Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) department describes ‘soft power’ as “having the ability to influence the behaviour or thinking of others through the power of attraction and ideas”. It says this is “so vital to our foreign policy.”
The public face of that ‘soft power’ consists of government programs that promote Australia as a source of education, science, research, tourism, a good lifestyle, democratic values, and diversity, as well as a source of information and news.
A key part of this agenda is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia’s national broadcaster. In a February 2026 press release, the ABC stated that it had signed agreements with at least 23 public broadcasters across the Indo-Pacific region since 2023, with one more signed since then.
Most of these agreements are with public broadcasters and mostly with Pacific nations, such as Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, Palau, Solomon Islands, and Tonga.
The ABC is also cooperating with its counterpart across the Tasman, Radio New Zealand (RNZ), to carry out the Australian government’s foreign policy agenda in the Pacific.
A 2018 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between ABC and RNZ was established in the wake of the January 2017 ABC shut down of the shortwave transmission of ABC Radio Australia, ostensibly to focus on a ‘digital first’ strategy, but also to save $1.9-million a year.
The closure was opposed by both major political parties and was seen as a blow to Australia’s ‘soft power’ in the Pacific. Former Australian Prime Minister and Ambassador to the USA Kevin Rudd has described Radio Australia as an “essential lifeline that amplified” Australia’s “national interests and democratic values to remote Pacific Island countries”.
In a 2017 submission to an Australian Senate committee on a bill to force the ABC to restore its shortwave radio service, DFAT made it clear how it saw the ABC’s role. It said that the ABC’s Pacific services were a “valuable channel for delivering news, Australian perspectives and content, and advancing Australia’s public diplomacy in the Pacific.” [Emphasis added]
In a submission to DFAT’s 2018 review of Australia’s soft power strategy, the ABC presents itself as one of the government’s most effective tools to get its agenda across, saying that international broadcasting uses “mass media, enabling it [to] reach large numbers of people on a daily basis, and making it a particularly cost-effective means of influencing foreign publics.” [Emphasis added]
That same year, the ABC submitted to a separate review conducted jointly by DFAT and the Department of Arts and Communications that “people who are engaged culturally with Australia have a greater likelihood of conducting business have a greater likelihood of… adopting Australia’s world view.” [Emphasis added]
The ABC didn’t hold back in supporting the government’s foreign policy, by openly naming the information adversaries as “Russia and China”:
“Australia, with a population of 25 million in a world of over 7 billion people and an Asia-Pacific region of enormous diversity, where China and Russia seek increasing influence, has a lot to lose by not actively connecting internationally by exercising effective soft power.”
Targeting with ‘soft power’
This year’s federal budget gives further funding to the ABC for international broadcasting for the government’s soft power efforts. In a 2026 budget night press release the ABC stated:
“In an uncertain geopolitical environment, trusted media is critical. We look forward to growing the ABC’s soft power impact in this increasingly complex world.”
The ABC has made it clear that its decisions on international broadcasting are now made to align with Australia’s foreign policy. This was heard in evidence given to the Australian parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade in 2023, by head of the ABC’s international division, Claire Gorman.
If ABC International was given a larger budget, she argued, there was “a lot more” the ABC could do especially in Indonesia, India and “other countries and regions that we would regard, from a national-interest point of view, as high priority because of the geostrategic situation across the region”.
In a 2025 article for a government-owned think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Gorman stressed the necessity of the ABC’s role in Australia’s soft power strategy, arguing that “Russia, China and others” – whom she indirectly compared to the Axis powers in World War II – are taking advantage of a “US withdrawal of soft power” in order to subject “populations across the globe to an information assault”.
“With the US pulling back, Australia’s security in our region is challenged. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for a change in the US position; we need to project our soft power with all available tools.”
In a 2025 response to questions from the ABC’s Media Watch television program about the shutdown of Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America, the USA’s two international broadcasters, Gorman said that the ABC was in “ongoing discussions with DFAT and the [Department of Infrastructure] regarding the information environment across the region and the key role played by the ABC,” and added:
“This approach reflects and respects the values these partners place on formal relationships and signals that Australia is a long-term committed partner to the media sector across the Indo-Pacific region.
“The US cuts amplify the need for Australia to step up its international media activity across the Asia Pacific and the ABC’s vital role in achieving this. We must be able to offer audiences across the region access to independent, impartial news and current affairs covering issues that are important to them. This is essential to counter narratives coming from illiberal states which seek to undermine democratic ideals and the rule of law.”
Declassified Australia asked the ABC how the ABC’s international services serving as a counter to other media outlets and illiberalism is compatible with the ABC’s editorial policy on impartiality.
An ABC spokesperson stated:
“The ABC as an international broadcaster complies with these standards [the ABC’s editorial policies] across the Indo-Pacific region and as such this content may often be counter content from other state broadcast sources which is not ‘impartial according to the recognised standards of journalism’.”
Referencing the language in the ABC’s impartiality policies, the spokesperson stated:
“The ABC takes no editorial stance other than its commitment to fundamental democratic principles including the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, parliamentary democracy and non-discrimination.”
‘Soft’ hands unite across the Tasman
Declassified Australia has obtained a copy of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the ABC and RNZ signed in 2024.
The MOU sees the two public broadcasters “discuss and mutually agree to distribute content in response to the needs of the audience in the event of natural disasters or adverse security events across the countries of the Pacific region.”
A spokesperson for the ABC told Declassified Australia said that the “language used in the MOU is deliberately broad so that it covers a range of adverse events that relate to human security.”
