Conclusion_phd_terry Flew

Conclusion

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Chapter Eight Conclusion

In this thesis, I have demonstrated three propositions. First, it is necessity to understand the institutional and policy frameworks through which creative and cultural practice occurs. In this thesis, I have been particularly interested in the relationship between collective forms of political agency and institutional structures of government and the corporate sector. I have also argued that application of such a problematic to the media introduces issues that did not sufficiently register in debates such as those surrounding cultural policy studies in Australia in the 1990s. One of these has been the particular nature of privately owned broadcast media as a form of ‘soft property’, and the resulting ambiguities of government regulation. The thesis has also addressed the emergence of distinctive institutional frameworks and policy settlements in national broadcasting systems, such as the ‘social contract’ in Australian broadcasting, that has connected privileged access to the airwaves to ‘pro-social’ policy obligations such as those around Australian content. The thesis has also analysed the implications of broadcast communications being potentially borderless, rather than based within nation-states. Media policy concerning broadcast program content has often constituted a form of ‘communicative boundary maintenance’, particularly in countries such as Australia that are especially open to content from the United States as the world’s principal audiovisual exporter.

85

The second proposition that I have demonstrated in this thesis has been the ongoing significance of citizenship discourses to Australian broadcast media policy. It was argued in Chapter One that citizenship discourses emerged out of the ‘public trust’ aspects of spectrum ownership, as well as the public nature of communications using broadcast media and their impact upon the formation of national and cultural identities. It was stressed that citizenship concerns were not exclusively associated with public broadcasting, but arose from both the public nature of communications undertaken by commercial media, and the ways in which regulatory and policy actions to shape the conduct of commercial broadcasters were legitimised, on the basis of their private appropriation of a public resource. Citizenship discourse possesses two parallel elements: a political element that stresses the right of public participation in decisions affecting the lives of citizens in a democratic society; and a national element that concerns the role played by cultural technologies and institutions in the ‘nationing’ of populations. Both aspects of citizenship discourse possess significant areas of tension and contradiction. In the case of political citizenship in liberal democracies, it is apparent that the freedom of citizens has been premised upon their governance as populations through what Michel Foucault refers to as the process of governmentality. Such processes create issues about the legitimacy of governmental authority, or what has variously been termed the ‘participation gap’ or the ‘democratic deficit’. In terms of national citizenship, broadcast media promote the uncoupling of space and time in communications, and an orientation

86 towards international distribution that challenges the goal of modern nationbuilding states to establish linkages between polity and culture within defined national territories.

The third proposition that I have presented in this thesis has been that, while there are underlying continuities in institutional structures and policy settlements in Australian broadcast media, there have at the same time been policy changes, and associated forms of policy activism, that have given distinctive inflections to the ‘social contract’ in Australian broadcasting. In the 1970s, following a period of sustained campaigning for the democratisation of media policy formation, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal sought to use the licence renewal process as the basis for an open-ended engagement between the public as citizens with commercial broadcasters as trustees of the broadcasting spectrum. While such initiatives came to grief fairly quickly, they nonetheless promoted more organised, collective and focused forms of media policy activism, that were effectively mobilised in the 1980s around the ABT’s inquiry into the establishment of Australian content regulations for commercial television.

In the 1990s, with the passing of the Broadcasting Services Act, such activism by public interest and media advocacy groups was to some extent sidelined by the neo-liberal policy discourses of ‘light touch’ regulation and ‘regulation by exception’. It is less apparent, however, that the promotion of competition and new services sought by the drafters of this legislation was

87 achieved, as the ‘Big Three’ commercial broadcasters thrived in the new environment and new service providers such as the pay TV sector faced policyinduced obstacles. Moreover, accusations existed that the new forms of regulation had failed to govern enough, as indicated by the concerns raised about so-called ‘co-regulatory’ arrangements towards broadcaster conduct in light of the ‘cashfor-comment’ scandals in commercial radio, or that they governed too much, as with the passing of new laws in the areas of censorship and program classification. The balance between ‘too much’ and ‘too little’ governance represents a classic problematic of liberal forms of government, and the basis of policy failure and continuous policy innovation.

