Remote Indigenous Australians are being cut off from national and international news, views, and entertainment due to a crisis facing remote TV broadcasting.
According to representatives of Imparja, the Indigenous-owned not-for-profit broadcaster delivering commercial television services to the most remote areas of the country, four out of five Indigenous households will not be able to follow this week’s televised broadcasts on a voice to parliament because of the lack of basic television services in remote areas.
Imparja Television CEO Alistair Feehan has pleaded with the Albanese Government to take urgent action to address the remote broadcasting crisis. He said that recent work by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has revealed that up to 80 percent of Indigenous households have no working free television service due to damaged cabling or dishes and defunct set-top boxes.
Appeals to the government for rescue packages to ensure Indigenous Australians can access the same news, information, and entertainment as other Australians have been ignored for years. Feehan emphasized that if the government is serious about using the Voice to Parliament to include First Nations peoples in policy debates, they must connect them to those debates through a television in their homes.
“We need the government to step up on this. A demonstration of good faith with Indigenous communities would be if we left Canberra this week with a firm commitment to a plan for the restoration of basic remote television services and a regular program of equipment repair and maintenance,” Feehan said.
Imparja is fighting for survival, as without urgent additional funding, remote Australians who can access television will receive fewer channels from 30 June as Imparja struggles to keep the doors open.
Imparja is a free-to-air television broadcaster established in 1987 with eight retransmission sites at Ceduna, Coober Pedy, Leigh Creek and Woomera in South Australia and Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and Bathurst Island in the Northern Territory. Imparja’s first test program was telecast on 2 January 1988, bringing a live broadcast of the Australia vs Sri Lanka test cricket match to a delighted outback population.
Regular transmissions began two weeks later, reaching a total audience of 62,000 people.Imparja’s broadcast area is now over 3.6 million square kilometres, spanning six states and territories – Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, with an estimated one million-plus residential viewers.
The service is also watched by approximately three million tourists who visit Outback Australia each year, and 200,000 viewers in terrestrial black spots.
Feehan said that the government needs to contribute towards the cost of these services; otherwise, some services will go black on 30 June.
“There has rarely been a more important time for all Australians, including First Nations people living in remote areas, to be connected and involved in a public policy discussion,”
