Broadcasting in Australia.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20493, 11 March 1932, Page 10

Broadcasting in Australia.

A message from Canberra to-day announces the introduction of the expected Bill to place broadcasting under a control broadly resembling that adopted in Great Britain' and now, of course, in New Zealand. It is notable that the Commonwealth Government, like that of this Dominion, does not think it at all odd to define an enormous responsibility and fix a petty rate of pay for taking it. The Australian system will- be managed, in " all

"aspects," by a Commission of five, the chairman of which will be paid £SOO a year, the members, no doubt, something a little less handsome. Since the Commissioners will control the staff and appointments, the programmes, agencies to collect news, the publication of magazines, the. development of local talent, and the organisation of a national orchestra, even the severest critic is not likely to complain of their being overpaid, if they do all this reasonably well; but the Government has taken the risk, knowingly or not, of getting the work done badly by paying for it badly. The i summary of the Bill does not, however, I quite exhaust the range of the Commissioners' duties, another of which, the acceptance of advertising matter, is referred to in a Melbourne message. Here the Commonwealth Government ignores Hie warning of experience abroad and diverges from the British system. The French stations lease a good deal of their time to advertisers, with the result that French listeners, as Major R. Raven-Hart wrote in the Nineteenth Century last July, buy super-hetero-dynes in order to " reach out" to British and German programmes and dodge their own. In America, where the stations are also supported by the advertisers, who select their own programmes, the air twangs and buzzes with "popular hits" and "favourite "numbers," and, although the larger stations and chains severely limit the quantity of direct advertising, the weaker ones tolerate anything. " The "most grotesquely offensive matter is " sometimes broadcast," Mr R. W. Postgate said in an amusing article in the New Statesman and Nation last year. He specified one atrocity, only to add that it was "outdone by a pro-, " gramme in which 'Roses are Blooming "'in Picardy' and a series of similar "songs were sung, one after another, "by the directors, managers, and department heads of a Jewish fur- " store." Sozne of these stations, according to a report described in the New Republic, had lost all their listeners and existed only to defraud their advertisers; bat if this measures only the extreme of revulsion from the worst abuses, the sober, normal truth appears in Sir John Reith's statement that he had found "growing impatience with and even resentment"against advertising." If the Australian Bill becomes law in its present form the Commissioners will bo wiser in refusing the experiment than tho Government in inviting them to try ?t.