Radio was the ABC’s first medium when it was founded in 1932, grounded in a central mission of building unity in the relatively new Commonwealth. But by the time influential administrator and aesthete Kim Williams arrived as chair in 2024 it had, in his words, been neglected.
In his first public address as chair of the national broadcaster, Williams used the Redmond Barry Lecture to call for a “renewed” Radio National as the broadcaster’s flagship, leading a rejuvenated audio division.
It needed more creativity and better curation, Williams said while giving the lecture at the State Library of Victoria in June 2024, having spent the past three months getting deep under the hood of the broadcaster. Williams spoke, then things happened quickly.
Rumoured plans to cull one of its talkback networks – Local Radio, NewsRadio or Radio National – were kiboshed. Just months later, ABC backflipped on a decision to fold the audio division in with the rest of its screen content.
In August that year, Williams told Radio National staff of his bold ambitions for the station. He wanted it to become the ABC’s “heartland”, and to replicate the BBC’s equivalent station, Radio 4, which reached 17 per cent of the British public (at that time) every week.
“My aspiration would be to that level. My aspiration is to actually see it be a service that has a real impact,” Williams said.
With former ABC Radio Melbourne manager Dina Rosendorff at the helm, the ABC instigated a station-wide review. The result was a visual rebrand, while “Always Curious” replaced “Think Bigger” as the station’s mission. There was also greater emphasis on knitting the day’s programming together with two continuity announcers appointed to guide listeners.
There was a complete rethink of the flagship Breakfast show. Newshound Patricia Karvelas was replaced by Sally Sara and a team of dedicated and experienced roving reporters styled like Radio 4’s Today program. The network’s former star Fran Kelly returned to do The Radio National Hour in the evenings. There were new programs such as Saturday Extra with the BBC’s former Washington correspondent Nick Bryant. Life Matters got a new host, as did The World Today with Andy Park. Journalist and filmmaker Marc Fennell got a new show, there was a new arts program, a new economics show, a media show, a science show, a food and culture show, and many more.
Finally, there was an insistence, led by Williams, that the station be referred to as Radio National, rather than the colloquial “RN”. It was a minor point, but it showed the chairman’s personal investment in small aspects of the station’s presentation, and his desire for it to reassert its position in the national conversation.
At that point, ratings and audience figures had been on the slide for several successive years. Unlike local radio, which was the beneficiary of a ratings boost at the height of the pandemic, Radio National figures were largely consistent with those in 2019, but from 2022 onwards, the statistics fell off a cliff.
National effort
A year on from Williams’ remarks and the average weekly national audience of Radio National had fallen by 9 per cent to 462,000 in the 2024-25 financial year, according to the last annual report. That is just 1.7 per cent of our population. There is a long way to go to reach Williams’ target.
And over the course of the calendar year, Radio National reported an average radio survey cumulative audience of 472,250 across the five capital cities, down from 496,000 in 2024.
There are eight ratings reports published each year, and “cumulative audience” includes any listener who tuned in for at least eight minutes in that survey period.
But after an initial six months bedding the new programming in, a deeper look into the numbers shows there are some green shoots, and at the very least, the station has arrested any further declines. Across the five cities, the final survey delivered 492,000 cumulative listeners, 36,000 more than the same survey in 2024 and across the final four surveys of 2025, audiences rose 4 per cent.
But there remains an audience issue for Radio National in the country’s two largest cities, where the station has lost 35 per cent of its audience since pre-COVID in 2019.
“Talk formats like Radio National tend to attract older audiences, so the numbers should be holding firm,” a former ABC executive says, speaking on the condition of anonymity as they remain in the industry.
ABC head of audio Ben Latimer says live radio is only one part of the picture for Radio National, arguing that many of the station’s programs now reach larger audiences in podcast form than on broadcast.
“What we’re seeing post-COVID is a redistribution of listening rather than a loss of relevance, with Radio National playing a central role in the ABC’s podcast leadership,” Latimer says.
