[HCDX] Thumbs up for a stronger Radio Australia

["Alokesh Gupta" <alokeshgupta@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Excerpts from very interesting report published in "The Australian" ......

Thumbs up for a stronger Radio Australia
------------------------------------------
October 07, 2004
....Labor says it will spend an extra $6million during the next two years
to rebuild and enhance Radio Australia's capabilities. A key part of this
will be to wrest back the Cox Peninsula radio transmitters from
evangelical religious group Christian Vision.
This takes us back to the 1997-98 budget, when the new Howard Government
stripped Radio Australia of more than half its annual funding - a cut from
$13.8 million a year to $6.3 million. At the same time it also pulled the
rug from under Australian Television International, an ABC offshoot that was
trying to become a self-funding TV service broadcasting into the
Asia-Pacific region.
The RA cuts forced a reduction of staff and services, and the closure of the
powerful shortwave transmitters on the Cox Peninsula near Darwin, which the
Keating government had spent $15million to upgrade in the early 1990s.
It also forced a rethink about how to provide relevant services through a
variety of outlets across a wide and disparate number of nations, time zones
and cultures. Put simply, RA learned to do more with less.
Under Rudd's plan RA will get an extra $6 million over two years to rebuild
its services, and "Labor will investigate the return of the Cox Peninsula
transmitters following the expiration of the current lease between the
Howard Government and the broadcaster Christian Vision".
The lease to CV was wrong in the first place. Public assets should not be
used to evangelise any religion to any foreign countries, but that aside, it
was also a lousy deal for taxpayers.
Although the details have never been made public, it is believed the lease
cost was a mere $2.5 million for 10 years, expiring in 2010, and the lease
deal included the outright purchase of much of the key equipment.
Labor may well investigate the return of the Cox transmitter, but wresting
it away from an entrenched and committed group of god-botherers won't be
easy - especially as the rival evangelists, Heralding Christ Jesus's
Blessings, are in the process of setting up a 31-tower transmitter array to
broadcast to half the world from Kununurra, just across the border in
Western Australia. ................
mday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Full story at :
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10992007%5E122
80,00.html
------------------
Alokesh Gupta
New Delhi.

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