Long Before the Final Whistle, SBS Scored for Australia

In an age when the scarcest thing in public life is shared attention, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Australia is the institution that still creates it.

The Socceroos are out. They lost to Egypt on penalties on 3 July, the first shootout in the team’s World Cup history, and a third knockout defeat from three attempts. So when the final kicks off at MetLife Stadium next Sunday, most of us will be watching a match we have no stake in winning. The country will watch anyway, on SBS, free, the way we have watched every World Cup for decades. That is worth holding onto, because only weeks ago a serious politician stood up and argued that the broadcaster carrying that final to us should not exist.

At the National Press Club in June, Pauline Hanson said a One Nation government would abolish SBS outright. The internet, she argued, had overtaken the need for it. Then she went further and told the room that Australia is a monocultural nation, not a multicultural one, and that our language is English. When an SBS journalist questioned her, Hanson told her she would be out of a job.

Most of the response missed the point, including a fair bit of the defence. People argued about cost per head, about language services, about whether multiculturalism has worked or failed, which is the wrong argument. SBS was never a multicultural courtesy the country could keep or drop once everyone learned English. It is one of the last institutions we have that can still gather a scattered country around one moment and give it something to be proud of together. That makes it less a piece of culture than a piece of infrastructure, and switching it off would not be a saving so much as a decision to let the country stop hearing itself.

I am not neutral about this. I came up through in-language media, years of it, before I ever worked at SBS, and getting the job felt like being picked for a team I had supported my whole life. Part of me will always feel like one of the crew. But distance has changed how I see it.

I no longer think of SBS as a broadcaster I was proud to work for. I think of it as part of what being Australian now means, and that was what was on trial at the Press Club.

Migrants today reach news and homeland media on their phones in ways that did not exist in 1975, and if the job were only translation, the internet really would have overtaken it. But that was never the whole job.

The internet solved distribution. It never solved trust.

Anyone can upload a video, but it is much harder to build something that Australians from hundreds of backgrounds recognise as a place worth returning to, especially when the conversation turns difficult. That is the part the market does not supply on its own, and the part the argument for abolition keeps missing.

SBS turned fifty last year. It began on 9 June 1975 as two small radio stations, 2EA in Sydney and 3EA in Melbourne, and it began for a strikingly practical reason. Australia had just introduced Medibank, and hundreds of thousands of migrants could not follow how the new health system worked because nobody was explaining it in a language they spoke. The first job of what became SBS was not culture or representation but information. It was a government deciding that people who did not yet speak English were still citizens who needed to understand how their own country worked. The first voice on air in Sydney spoke Greek. I will admit that detail still pleases me. A broadcaster built to help the newest Australians find their footing began by speaking to one of the oldest migrant communities in the country, and no one treated that as a contradiction.

Fifty years on, the country that first heard Greek on national radio now hears more than sixty languages through SBS. Not because Australia lost a national identity, but because the identity grew large enough to hold them.

The institution understood something many others did not. SBS never asked Australians to become less Australian; it quietly widened what Australian was allowed to mean. That is a different project from assimilation, which asks people to shed what they brought, and different again from separation, which asks them to keep to their own. It assumed, correctly, that a person can belong to more than one story at once. When Hanson says monocultural, she is not describing the country. She is proposing to unwind that idea, and to switch off the institution that has spent fifty years showing it works.

She is not the first to try. In 1986 the Hawke government moved to fold SBS into the ABC, presented as an efficiency. Migrant communities and SBS staff understood it as erasure, and they said so loudly enough that within a year the plan was dead. What that settled is that SBS does not survive as a favour from whichever government holds office. It survives because the people it serves defend it, and its value has been decided not in Canberra but by the communities who refuse to lose it. That is the flaw in assuming it can simply be legislated away.

This year, the answer arrived on the field, at the exact moment the argument was being made. Australia’s World Cup squad drew on at least fifteen cultural backgrounds, four of the players former refugees. On the eve of the tournament they released a video about their own migrant roots. The opening goal against Türkiye was scored by a twenty year old former refugee Nestory Irankunda, the youngest Australian ever to score at a World Cup. One of the players, Awer Mabil stopped a press conference to thank the SBS commentator David Basheer by name for what the broadcaster had meant to his family.

All of it reached the country live and free on SBS, the broadcaster One Nation wants to abolish, in the same fortnight it argued we are monocultural. You could not stage a cleaner rebuttal.

