Unless more government funding is injected very soon into our national broadcaster, it will be too late to save it, writes Robert Manne.

We live at a time when all .cultural institutions which rely substantially on public funding are doing it tough. Belonging as I do to a university where an atmosphere of demoralisation now runs deep, I do not find it difficult to understand the climate of fear and insecurity which seems to have gripped so many staff members at the ABC.

The ABC is an institution infinitely more important to the life of this country than any particular university. It is no secret that at present- in particular because of the need to make the conversion to digital television programming- it is staring real financial crisis in the face.

Unless additional government funds are soon injected it will begin upon a plane of irreversible decline.

It is time for its many friends to speak. What follows is my short account of the many ways in which the ABC matters to me.

For the general population commercial television and talkback radio provide the most important source of news and opinion. For politically minded Australians, however, it is the ABC which largely plays that role. A continent as vast as our requires some focus for its national political discussion.

In the absence of a high circulation national daily newspaper that role has been assumed by the ABC, most importantly; for almost a quarter-century; each morning and evening by the radio programs AM and PM. Without these programs our political discussions would be far more fragmented and unsatisfactory than they are.

On television a similar role is played by The 7.30 Report. In recent years there was an attempt to federalise the program. The experirnent was soon abandoned; I always thought it a mistake. The 7.30 Report is the most intelligent and sober national television program of current affairs that we have. Its reprieve has had another advantage -to allow the melancholy figure of Kerry O'Brien -the one interviewer capable of speaking to our political leaders on equal terms -to continue upon his evolution into a national pofitical institution, a kind of Australian equivalent to Britain's late Sir Robin Day.

Those who follow politics will have their own opinions on ABC television's current political fare. In my view; in recent years, Four Corners has been uneven. Sometimes it misfires. Sometimes- most famously with regard to Queensland police corruption -it has proven capable of making a real improvement to our world.

For me at least, under both Stuart Littlemore and Richard Ackland, Media Watch became compulsory viewing. Despite occasional unfairness, time and again in its exposure of the corruptions to which the contemporary media are prone, It hit the mark. This year, however, with Paul Barry; it seems to me to be obsessed by the trivia of commercial television and to have lost, as a result, its old cultural bite.

So, in a different way; has Lateline. In the past, in particular when steered by the shrewd intelligence of Maxine.McKew, Lateline became something rather rare in Ailstralian television: a forum for the exchange of ideas. This year it has been transformed into a more conventional program of current affairs. I think this transformation is a loss.

In myown life I am even more reliant on ABC radio than television. Over the past few years - ever since Ackland converted me through his drollery to his breakfast program -Radio National has become especially important to me. On New Year's Day; through the collaborative work of almost its entire crew, Radio National was responsible for one of the most brilliant pieces of broadcasting in the history of the Australian media: a scintillating cultural survey of the past millennium, extending over the course of the entire day.

I saw clearly on that day something I had only dimly glimpsed before -namely the astonish- ingly significant place Radio National has come to assume in the cultural life of Australia in the world of books, ideas, science and the arts. Last week the Minister for Communications, Senator Richard Alston, offered the ABC some gratuitous advice about the need to eliminate esoterica from its programming. ,f it was the offering of Radio National he had in mind his advice was both foolish and philistine. At its current level of daily performance, despite its modest ratings, Radio National is one of the truly great achievements in the history of the ABC.

There are not many Australian causes for which I would go to the barricades. The retention of Radio National in its present form is one.

I do not want for a moment to suggest that the ABC is only; or even mainly, valuable because of the role it plays in high culture. The ABC is as much about community news and local councils, veterinary and gardening advice, the level of rivers and bushfire warnings, as it is about politics and ideas. In very many areas it enriches the popular culture. Let me illustrate through one example: its coverage of football in my home State.

For as long as I can  remember I have listened to the local ABC football program on winter weekends. Before the match begins, the football issues of the week are discussed. Sometimes this involves surprisingly complex questions concerning the laws governing the game; sometimes delicate social matters, like the problem of on-field racial abuse. Time and again I have been deeply impressed by the subtlety, the commonsense, the basic decency displayed. Because I am a passionate supporter of the Geelong Football Club, on occasions, after play begins, I am obliged to turn to commercial radio. The contrast in style is clear. Here the ethos of the old world of ocker jocularity, with its undertow of male aggression, unchallengeably still holds sway.

In its broad humariising impact, across very many fields of high and popular culture, we owe far more to the ABC than we commonly u nderstand. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once described the conservative disposition as applying to the person "aware of having something to lose which he has learnt to care for". Regarding the ABC I am a conservative in the Oakeshottian sense. The longer I have lived the more I have learnt to care for the ABC and to fear what right-wing ideologues and penny-pinching governments might, between them, soon allow us to lose.

Robert Manne is associate professor of politics at La Trobe University. On occasions he has earned a pittance for his commentary on the A.BC.