Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club she would abolish SBS if One Nation came to power, arguing the internet has overtaken the need for a publicly funded multilingual broadcaster. It is a proposal worth examining on the numbers, because SBS does far more, costs less and reaches deeper into Australia’s multicultural communities than the slogan suggests.
Start with what SBS actually is. The Special Broadcasting Service was created to inform, educate and entertain all Australians in a way that reflects the country’s multicultural society, a mandate written into the SBS Act. In practice that means a spread of services well beyond the main television channel. SBS runs SBS World Movies, SBS Food, the multilingual news channel SBS WorldWatch, the streaming platform SBS On Demand, and SBS Audio, which broadcasts radio and podcasts in scores of languages. It also operates NITV, the National Indigenous Television service. At last count SBS carried content in 74 languages on radio, more than 60 on television and over 50 online, more than any other broadcaster in the world. Alongside the cycling, the World Cup football and the subtitled drama it is known for, it produces in-language news and settlement information that many recent migrants rely on, the kind of service that proved its worth during the pandemic, bushfires and elections when official information had to reach communities that do not read English first.
Now the money, which is where the debate gets sharper. SBS is funded mainly by the taxpayer, but not only by the taxpayer. Under its most recent three-year funding deal the Government committed $953.7 million across the 2022-23 to 2024-25 period, an average of about $318 million a year. The 2025-26 Portfolio Budget Statement put SBS’s total revenue for the year at roughly $537.8 million, made up of about $359.2 million in government funding and around $178.7 million the broadcaster raises itself. On those figures government provides close to two-thirds of SBS’s income and its own commercial activity provides about a third. Spread across the population, the public contribution works out to somewhere around $13 a person a year.
That self-generated income is the part most people do not realise exists, and it sits at the centre of a quieter industry fight. Unlike the ABC, SBS is allowed to carry advertising, capped under its Act at a limited number of minutes each hour. In 2024-25 it reported $126.7 million from advertising and sponsorship. So SBS is both a recipient of public money and a competitor in the advertising market, including the market for government campaign advertising aimed at multicultural audiences. That dual role is exactly what independent ethnic publishers have been complaining about for years.
Here the available data and the claim circulating in the industry part ways, and it is worth being honest about the gap. One figure put to The Indian Sun, from within the advertising sector, is that the federal government spends about $15 million a year on multicultural or ethnic media advertising and that SBS captures roughly 30 per cent of it. We could not verify those specific numbers against any published source, and they should be treated as an industry estimate rather than an established fact. What is documented is the underlying grievance. State multicultural advertising policies show the pattern clearly. New South Wales lifted the share of campaign spending directed to multicultural and Aboriginal audiences from 7.5 per cent to 9 per cent from July 2024, but that allocation still counts money spent with SBS, an organisation already funded by government, as well as spend with global social media platforms. Victoria, by contrast, sets its multicultural advertising target at 15 per cent while explicitly excluding SBS and translation costs. Independent outlets argue that when SBS, social media giants and translation agencies are all counted inside a multicultural advertising budget, relatively little reaches the front-line community mastheads the policy is supposed to support, and that campaigns are often limited to only the top four or five language groups such as Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Hindi.
The physical footprint of SBS is more modest than its reach. Its headquarters sits at 14 Herbert Street in Artarmon, on Sydney’s lower north shore, with a major presence in Melbourne at Federation Square and smaller offices in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, plus a production hub in Western Sydney. Public reporting on the exact split between property, technology and salaries is limited, and third-party data services put the workforce anywhere between about 1,200 and 1,700 people, so the precise headcount is best drawn from the annual report rather than stated with false confidence. As a broadcaster, the bulk of its spending goes where it goes for any network, on people, content and the cost of getting signals and streams to audiences, rather than on real estate.
So what would abolishing SBS actually do? Removing the government contribution would save the budget in the order of $350 million a year, a real but small figure against total Commonwealth spending. It would also remove a broadcaster that earns well over $100 million of its own keep, employs well over a thousand people, and delivers in-language news and settlement services that no commercial operator has shown any interest in providing at scale. Hanson’s argument, that the internet now does this job, is not empty. Migrants today reach news and homeland media on their phones in ways that did not exist when SBS launched in 1980. The counter-argument is that trusted, locally accountable, Australian in-language journalism is precisely what the open internet does not reliably provide, and that the gap tends to be filled by foreign state media and unverified social feeds.
There is also a sharper point that cuts across the politics. If the real concern is taxpayer money and fairness to independent multicultural publishers, abolishing SBS and ending its public funding is one answer, but so is the narrower reform the independent sector has actually been asking for, which is to stop counting an already-funded national broadcaster, and the global platforms, inside the multicultural advertising budgets meant to sustain community media. Those are very different policies aimed at very different problems, and they should not be confused.
None of this settles whether SBS is worth roughly $13 a head each year. That is a judgement for voters and the Parliament. What the numbers make clear is that the choice One Nation is putting forward is not a simple deletion of a line item. It is a decision about in-language news, Indigenous broadcasting, settlement information and a chunk of the multicultural media economy, wrapped inside a single sentence at a press club lunch.
This article draws on SBS annual reporting, the 2025-26 Portfolio Budget Statement and public funding records. The $15 million federal ethnic-media advertising figure and SBS’s 30 per cent share are an industry estimate that could not be independently verified.
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