Excerpts from very interesting report published in "The Australian" ......
Thumbs up for a stronger Radio Australia ------------------------------------------ October 07, 2004 ....Labor says it will spend an extra $6million during the next two years to rebuild and enhance Radio Australia's capabilities. A key part of this will be to wrest back the Cox Peninsula radio transmitters from evangelical religious group Christian Vision. This takes us back to the 1997-98 budget, when the new Howard Government stripped Radio Australia of more than half its annual funding - a cut from $13.8 million a year to $6.3 million. At the same time it also pulled the rug from under Australian Television International, an ABC offshoot that was trying to become a self-funding TV service broadcasting into the Asia-Pacific region. The RA cuts forced a reduction of staff and services, and the closure of the powerful shortwave transmitters on the Cox Peninsula near Darwin, which the Keating government had spent $15million to upgrade in the early 1990s. It also forced a rethink about how to provide relevant services through a variety of outlets across a wide and disparate number of nations, time zones and cultures. Put simply, RA learned to do more with less. Under Rudd's plan RA will get an extra $6 million over two years to rebuild its services, and "Labor will investigate the return of the Cox Peninsula transmitters following the expiration of the current lease between the Howard Government and the broadcaster Christian Vision". The lease to CV was wrong in the first place. Public assets should not be used to evangelise any religion to any foreign countries, but that aside, it was also a lousy deal for taxpayers. Although the details have never been made public, it is believed the lease cost was a mere $2.5 million for 10 years, expiring in 2010, and the lease deal included the outright purchase of much of the key equipment. Labor may well investigate the return of the Cox transmitter, but wresting it away from an entrenched and committed group of god-botherers won't be easy - especially as the rival evangelists, Heralding Christ Jesus's Blessings, are in the process of setting up a 31-tower transmitter array to broadcast to half the world from Kununurra, just across the border in Western Australia. ................ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Full story at : http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10992007%5E122 80,00.html ------------------ Alokesh Gupta New Delhi. ---[Start Commercial]--------------------- World Radio TV Handbook 2004 is out! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0823059685/hardcoredxcom ---[End Commercial]----------------------- ________________________________________ Hard-Core-DX mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dallas.hard-core-dx.com/mailman/listinfo/hard-core-dx http://www.hard-core-dx.com/ _______________________________________________ THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt
