From Mr R. Dingli

The Maltese living in Australia are a fortunate lot. Considering the size of the Maltese community, we have been able to achieve the support of the Special Broadcasting Service television station (SBS TV) to air a regular Maltese news programme on Sunday afternoons by intense lobbying and perseverance.

Support is also provided through community networks and private radio stations for Maltese programmes on radio. Fortunately, these are all mainly written, produced and directed by Maltese living in Australia. The TV news broadcast, however, is an unedited programme as supplied to SBS TV from PBS in Guardamangia.

The quality of the programme is worse than something out of the Sixties, totally irrelevant, and shames us. Given the quality of the broadcast, I doubt if SBS TV will be able to sustain this service for much longer.

Maltese is one of 17 languages supported through this unique multi-cultural service available to all Australians. There are more people from different cultures and languages waiting to hear news from their country of origin and the lobbying and pressure that is being put on SBS TV to include them on their programmes can only increase.

If SBS TV decides to include a new language on this service it will be at the expense of an existing one. Which ones are most likely to be removed? I would suggest that the Maltese service from PBS would be at the top of the list.

We have the opportunity to try and keep our exposure on SBS TV, and maintain this service, which is provided for all Australians, but specifically relevant to Maltese-Australians. To be able to do this, the quality, content, relevance and timeliness of the programme needs to be overhauled. In fact I suggest starting from scratch and bring in the Ministry of Tourism to assist you.

This afternoon, the 30-minute programme, which incidentally only lasted 16 minutes, commenced its broadcast by giving us the exciting news about three court cases that would have been at least three weeks old. This was interspersed by shots of the Law Courts in Valletta. So it is PBS' considered opinion that the top news bulletin for the programme to be seen on Australian TV was local crime.

This was then followed by news of the Chalmers report about funding developments in education and training and the appointment of Mr Chalmers as chairman of Bank of Valletta. All very good - but did we really need the newsreader to read a CV of Mr Chalmers verbatim? Probably all very relevant for local viewers but not really relevant to international listeners who are interested in big-ticket news items from Malta.

Other news items were interspersed with shots of the mess that is Il-Monti in Merchants Street, which were considered appropriate background shots of Malta for not one but two separate stories.

With all the beautiful footage that is available, especially in winter, this was an absolute disaster and so typical of the attitude – this will do.

How about some comment or editorial about current important issues such as the problem and policy response to illegal immigration, the ongoing debate about the Opera House site, the hospital contract issue, developments with the EU and so on. I do not need to include examples of what background footage could be used for general stories.

Come on PBS, surely you can do much better! And if you have no funds, how about seeking some support from sponsors. Consideration should also be given to include a five- or 10-minute segment on tourism in English – the income that could flow from this would certainly outweigh the small investment needed to produce a quality product.

Raphael Dingli

CANBERRA

AUSTRALIA