Looks like my old stomping ground is in deep shit:
One of Sydney’s leading community radio stations could be closed as early as July, as the station scrambles to solve a funding hole caused by the exit of one of its financial owners last year.
2SER, or Sydney Educational Radio, is owned by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Macquarie University, the latter of which announced it would withdraw its funding for the station this year.
In an email to station volunteers seen by 702 ABC Sydney, 2SER station manager Cheryl Northey said the station understood UTS could not fund the station on its own.
Cheryl Northey told staff and volunteers that without secure funding, 2SER could close as early as July this year. (Radio National: Sophie Kesteven)
Ms Northey said it was trying to avoid closure, but the station needed to find a way to make up for the shortfall caused by Macquarie’s exit.
“Should the station close this year, which could be as early as July, 2SER must do the right thing by our staff. A decision to close would not be taken lightly, and work is being done to avoid that outcome,” Ms Northey said in the email.
Now I’m admittedly long out of the loop with SER, having left back in 2013, but I’m kind of astonished it’s taken me this long to discover Macquarie had pulled out of the partnership after all these decades. I’m guessing that this was not a casual decision on Macquarie’s part, and I presume there was some discussion with UTS about it for a while, so that the whole thing wasn’t actually as abrupt as it appears in the news story. Remember when FBi were in dire straits in 2008 and they were upfront about it? Would’ve been nice of SER to do something similar. The ABC article cites Robbie Buck, who was an SER presenter before he took off on Triple J, but he’s also cited in the Herald news story where I think he’s more pertinent:
Buck, a lifetime paying member and former staffer, told this masthead that he and others were perplexed to see the real possibility that an “institution and pillar of Sydney culture” could be wound up in just a few months’ time.
“The question we have is, how did it get to this without anybody in the community realising how dire the situation was?” Buck said.
“UTS is a billion-dollar-plus enterprise. The funding from UTS is less than half a million dollars per year. We see no reason why even after Macquarie has pulled this funding, there couldn’t be a paired-back version of 2SER that continues with just UTS funding until further funds are found.”
Yeah, there’s been major fuck-ups behind the scenes, I just don’t know if they’ve been perpetrated by SER management or higher up at UTS. Apparently Macquarie pulled out last September but it was only about a month ago that they finally started hunting up new partners. WHAT THE FUCK. And according to the SMH piece, SER was actually about eighty grand in surplus in 2024. What went wrong? And why were they apparently determined to hide it from the members until it was too late?
I’ve got mixed feelings about my time at SER. Most of them are, admittedly, excellent, I made some great friends and met some interesting people; I got to be a judge at a short film festival and I got to be part of the defence for Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin in 2004 whent it was facing an unjustifiable ban by the OFLC. I was part of the film show from 1999 to 2011, I had my own show from 2008 to 2013, did a number of fill-in slots on the drive-time program, and even made a couple of appearances on The Gristle, SER’s news/satire show, because I could pronounce the name of the then-president of Indonesia and the regulars couldn’t. I knew the creator of Spiders Georg, he was a volunteer there too. It was a great time for the most part.
Then the station had one of its periodic program grid reshuffles and my show vanished. I apparently no longer have the email they sent farewelling me so I can’t quote it directly, but I recall being struck by the tone of it. It was written like I’d made the decision to move on, when nothing of the sort had happened. THEY took my show from me. I did the goth show and it went to air at midnight on Wednesday, an appropriate timeslot but probably not the best. And for a while the 10.30pm slot was vacant, and being filled by a repeat of another program. I asked Anthony, the manager at the time, about my show being moved into that slot to give it a better chance, but he suggesting waiting until the program grid review was finished and we’d see what it looked like by then.
So I held off. The program grid came out. My show was conspicuous by its absence therefrom. There was no more after-midnight programming. Instead, the overnight graveyard slots for new volunteers to practise their skills on were being expanded from just Friday and Saturday nights to the whole week. So no more midnight slot for me. No other slot for me, either. And they wrote me this “thank you for your service” message as if it were MY choice to end the show. I was… unimpressed. I’d also advised Anthony that I was interested in being a contributor to a few other shows like the book program, and he said he’d pass my interest onto them. I heard from one of them. Once. SER decided I was surplus to requirements, and they never admitted it to me.
I gave nearly 14 years of my life to 2SER, and I don’t know how much money on top of my time; after the stroke I had the gear to record at home but still had to go into the station to actually put the recording on the network, which involved getting taxis to and from (not cheap at that time, let alone what it would cost at current rates). That was on top of whatever I was spending on buying CDs for the show (since I didn’t get many sent to me). 2SER cost me a fair bit, and I’m sure it’s cost most of the volunteers a fair bit over the years too. I enjoyed most of that time and wasn’t unduly bothered about the expense. Not until it ended the way it did.
And I’m still angry that it did end like that, and I’m even angrier that it now looks like the station’s going to end like this. Whatever else I may say about SER, it was worth it. I was a small part of something, but I was part of it nevertheless. And now someone made such a fuck-up somewhere down the line that there’s probably going to be no something to be a part of anymore. And the people that were part of it until now have been fucked over royally. Yeah, I’m angry for them more than me.