The MOU, which has a term of three years, will see the two broadcasters “identify issues of mutual concern and interest, explore potential partnerships or other arrangements, and share best practices [on] approaches and negotiations with Meta and Google”, “initiatives related to climate change”, and “responses to domestic and international crises.”
The memorandum is particularly focused on RNZ and the ABC’s work in Pacific island nations, though its preamble states that it documents RNZ and the ABC’s desire to “further their aims with audiences domestic and international.”
The sections of the memorandum concerning “natural disasters and adverse security events” in the Pacific have not been utilised yet, the ABC and RNZ both said in their responses to questions from Declassified Australia.
The MOU follows a recommendation made by the Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Review, a joint DFAT and Department of Infrastructure review of the Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Strategy, Australia’s soft power strategy in the Indo-Pacific.
The review, a heavily redacted version of which has been obtained through a freedom of information (FOI) request by Declassified Australia, recommended that the ABC “increase its existing arrangement with [RNZ] in order to maintain connection with audiences listening to shortwave” and found “merit in the ABC cooperating with [RNZ]” as an alternative to re-establishing the ABC’s shortwave radio transmission, which was shut down at the end of January 2017.
RNZ said in a response to an official information request by Declassified Australia that it did not make a submission to the review, nor was it consulted on it.
An ABC spokesperson denied that this meant the MOU, which was entered into after the government review recommended it, was entered into on instruction from the government, saying that RNZ and ABC leadership first expressed their desire to enter into such an agreement in 2022 and discussions began to progress in August 2023.
This superseded an earlier MOU between RNZ and the ABC that was signed in 2018. The 2018 MOU, which was only six paragraphs long, is much lesser in scope than the superseding MOU, and only had the two broadcasters agree to “program exchanges” without charging each other for licensing intellectual property, as well as “staff exchanges for news gathering, visits, and business cooperation purposes.”
The new review called the 2018 MOU a “shortwave radio arrangement” despite it not concerning or even mentioning shortwave radio, although it did lead to RNZ’s shortwave station, RNZ Pacific, broadcasting the ABC’s Wantok news program, which is spoken in multiple languages of Pacific countries.
The agreement has seen RNZ Pacific, which is broadcast in and targeted at Pacific Island nations, air the ABC’s Pacific Prepared program, which focuses on climate change and its link to natural disasters in the Pacific and teaches emergency preparedness.
Pacific Prepared is the primary part of the Pacific Climate Media & Traditional Knowledge project carried out by ABC’s International Development wing. It received no less than $1-million in funding from DFAT between 2023 and December 2024 as part of the Australian government’s Pacific Media Assistance Scheme, according to another ABC document obtained by Declassified Australia. The Pacific Media Assistance scheme is itself part of the Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Strategy.
Although the DFAT funding is disclosed at the end of each episode of the Pacific Prepared program, as well as on its web pages, its role in a larger soft power strategy isn’t mentioned.
An ANZ co-production
RNZ and ABC Radio Australia, the ABC’s international radio station, have so far co-produced just one program under the agreement, according to RNZ.
The program, The Last Voyage of The Rainbow Warrior, a three-and-a-half hour podcast series adapted from David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire, recounts Greenpeace anti-nuclear activists’ help in relocating Marshall Islanders whose homes had been made uninhabitable by contamination from American nuclear weapons tests.
The podcast focussed on the subsequent bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship which protested French atomic weapons testing and had been bombed and sunk by French intelligence services while it was moored in Auckland’s harbour.
The mysterious role played by Australian authorities in assisting the bombers’ escape from New Zealand’s authorities – as reported last year by Declassified Australia – was not explored in detail in the podcast.
RNZ said in its response to an official information request that it had “led” the podcast as “producers”, but it was “majority-funded by the ABC.” The podcast’s credits lists only two people at the ABC contributing in the roles of “content director” and “executive editor”, suggesting minimal involvement with its production.
The ABC aired the podcast on Radio National, the ABC’s national radio station, and was advertised on ABC Australia, the ABC’s international TV channel which airs across the Asia-Pacific.
Cooperation of this sort was recommended by the Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Review which recommended that the ABC and its public service sibling, the SBS, should work on co-productions with Pacific broadcastersand that the government “[s]upport co-production as a capability and capacity development mechanism in the Indo-Pacific region.”
The review gave heavy concurrence to submissions recommending such co-production take place. Submissions that did do so were from the independent group of journalists and media executives, the Australia Asia-Pacific Media Initiative, as well as former ABC executive Geoff Heriot, who made heavy reference to his book on international broadcasting, “International Broadcasting and its Contested Role in Australian Statecraft”, a copy of which he even gave to the review’s team.
A June 2025 ABC International document titled “Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Strategy Mid-Term Review”, was obtained through an FOI application by Declassified Australia.
The document quotes the Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who at a 2023 oration partly themed as a challenge to colonial narratives, emphasised that how a country projects its multicultural reality to the world is not just a public relations exercise, but a genuine element of its national power:
“One of the most important ways our countries can modernise our relationships is in the stories we tell the world about who we are, which is of course, the starting point of foreign policies.”
Although the Review document has significant redactions, it states that the ABC has “actively pursued more formal relationships through our program of forging Memoranda of Understanding.”
In May, one more regional media outlet struck a similar bargain with the ABC, when Sri Lanka’s Maharaja Media Network signed an MOU that offers content sharing, collaborative productions and professional exchange initiatives for “deepening the shared values between Australia and Sri Lanka”.
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