Policy developments in Australia since the late 1980s increasingly occurred under the shadow of international trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the resulting disciplines being established by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Australian trade negotiators have approached such agreements from the perspective of Australia as a nation that is ‘pro-free-trade’, partly because of its status as a major primary products exporter, but also as a result of the ‘free trade consensus’ that had consolidated in Australian public policy since the 1970s, as the culture of ‘protection all round’ (Emy 1993) has been eschewed in favour of policy settings that promote a more open, dynamic and internationally competitive economy. Interestingly, this agenda has been pursued more strongly by Labor governments since the 1970s, which may reflect the ‘heretical’ view of the Australian Labor Party as the party most

88 likely to promote comprehensive economic reform on the basis of its lack of ties to particular corporate interests (Catley 1996; Latham 1998).

This thesis will conclude with consideration of three current issues that impact upon the analysis developed in this thesis. First, there is a discussion of the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into Australian broadcasting, which marks the most sustained use of the competition policy framework to critique the regulatory quid pro quos that it believes have governed Australian broadcasting policy, and now constitute a barrier to the realisation of consumer and national policy objectives from media convergence and the information technology revolution. Second, there is a discussion of the contradictory elements of Australian approaches to liberalising international trade in audiovisual services, that result from the diverse range of policy discourses and policy cultures through which such actions are apprehended. Finally, there is consideration of the implications of media convergence, and the further development of media as a convergent services industry. Further research questions arising from the analysis developed in this thesis are also considered, around the nature of global media markets, globalisation and questions of governance, creative industries, media and the future of citizenship, and intellectuals and the policy process.

89

Revisiting Competition Policy: The Productivity Commission’s Inquiry into Australian Broadcasting

The growing significance of competition policy principles to broadcast media policy was a worldwide trend in the 1990s, as the focus of regulation shifted from maintaining the viability of individual media organisations and regulating their conduct to promoting a more competitive process (OECD 1993). It was argued in Chapter Six that the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 was premised upon an in-principle commitment to making broadcast media policy consistent with competition policy and microeconomic reform principles. However, in practice, a range of restrictions remained that ensured the viability and profitability of the commercial free-to-air broadcasting sector, seen by many as the condition for guaranteeing Australian content and other ‘pro-social’ programming regulations such as those involving children’s programming.

In that light, the decision of the Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, to ask the Productivity Commission, in accordance with the Commonwealth government’s Legislation Review Schedule, to inquire and report into the operations of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 and related legislation, was a very important one.

Under the Terms of Reference of the Inquiry, the

Productivity Commission was required to:

90 •

Advise on practical courses of action to improve competition, efficiency and the interests of consumers in broadcasting services;

•

Focus particular attention on balancing the social, cultural and economic dimensions of the public interest; and

•

Take into account the technological change in broadcasting services, particularly the phenomenon of convergence (Productivity Commission 1999: xii).

It was also required to consider broadcasting legislation in light of both its own guidelines under the Productivity Commission Act 1998, and the broader parameters for regulation assessment outlined in the Competition Principles Arrangement (CPA), agreed to by the Commonwealth, state and territory governments in 1995. Of most significance was the requirement, under the CPA, that ‘any legislation that restricts competition should be retained only if the benefits to the community as a whole outweigh the costs and if the objectives can be met only by restricting competition’.

