that's not a dog. it's a canine.

When Tony Abbott said the cuts to the ABC and SBS were neither cuts nor a broken pre-election promise but an “efficiency dividend” I thought he was just making up words.

I, in my taking-words-at-their-dictionary-meaning way, always understood dividend to be a bonus, a share of profit. A reward even.

The funding cuts are anything but.

However, it turns out the “efficiency dividend” really is a thing. Dating back to the 1980’s no less. A measure to increase efficiency and performance in government agencies, albeit flawed and referred to more than once as a “a blunt instrument”.

I wonder which wordsmithy spinmeister dreamed up this less that delightful example of doublespeak, presumably intending it to mean a dividend to the taxpayers.
I’m putting it up there with “friendly fire” and  “enhanced interrogation”.

And can I just point out that if Tony is going to nitpick over terminology then he’d better try a little harder because guess what. The definition of efficiency dividend is

“an across-the-board cut to the funding that agencies receive for running costs” 

So it’s not a cut, it’s a “cut to funding” is it, hmmm?
And that’s not a dog, it’s a canine.

But terminology aside, here’s the thing. According to this Parliamentary research paper of Dec 2012, several government funded agencies have full exemption from this not-actually-a-dividend dividend. In particular:

“the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Special Broadcasting Service Corporation due to election commitments from both major parties to ‘maintain the real level of funding’ for each broadcaster”

It seemed however that everyone was so upset by the whatever-you-want-to-call-them-but-lets-just-call-them-funding-cuts, that no-one noticed this little issue of exemp… no wait.

Matthias Corman said it out loud to the media and anyone who wanted to listen.

“The ABC has been exempted from efficiency dividends for the last 20 years…”

As if that would somehow win him friends among we taxpaying people of Australiana.

At least Malcolm Turnbull had the good sense to steer us clear of those murky waters quick-smart (so, not just a broken promise but a broken bi-lateral commitment) and asserted–on a technicality, mind, nothing to do with exemptions or anything–that whatever these not-cuts were, they were definitely absolutely not in any way an “efficiency dividend”.

In fact, to put his own positive spin on it, the whole "dividend" thing clearly not working,  Malc is now using the more cuddly – and I must admit refreshingly straightforward and non-doublespeaky – term “government savings measure”.

And anyway it’s all the ABC’s fault, he said.

“...in terms of program changes that has nothing to do with the government.”

So there.