The ABC has blamed its decision to axe three television programs and make workers redundant on falling audiences, tight budgets and a strategy of focusing on prime-time shows.
New Inventors, Art Nation and Collectors are to be dropped, with the last to be replaced by a new show called Auctions.
Quentin Dempster, host of 7.30 NSW and a former staff-elected ABC director, has called for a public inquiry into ''the siphoning of taxpayers' funds meant to sustain independent public broadcasting to the commercial television sector''.
He said the so-called schedule refreshment was in fact the ''intentional destruction of the ABC's creative independence'' given the outsourcing over time of production of drama, natural history, documentary and arts.
''The public trust of the ABC is based on an expectation that we are independent of commercial influence; that trust is being breached by current management and board policy.''
The union representing affected staff said the number of redundancies was in the region of 100 and called the demise of Art Nation on Sundays ''an act of cultural vandalism''.
The section secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union, Graeme Thomson, said the ABC's ''distinctiveness, rationale and ultimately its funding'' were under threat as a result of buying rather than making more programs.
That risked making television more ''homogenous'', given the production companies that made the programs also served commercial networks.
ABC staff will take stopwork action today to protest against the changes.
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