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

Support is also provided through community networks and private radio stations for Maltese programmes on radio. Fortunately these are all written, produced and directed by mainly 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 brings us all to shame. Given the quality of the broadcast, I doubt if SBS TV will be able to support 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 awaiting to hear the news from their place of origin and the lobbying and pressure that is being put to SBS TV to include them on their programmes can only increase.

If SBS TV decide 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.

So here we have an 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 would suggest starting from scratch and bring in the Ministry of Tourism to assist you.

This afternoon, the 30-minute programme which incidentally went for only 16 minutes, commenced its broadcast by giving us the exciting news about three court cases which would have been at the very minimum three weeks old. This was interspersed by shots of the courts in Valletta. So PBS's considered opinion is 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 - 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, also the hospital contract issue, developments with the EU, etc.? 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 ten-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.

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