Climate change at Radio National

The News is skimpy, often in no particular order, for example, someone falling off a motor bike preceding a revolution in another country. This sort of thing is particularly likely with the 7 o'clock news. Most detail is given to particular sports news, with exerpts from sportsmen's comments. There are a few regular news-readers, but many seem to come on once only, for some reason.

Nowadays the audience for talks is said to be mainly over 60 years in age. The older audience has changes in its hearing – the higher frequencies for voices become less audible, the lower frequencies for drums become overbearing. Muttered female voices, being highest register, become inaudible to many. Noise-music hides the talking for 18% of Radio National audience – possibly more. Talk programs have stings between sections; the stings have got longer and longer.

To make up it seems for the advertising on commercial radio, every hour there are promos for programs to come. Lately, promos have been played in the middle of other programs, e.g. Life Matters and By Design. This is infuriating for listeners, and makes thinking difficult. These promos get longer and longer, until you feel you have heard the entire program already. A promo for David Hume on the Philosopher's Zone was repeated at least twenty times – or it seemed like it – and at last I did not listen to the program, up my alley though it was. There can be two promos of at least two minutes before the News, plus one after. Will it get any worse? Promos used to be between the talk programs. Now they come at any time, including in the middle of talk programs. The same one can be repeated up to twenty times, it seems.

To fill in the space between proper programs and the News, often a lot of music is played which is anti-thinking. By this I mean that Radio National has too often abandoned music that has melody and sequence for music that consists of the same phrase repeated up to thirty times. The music played is often highly reliant on repetitive drumming which could be done by machines, and too much of it consists of one line of music or lyrics repeated for up to twenty times. One cannot think while it is on, but cannot tell when it will end. Surely the proper programs could be longer to fill the space.

The 5.30 am slot, which is mainly listened to by the sleepless, depressed, suicidal and ageing, may be at risk to be shorn of its life-giving content of comedy, laughs and games. Yet this is the time it is most needed. On Sundays we now have items such as Method Acting and Richard Dawkins – heavy stuff for 5.30 in the morning.

I am told there are listener surveys, but cannot find when they are. Why not?

Australia needs a radio station catering for intelligence if it wants to be the Clever Country and stand respected internationally. It cannot by definition have high ratings, because only ten per cent of the population has high intelligence. But it could have that 10% of listeners, not the 2% attributed to it. People of all degrees of intelligence could listen to particular programs that appealed to them – the Science Shows are one example.

This is not a matter of elitism, it is a matter of necessity, and we should all contribute our taxes to keeping it going. It should be clear from this report that changes are needed, and these changes should not to be to go down-market. The airwaves have more than enough that is at average level and below.