Assigned actions

When we consider your application to allocate, renew or transfer your community broadcasting licence, we may identify areas where your operations should be improved. If we approve the application, we’ll let you know about these by assigning you actions to complete.

By making you aware of potential problems and how you could address them early, we aim to support stronger industry-wide compliance and reduce the likelihood of contraventions requiring us to use our formal compliance or enforcement powers under the Broadcasting Services Act 1992.

Having an action assigned to you does not mean we’ve made a compliance finding against you, or that you have broken any rules in a code or law.

We may assign you an action to address an area for improvement if it relates closely to an obligation under legislation or the Community Radio Broadcasting Codes of Practice 2008. 

We may give you a due date to complete the action and to let us know that it has been done. Whether we give you a due date may depend on how urgent or important the assigned action is to help you comply with the relevant law or code.

If we do not give you a due date, we may check if you completed the action the next time you apply to renew or transfer your licence, or if we receive a relevant complaint.

An example of a possible assigned action is: Take steps to identify the needs of the community in the licence area. This action would help you comply with the licence condition for community broadcasters to continue representing their community interest.

It is important for you to complete all actions that are assigned to you. They are relevant to your obligations under laws or codes as a community broadcaster.

1. If you do not complete an assigned action the first time that we give it to you, we may assign the same action to you again.
2. The second time we assign you the same action, we will give you a new due date. 
3. If you do not complete the repeated assigned action by the new due date, we will publish a notification about it on this page of our website.

The information published on our website may include:

• the name of your organisation
• the date we gave you the repeated assigned action
• what the repeated assigned action was about.

We will remove this notification from our website once the action is completed.

If you give us an explanation for why you could not complete the repeated assigned action and we consider that it is a reasonable explanation (for example, a natural disaster or other emergency), we will consider not publishing on our website the information about you not completing the assigned action.

If you have any questions about assigned actions or would like to know if you have any outstanding assigned actions, please email us at communitybroadcasting@acma.gov.au.