The gravity of Mark Scott’s announcement yesterday, and his on-air appearances, did not completely disguise the underlying sense that he is not entirely unhappy to be reconfiguring the direction of the national broadcaster.

To lose 10% of his staff and more than $50m a year for five years, plus the one off whack of $120m from the May budget, presents opportunities for Scott, aside from the despair.

The managing director has seized them. It’s digital all the way, largely at the expense of traditional regional services across the wide, brown land.

That is an uppercut right to the chin for regional viewers and listeners, who might reasonably be expected to be Coalition supporters. Mainstream media businesses will also feel the blow, as they scramble to move their content and customers from print to digital.

Arguably, one of the biggest pains in the ABC’s neck is the infantile carping from News Corp. The Murdochs have been belting out the same chorus against public broadcasters for years. Who can forget James Murdoch’s 2009 MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh, where he denounced the BBC’s “land grab”?

Of course, for the ABC to announce a massive expansion of its digital business, all of it free to consumers, is one in the eye for a national commercial operator trying to build an online news business behind a paywall.

Rural and regional Australia has seen all this before. The Howard government’s cuts in 1996-1997 saw rural and regional Australia experience its fair share of the broadcaster’s pain. Before that Peter Nixon was taking an axe to the place in the Fraser years.

However, under later and separate funding deals ABC management, at the time led by a conservative favourite, Jonathan Shier, managed to secure an extra $20m from Howard to go back into the very areas that had been winnowed in the budget.
Standby for more repurposed funding as the 2016 election draws closer.
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For a government filled with serious ABC haters, egged on by a chorus line of claqueurs, maybe it is right to think this is not the end of the story. In the medium strategy the ABC and SBS could be starved, and then merged. Once the combined entity is further diminished by fresh “savings” it would be put on the block for sale.

In the blustering politics of today, nothing can be entirely discounted. No doubt we’ll be hearing lots of alternative funding ideas in an effort to wean the public broadcaster off the public teat: fees for online services, advertising, licence fees, and sponsorship.

It’s also a nightly viewer’s ritual to think of ways the ABC can be improved: better drama (at least better-written Australian drama), more docos, fewer repeats, more scoops and investigations, fewer panel shows, less predictability, more arts, a higher degree of expectation.

Apart from the rural and regional “savings”, Scott has also clipped the main current affairs programs: Four Corners, Australian Story, Lateline and Landline – with the the Friday 7.30s entirely removed.

This will not disappoint Abbott’s ministers, who in their introspective moments know that less confronting political reporting and discussion would be most helpful.

To that extent Scott’s decision to deprive news and current affairs of resources is a decision in lockstep with the thinking of the government. The managing director’s contract expires in July 2016. He was reappointed for another five year term in October 2010 by the board, led at the time by arch-conservative and Abbott government ally, Maurice Newman.

Newman was effusive about Scott: “The board and I are keen to see him continue in the role. Mark has made a significant contribution to the corporation’s success…”

Scott had come from Fairfax, where he had been the editorial director. Before that he was in the bosom of the Greiner government, working for Virginia Chadwick and Terry Metherell, a former member of the Liberal Party who accepted a job offer that resulted in the end of Greiner’s premiership.

His investment in the broadcaster’s digital services is driving News Corp bonkers, which is delightful to observe. The spluttering indignation in the Australia’s editorial was the main amusement of the morning.

“Mark Scott’s strategic statement on the future of the ABC yesterday was a political stunt by a failing technocrat who is out of his depth as editor-in-chief of the national broadcaster,” the paper opined.

His sin is the expansion of the ABC’s digital services, something News Corp and Fairfax regard as their own private turf. There’s nothing worse than publicly-funded competition.