything they do in regional Australia, they should find other ways to live with their budget.
You may have heard about a cut to the ABC’s budget, but that’s not actually happening, they just won’t be getting an extra $ 84 million to add to the more than a billion we give them every year.
Since the Government decided not to give them anything extra the usual suspects have been threatened with the axe: country newsrooms, radio stations and, of course, kids TV.
But it’s difficult to believe that all of these things have to go while the bosses back in Sydney admitted to Parliament this month that the ABC has been spending $ 2 million on Facebook and Google ads to promote their TV shows.
So forgive me if I don’t believe management has saved all the money they can save, and as one of them said recently, they were cutting right down to the bone.
Facebook and Google ads are not the bone and if you think they are, time for an anatomy lesson.
The ABC has every right to tell people what’s on, but they don’t have to pay anyone else to get the word out. They can promote their TV shows on their radio stations, their radio stations on their websites, and their websites on their TV stations.
It’s an advantage they have over every media company in Australia.
Oh that, and a guaranteed source of revenue where a failure to give them extra is seen as a cut.
Surely a billion dollars is enough to do everything the ABC does well, and then some. FORGIVE me for not joining the lynch mob out to get Workplace Minister Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash this week.
While I’ve been very critical of her in the past, this week’s rubbish about her being called into court to fight with the Australian Workers Union is nothing but a sideshow.
Last year police raided the AWU’s office to get documents about members’ money donated to help start activist group GetUp. They were raided because the union refused to hand them over, and they may show or not show that proper processes were followed for the donation.
Present at the raids were media crews who filmed police coming and going from the AWU office.
The hunt was on for who told them the raid was happening distracting people from the very point of the raid.
Eventually a staff member for Cash left her office over all of this and that was the end of it. That is, until this week when the AWU filed an application to force the Minister to tell a court who knew what about the raid and who told the media.
Again a distraction, because the court case is all about the AWU trying to fight the release of the very documents the police got from their office. But the distraction worked; by the end of the week the media was asking Cash if she has nothing to hide about the raid then front up at court.
I think the far bigger question is if the union has nothing to hide, then why fight the documents release?