So after the news broke of 2SER’s impending implosion, the station held a “town hall meeting” on Monday which… went poorly. I’d opted out of attending (there was a Zoom option to attend online) cos I had a feeling it would be a shit show and that was evidently how it turned out:
Following a week of media coverage over the embattled station’s financial position, the meeting on Monday drew approximately 300 attendees both in person and online, according to sources present speaking to Crikey.
Station manager Cheryl Northey and board co-chairs Chris Dixon and James Bennett answered questions from a crowd of 2SER volunteers, community members and station alumni, with many incensed at the news reported last week by the Nine papers that the broadcaster could close as early as July. Dixon serves as the Macquarie University arts faculty executive dean, and Bennett is dean of the faculty of design and society at the University of Technology Sydney.
A partial recording of the meeting obtained by Crikey paints a picture of a livid 2SER community. Organisers told attendees a recording was being made during the meeting, but 2SER declined to provide Crikey a full recording of the event, citing consent and privacy concerns. Attendees have since been directed by management of both universities represented not to share recordings of the meeting, which was accessible to the public and advertised as a public meeting.
I can’t imagine why they don’t want anything circulating from this publicly accessible gathering…
Anthony Dockrill, the 2SER program director for 17 years between 2007 and 2024, described it as a “really shameful place to be” for the station and the board, and again criticised the timeframe of approaches for funding on the part of 2SER management.
Dixon denied that the funding withdrawal was thrust upon station management, replying, “We started considering this two years ago, but that conversation was shared with others.”
Dockrill added in a follow-up, “If the board was serious about finding a partner for the station, it needed two years … that hasn’t happened.”
“And I think the station has been let down by that,” he added, to audible applause.
Oh. So Macquarie was considering this move two years ago, and this news was evidently hidden from the people who would be most affected by it. (Parenthetically, Anthony is another Celluloid Dreams alumnus, indeed he was on the show before I was myself AND we actually both overlapped at UNSW before that, both of us were doing the Theatre & Film course there in the mid-90s. I don’t think I knew he’d been the program director for as long as that, though, that was long service. He’s correct in what he says here.)
A longer question came from Chris Nash, a retired professor of journalism at Monash University, a Walkley winner in 1977 and one of the original 2SER presenters when the station first went to air in 1979.
“What I’m not hearing here tonight is any sort of passion or even vision about what role 2SER might play in a revamped environment … and so I support what the other questions have been here tonight about the timing, because we’re now in late April, there have been two articles in The Sydney Morning Herald this week, and then we get invited to a meeting tonight to discuss options, but we’re also told that July is pretty much a deadline. You can’t turn something around in three months.
“So it seems to me that this is a communications exercise, with all due respect … for a decision that’s already been made.”
Yeah. This kind of ties in with Anthony’s point about the board being serious about finding a new partner, which, frankly, they don’t appear to be. I’m increasingly thinking the people in charge of these things are actually OK with SER shutting down and would rather it did so without this much fuss.
Meanwhile, in the online chat forum where questions were being asked by remote meeting attendees, tempers flared. Among several less-than-flattering responses was one made by an award-winning journalist at a major broadcaster, who said that Dixon was “not answering questions”.
2SER alumni and ABC broadcaster Robbie Buck asked: “How much is the managing director on?”, to audible gasps from the in-person audience and a concerted effort to move on from the panellists.
“It’s fine to ask the question. I think it’s also fine to not answer it,” came the response from the panel’s table.
Oh, Robbie Buck is pissed about this. Which, you know, he’s right to be. Funnily enough, around the time Macquarie were apparently initially planning their withdrawal from 2SER, this was also happening:
National Tertiary Education Union members at Macquarie University have taken the extraordinary step of passing a motion of no confidence in a senior university leader.
Macquarie is planning to scrap hundreds of casual academic roles, forcing huge workload increases on permanent staff.
Under the plan, Staff would be restricted in taking long service leave during teaching periods.
The Department of Critical Indigenous Studies would no longer be a stand alone department, losing independence and financial autonomy.
NTEU members on Wednesday unanimously voted for a no-confidence motion in Executive Dean of Arts Chris Dixon.
Yeah, THAT guy who was apparently getting tetchy at the Monday meeting about people asking him about the delay in publicising the news of MQ pulling out. A popular chap, by the look of things, whose brief seems to have been mostly to cut the arts faculty to ribbons, with 2SER being part of that. Even back in My Day, I remember hearing about MQ grumbling about funding SER and not getting enough of their shows in the program grid… fairly sure this wasn’t the solution, Chris. Cunt.
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