To the Editor
The Australian Newspaper

The opinion piece by Noel Pearson, “More Uncle Tom’s than meet the eye” in Saturday’s paper was factually incorrect about National Indigenous Television. As Directors of NITV and independent organisations involved with NITV, we stand by the newly established service.

In his opinion piece, Mr Pearson notes that he does not know much about television nor “the relative merits of ICTV and NITV”. Having conceded his ignorance on the issues, Mr Pearson then feels free to demonstrate this by making derogatory remarks about NITV and its leaders which are factually incorrect and provocative. His only source for his misinformed opinion is an open letter from Mr Frank Rajivic (a non-Aboriginal person) who was employed by ICTV for a mere three months.

We would like to clarify the following points:

• The ICTV service was established by Imparja Television some six years ago, using its second video channel, with absolutely no contribution from the ICTV consortium, including Mr Rijavec, Since that time, the recently incorporated ICTV has simply been a program provider to the Imparja owned and operated video channel along with CAAMA (Alice Springs based), Goolari Media(Broome based)and other independent producers. Imparja had also used this channel to source, schedule and broadcast sports programming, and community service announcements on health, education, anti-discrimination. Seeing that ICTV never held a broadcast licence and never had exclusive rights to the channel, it is totally inaccurate for Mr Pearson to state that NITV has “ripped” the licence off ICTV.
  

• The decision to use Imparja’s second channel as the launching pad for the NITV was made solely by the Federal Government. The then NITV committee had lobbied hard for the Government to fund a full free to air broadcasting service, similar to SBS, rather than the scaled down service model, using Imparja’s second channel, which the Government preferred and funded.
  

• ICTV represents only four Indigenous organisations, it is totally incorrect to suggest that its represents all remote Indigenous communities. NITV’s mandate is to cater to the 450,000 Indigenous Australians across the country, which includes remote communities.
  

• NITV since its establishment in December 2006, has continuously attempted to negotiate with the ICTV consortium on the ongoing production of NITV programming, only to be turned away by people like Mr Rijavec, who have a dream for a television service, but the dream only includes the few remote communities that ICTV purport to represent.
  

• Finally, there was no alcohol at the NITV launch that took place at 10am in the morning. As such Mr Pearson’s descriptions of “quaffed champagne” and “rivers of grog” are patently false and mischievous.
  

The strength of NITV lies in the fact that the vision for a national Indigenous television service was one that unified Aboriginal people around the country. It remains NITV’s great strength that it is a partnership of Indigenous people and organisations around the country.

We intend to continue to put our energy into celebrating and representing this diversity and will not be distracted or be drawn in to vitriolic personal attacks. We are happy to be judged in the end by our audience and by the breadth of programming we commission from Indigenous people around the country.

Owen Cole, Chairman, Imparja Television, Alice Springs
Rachel Perkins, Chairperson, Indigenous Screen Australia, Sydney
Patsy Mudgedell, IRCA Board Member, Balgo