The Editor
Adelaide Advertiser
9 May 2001

From conversations I have had with several Liberal MPs holding marginal seats in South Australia, I believe that there will be an increase in funding for the ABC in the federal budget.

This increase will not come, as Samantha Maiden suggested yesterday, from an approval of Jonathan Shier's idiosyncratic (to say the least) management style. It will come from the belated realisation by Liberal MPs that the independence, integrity and funding of the ABC is an election issue.

Friends of the ABC, now fourteen thousand strong across the country, and active in all states and territories, has made it known that it will be intervening in the federal election.

Get ready for another John Howard poll-inspired backflip.

Darce Cassidy

National Spokesperson
Friends of the ABC