halve the inverted pyramid management structure and associated excessive remuneration and I reckon the current spotlight may extinguish.
The problem with cuts in the public service, be it the ABC or any other form of PS, is that it tends to make this problem worse rather than better. They cut programs (by which I mean activities in a generic sense not necessarily TV / radio programs as such although they'd be in the mix in the case of the ABC) and cut staff who actually do something useful but the managers remain. End result = even fewer actual workers per manager employee, thus making the organisation less efficient not more efficient.
Even worse, with fewer staff and fewer activities to actually manage, the managers then start coming up with all sorts of weird and not so wonderful ideas to justify their own positions. In short, business complains about the amount of "red tape" imposed on them (a valid point) but the amount of internal red tape within some government departments is beyond ridiculous.
Once the cuts come in, you end up with things like staff with 25 years experience who used to manage, say, a $1 million program and who did nothing wrong now needing one, two or even three levels of management sign off in order to spend $20. And getting such approval tends to mean a written report or at least an email filled with facts and figures that takes hours to write. It then becomes impossible to actually get the job done, since what used to take a few minutes (just buy the $20 item) now takes hours or even weeks worth of time.
I'm not anti-PS or anti-ABC by any means, but the approach to cuts in the PS over the years has a been a seriously flawed one. Ask a "front line" worker in any of these places and I'd bet that at least two thirds would love to get things done more efficiently and cheaply. It's the bureaucracy and endless rules created by unnecessary managers which slow everything down to snail's pace.
What's really needed is a proper review into how these places ought to operate and be structured. Just cutting x% compounds the problem if there's no direction as to where the cuts will be targeted since those deciding where to cut internally are unlikely to put their job on the list of things no longer required.
As for the ABC, it's an important organisation and needs to remain publicly funded to a decent level in my view. That doesn't preclude efficiency, but it's one of those things that's not intended to ever be profitable as that's not its' purpose. The last thing we need is a government "commercialising" it with a view to privatisation (and with practically everything else sold off, I wouldn't be surprised if this is proposed at some point).