The ABC has welcomed the release of the “Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories?” report into cultural diversity in television news and published this response:
The findings broadly reflect the results of our own tracking and show that, while we’re making good progress in how we reflect the diversity of the Australian community, we can certainly do better.
As the national broadcaster, the ABC has a responsibility to represent all Australians in our content and services and in our workforce. Ensuring we look and sound like contemporary Australia in all we do is central to our role. A broad range of perspectives, people and content makes us stronger, more creative and better able to engage with Australia’s many communities.
The ABC’s Diversity & Inclusion Plan 2019-22, which complements the key content priorities in the Content Plan, sets out our vision for diversity and inclusion and is centred around three strategic goals:
• Recruiting, developing and retaining a diverse workforce
• Fostering an inclusive, collaborative and accountable workplace culture
• Reflecting and representing the diversity of the Australian community in our content and the services we provide
As of July, our workforce representation of Indigenous employees was 2.9%; culturally diverse content makers 9.6%; culturally diverse executives 8.3%; and employees with disability 4.9%. More information on our goals for Indigenous representation are in the Elevate Reconciliation Action Plan 2019-2022 (Elevate RAP).
Achievements over the past year include:
• Overhauling our recruitment processes to enhance our ability to recruit for diversity Introducing compulsory online cultural awareness training
• Launching an Indigenous recruitment strategy, which aims to bring 20 new and prominent Indigenous roles into the ABC
• Partnering with First Languages Australia to offer Indigenous language lessons to enable us to embed Indigenous language in our work
• Establishing two new ABC Employee Network Groups – ABC Belong (focussing on Cultural Diversity) and ABC Inclusive (focusing on employees with disability) and continuing to support ABC Pride (focusing on LGBTQI+ inclusivity)
• Launching training in relation to both Disability Awareness and LGBTQI+ awareness, which will be made part of our induction program
We’ve also just announced a series of staff forums, led by managing director David Anderson, to get direct input from our people about the ABC’s efforts to promote diversity so far and how we can accelerate it.