There’s some truth to that. Of the top 100 podcasts in the country, 24 are produced by the ABC, according to recent figures from data and ratings firm Triton, many of them shows on Radio National. Compare that with a year prior, when only 15 of the top 100 shows were made by the ABC, and it’s an impressive jump.
Asked if Radio National is now a podcast-first station, Latimer says its role is to reach Australians “wherever and however they choose to listen”. If You’re Listening, hosted by Matt Bevan, is a prime example of that, airing on radio on Friday afternoons. But the show performs better online. It was the nation’s 18th most popular podcast in December and its full video versions gather hundreds of thousands of extra views on YouTube.
While several of the new shows commissioned for 2025 were dumped after one year, in 2026, Radio National further tinkered with its lineup. There’s a Radio National Arts Hour from Monday to Thursday, and it expanded Global Roaming, adding in two new hosts, Kylie Morris and Latika Bourke, and releasing a new episode each weekday. The approach can look choppy, but it’s also resulting in experimentation, with losses quickly cut and new bets placed.
It also goes some way to rejuvenating its arts coverage, a sector increasingly neglected across media, and which the ABC stripped back in a round of cuts in 2023.
It’s not just ratings that define success for the ABC, says managing director Hugh Marks, still in his first 12 months, though he notes the ABC is No. 1 in “live streaming”.
“Ultimately, success for the ABC’s radio services is about delivering trusted, distinctive content that serves the public interest by meeting the needs of the Australian community with integrity and purpose,” Marks says.
“We continue to strengthen these outcomes by investing in high-quality journalism and specialist programming, improving delivery through broadcast and digital platforms so audiences can engage with ABC content wherever they are.”
Tough programming
The big changes to the ABC’s audio offering have come during the tenure of Ben Latimer, who joined the ABC in 2023 from Nova, Lachlan Murdoch’s commercial radio company. It was a major switch: Nova focuses more on music and entertainment, Radio National is increasingly highbrow. For the broadcaster’s staff, any member of management coming from the dreaded “commercial” sector can be a lightning rod when things don’t go to plan.
When Latimer joined, ABC Radio was already in a transitional phase with an extensive, internal review already commissioned by the Ita Buttrose-led board. The aim: to address the rapid decline in audience figures for its local stations after pandemic-juiced figures. One of the key recommendations was that each show be judged on its own merits, which is in part what followed.
Each network has a distinctive role to play, Marks says. While Radio National provides breathing room for long-form storytelling and engagement, the network of local radio stations is the ABC’s most direct connection to the community.
There have been some significant changes to the local stations, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. Several hosts retired, including Richard Glover, or were pushed out, and ratings suffered.
“Change in any large creative organisation is always complex, and our staff base is just as passionate as our audience, but renewal is essential if we’re to remain relevant to audiences,” Latimer says.
The former ABC executive, who declined to be named, said the simplest explanation for the local stations’ woes was their broadcast material.
“While rivals have continued to provoke, argue and surprise, ABC Radio has become safer, flatter and more predictable,” the former executive says. “The data suggests listeners haven’t been driven away by technology, but by programming that no longer feels essential.”
Marks says the ABC’s job isn’t to chase clicks and provoke, like the commercial talkback model, but he agrees there needs to be investment in the renewed success of the ABC’s local radio.
“It’s important we see positive momentum in the short to medium term, and I think we can already see the impact of some of that work.
“The ABC’s purpose is to provide valued services that reflect and contribute to Australian society, culture and identity, not to compete in the marketplace of clicks.
“Quality, the diversity and distinctiveness of each channel and format, and the ability to serve accurately and distinctively every community that we operate in will stand us in good stead against the rise of noisier formats.”
Now the changes have been made, it’s up to the audience, who will vote with their feet.
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Calum Jaspan is a media writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Melbourne. Reach him securely on Signal @calumjaspan.10Connect via X or email.