Australia bushfire coverage: ABC emergency fire broadcasts praised but News Corp goes on attack

Since Boxing Day, as bushfires raged across Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, the ABC has handled more than 100 emergency broadcasts in a single week, receiving widespread praise for the practical, life-saving information and the professionalism on display.

The number of ABC emergency broadcasts for the first half of the 2019-20 financial year is already close to double that of the entire previous year.

Despite the dramatic rise in the need for emergency broadcasts – from 256 in 2017-18 to 371 in 2018-19 to 673 to date this year – there will be no additional funding to cover the resources which have been poured into the effort, according to the ABC’s director of local and regional, Judith Whelan. And then there’s the small matter of the $14.6m Coalition budget cut to manage this year.

“We have a budget and what we do is reorganise,” Whelan told Guardian Australia.

“There’s no way we are going to economise on emergency broadcasting. That is our No 1 priority. And so we do have to make some choices about what we might do or not.”

Despite the overwhelming praise for local radio in regions such as Gippsland and the Illawarra, News Corp papers have continued to publish articles critical of the ABC, a decision which has been jarring for many who are relying on the national broadcaster in a time of crisis.

The Australian has run opinion pieces critical of ABC programming and confected news stories blaming the ABC for the performer Tex Perkins giving Scott Morrison the finger during the New Year’s Eve broadcast. Familiar ABC critics, including the former ABC chairman Maurice Newman and the Liberal senator Eric Abetz, were lined up to pour scorn on the ABC, even as its news reporters put in long hours to cover the disaster.

One of the hosts of those emergency broadcasts, the 702 drive presenter Richard Glover, came back from annual leave on New Year’s Eve when local radio decided to drop its national summer programming for NSW-specific coverage. Glover said ABC emergency radio provided a vital service.

“When it’s at emergency level you really need rolling coverage so people can ring up and say ‘the road is closed’ or ‘if you can’t get a mobile phone call through to your mum don’t panic because the lines are down’,” Glover said.

“A few people always ask ‘why are you doing this?’ because of course people can just look up the information on the RFS [emergency services sites].

“The first answer is, as we’ve seen on south coast this week, people lose power and mobile phone coverage and the only thing you’ve got left is a battery-operated transistor radio or a radio in the car.

“And the second answer is that people can share information. It’s a really good spot for people to share information which they have very actively been doing.”

Glover’s own mud-brick house, which he built by hand decades ago at Wombeyan Caves, was still “very much under threat” as he volunteered to host the afternoon shift again on 702 on Saturday.

“Everyone feels it’s a privilege to be able to help in any way they can,” he said.

Whelan said Glover was not the only staffer to volunteer to come back to work. The new Q&A host, Hamish Macdonald, has been anchoring the TV news from Bega, and spent New Year’s Eve doing live crosses while on holiday in the region.

Whelan said a great deal of planning went into preparing for Saturday’s coverage of the dire conditions, including contingency plans if the transmitters burned down and for the safety of staff covering the disaster.

‘ABC is the place people turn to in these moments’

After Cyclone Yasi hit Queensland in 2011, the former ABC managing director Mark Scott created an emergency broadcasting policy, in consultation with the Bureau of Meteorology and Australian fire and emergency authorities, Whelan said. The policy commits the ABC to issue all watch and act and emergency warnings and to undertake recovery broadcasting. There is no specific funding for these roles.

Whelan said the emergency broadcasting division used to run for just six months of the year during bushfire season but in the past few years the ABC has had to extend it to the entire year. A small group of staff liaises with the emergency services, sends alerts to the radio stations and advises management of any need to escalate.

Macdonald, who has just joined the ABC full time to replace Tony Jones, said he had sprung into action on New Year’s Eve when he woke to text messages from friends saying he should evacuate immediately while on holiday in Tathra. He found himself at the Bega emergency centre and started doing live crosses on ABC radio.

“Very quickly the news operation swung into action and I was doing reports for the 7pm news from the showground and I filed a piece for digital,” Macdonald told Guardian Australia. “A lot of people came up and wanted to chat because I am from Jindabyne and a lot of people know my dad.”

Macdonald returned briefly to Sydney and had to coordinate the evacuation of his 80-year-old father on Friday.

“Obviously the ABC is the place people turn to in these moments and you want to be able to contribute in any way you can,” Macdonald said.

“The local news team here at Bega are just extraordinary. There are two young multiskilled journos, Adriane Reardon and Daniel Doody, and they shoot, they do radio, TV, digital.

“Daniel moved down there with his wife, who is expecting. Everyone at the showground loved him because they heard him on the radio. He did a full day shooting everything for me and then he went home and changed and came back in his SES uniform.”