There is a deeper thing the squad exposed, and it is why the whole debate feels a decade out of date. When Hanson and the multiculturalism-has-failed crowd argue, they are arguing about a policy word from the 1980s: committees, funding lines, communities kept in their lanes. That is not what most people actually live. Multiculturalism was never mainly a policy. It is the food on the next table, the kids from four countries on one under-tens side, the mosque, the temple and the church on the same bus route, the choice to meet a neighbour at whatever depth you both want and no deeper, and it happens without a department. It has also moved past coexistence into something more active.

We are not living side by side so much as mixing, and the Socceroos are the proof.

They are not fifteen cultures politely sharing a jersey but one team that could only exist because those cultures met and made something none of them had alone. That is interculturalism, and the country is further into it than its politics has noticed. SBS did not invent any of it; what it does is let the country watch it happen.

None of this is new for the place. Long before the game filled Australian stadiums, SBS carried it, called for years by Les Murray, himself a refugee, who turned the world game into an Australian one. Sport did the work of social cohesion before we had the words for it, and SBS was the reason it reached the living room. A squad celebrating its own diversity is simply the latest verse of a very old song.

Which brings us to the part of the argument that is harder to see, and more important. Hanson’s case did not rise on its own. It rode a wave that has been building online for a year, through the anti-immigration marches of 2025 and 2026, amplified by a global far right that is very good at making a small crowd look like a nation. When those marches were held, police put the Sydney and Brisbane turnout at around twenty-one thousand. A tech billionaire told his hundreds of millions of followers it was a hundred and fifty thousand. False claims about migrant arrival numbers spread faster than the statistics agency could correct them. This is the environment we now argue in, where outrage is rewarded, numbers are inflated, and a manufactured version of the national mood is sold back to us as the real thing.

Then you walk outside, into workplaces running in six languages before morning tea, into streets where none of that fury is visible, into living rooms where families of every background are yelling at the same penalty shootout.

The online Australia and the lived Australia are not the same country, and the distance between them is where much of our politics now happens.

I watched that distance close, and I watched it online. But I watched it on SBS, which is the part I keep coming back to. A crowd at one of the games was chanting SBS, not for a player or a goal but naming out loud the thing a senator had just told them they did not need. It gave me chills, because the moment reached me not through the outrage feed but through the very institution she wanted gone.

Watching it, I felt something the online version of this country keeps trying to talk me out of. I felt like an everyday Australian too.

This is the distinction worth holding onto, and it is why abolition would be a mistake regardless of who proposed it. The problem Australia faces today is not a shortage of information but the opposite. In an environment this loud, the institutions that matter are not the ones shouting but the ones still capable of putting a whole country in front of the same thing at the same time and asking it to pay attention together.

Broadcasting is not the rare skill anymore. Convening is.

Football is only the most visible version of it. Eurovision, Insight, NITV, emergency health information carried in dozens of languages through a pandemic: they look like unrelated programming, but they are the same act in different registers, each one getting a fractured country to look at the same thing at the same time. In 2026 that is close to the scarcest thing there is.

A public institution is not there to tell a nation what to think but to keep the conversation possible. SBS has never had the power to decide what Australians conclude about one another, and it should not want it. What it has done, for fifty years, is protect the conditions under which we keep talking at all. It amplifies voices the market ignores and treats difference as something to be understood rather than performed.

Increasingly that reads less like a cultural program and more like democratic infrastructure, the kind you only notice when someone proposes to switch it off.

Like every institution worth having, SBS has been criticised from the left and the right, and it should be. The case for keeping it was never that it is perfect. It is that it has repeatedly proven its worth, which is a far stronger reason to defend something than affection.

We tend to talk about nation-building as though it happens through constitutions, elections and great speeches. Some of it does, but a good deal of it happens more quietly, when millions of people from different beginnings watch the same match, follow the same stories and, without quite noticing, recognise themselves in the same country.

SBS has spent fifty years making Australia visible to itself.

The Socceroos will not be there on Sunday. Most of us will be, in front of the same broadcaster a sitting senator wants to abolish, the one that has spent fifty years showing that gathering across difference is part of what being Australian means. I will be one of them, still half feeling like part of the team, and prouder of it now, in a way I could not have managed from the inside.

The goals that decide the tournament will be forgotten by winter. The ones that change how a country sees itself are harder to notice, and they last longer. SBS has been scoring those the whole time. Long before the final whistle.

Written listening to Nana Mouskouri sing in German. Interviewing her was one of the best hours I spent at SBS, which is either beside the point or exactly the point.

First published on Substack, 12 July 2026.