STRONGER VOICE FOR AUSTRALIA

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30447, 22 May 1964, Page 13

STRONGER VOICE FOR AUSTRALIA

(N Z. Press Association—Copyright) MELBOURNE, May 21. Australia’s official “voice” in Asia; —Radio Australia —is to be strongly boosted to avoid being drowned out by increasingly powerful Communist Chinese and Indonesian broadcasts.

A booster station at Darwin to give new strength to Radio Australia’s beams is being planned. Top sources said today it was hoped the booster would be in service by 1967. The lift in beaming power has become necessary because Australian broadcasts to the Asian nations are becoming weak by comparison with other competing national broadcasts.

The officials said they were not particularly concerned about jamming of broadcasts by the Communist Chinese. From time to time, Radio Australia news bulletins with political content have been jammed in the region.

This has been stated on a high level, although the Postmaster-General’s department said that no case of deliberate jamming of Australia’s broadcasts in South-east Asia had been proved.

“With the rapid development of international highfrequency broadcasting, Radio Australia has to compete more and more with other broadcasts of many nations using wave-lengths adjacent to ours,” officials said today.

Radio Australia is now broadcasting 27 English and 11 foreign language news bulletins every day. The Asian broadcasts are in Indonesian, Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Cantonese.