The Productivity Commission’s Report was highly critical of the Broadcasting Services Act, which was considered to be outdated, administratively complex, contrary to competition policy and other public policy principles, and an inadequate base from which to respond to the challenges of digitisation, technological convergence and new media services. In particular, it found that the legislation was inconsistent with national competition policy in a number of areas,

91 including Section 28 of the Broadcasting Services Act that sets a three-station limit on commercial broadcast television services in a licence area, and the operation of the anti-siphoning list which restricted access for subscription broadcasters to various sports events. The argument that entry restrictions were a necessary condition for enabling the commercial broadcasting industry to meet cultural policy objectives, such as Australian content and children’s programming standards, was believed to be an unconvincing justification for maintaining these anti-competitive arrangements:

It is questionable whether the restrictions on entry are a necessary trade-off for imposing such obligations on the commercial broadcasters. Few industries enjoy entry restrictions to compensate for public obligations … All industries must meet the requirements of various codes, standards and regulations … It is not clear why the broadcasting industry is marked for special treatment and compensated for meeting its obligations. Higher costs do not justify restrictions on entry. (Productivity Commission 2000: 319)

The Productivity Commission argued that such restrictions were part of ‘a history of political, technical, industrial, economic and social compromises’ in Australian broadcasting policy, leaving ‘a legacy of quid pro quos [that] has created a policy framework that is inward looking, anti-competitive and restrictive’ (Productivity Commission 2000: 5). The Commission’s arguments against

92 perpetuating these quid pro quos, or what has been described in this thesis as the social contract between broadcasters, regulators, the production sector and public interest groups, were strengthened by two related arguments. The first was the observation that, in spite of production industry arguments for continuation of such regulatory arrangements (eg. SPAA 1999), the independent production sector actually got very little from the arrangement in comparison with the broadcast licensees. The Productivity Commission drew attention to the criticisms raised by production industry groups such as SPAA, ASDA, the Australian Writers Guild and the MEAA, that unequal bargaining power between the broadcast networks and the content production industry had led to program licence fees remaining static through the 1990s, in spite of high industry profitability and station licence values Second, the Commission noted that the $105.1 million spent by commercial broadcasters on the program areas that are governed by content quotas - Australian drama, Australian children’s programs, and documentaries - accounted for only 14 per cent of total commercial broadcaster expenditure on programming, and 5 per cent of the broadcasters’ total expenditure of $1.94 billion in 1996/97. This cost was in no way commensurate to the benefits derived from restricted access to commercial broadcast licences, calculated at $347.2 million in Sydney and $201.2 million in Melbourne (Productivity Commission 1999: 143, 147).

The Productivity Commission was particularly concerned about the extension of quid pro quo arrangements into the digital broadcasting environment. The plan developed by the Australian Federal government for the transition to

93 digital

broadcasting,

which

mandated

high

definition

TV,

prohibited

multichannelling by commercial broadcasters, required analogue and digital simulcasting until 2008, set restrictions upon the development of datacasting and interactive services, and extended the prohibition upon new commercial broadcast licences until 2006, was seen by the Commission as anti-competitive and deeply flawed. In extending the logic of trade offs and protection of incumbent broadcasters into a media domain that was likely to be profoundly different, the Commission believed that government policy had placed ‘considerable and arbitrary limitations on the innovative, interactive and additional services made possible by the technology of digital transmission’ (Productivity Commission 2000: 256). The current conversion plan was believed to generate outcomes which reduced the efficiency of spectrum management; created complex, artificial and arbitrary restrictions upon the development of new services; restricted the diversity of services available to consumers; reduced the likelihood of developing new and innovative media services in Australia; and maintained an anticompetitive arrangement which unduly benefited incumbent broadcasters. The Commission argued that, in an environment of pervasive technological change and uncertainty about the impact of new services:

It is not the time to add more quid pro quo bricks to the wall, but to take the opportunity to design a structure to serve Australians better. Greater competition, less regulation, spectrum licensing reforms, and the rapid

94 release of spectrum are the best means of achieving this objective. (Productivity Commission 2000: 254).

The Productivity Commission’s Report has, as of mid-2000, had little impact upon the conduct of broadcast media policy in Australia. The LiberalNational Party government’s Broadcasting Services Amendment (Digital Television and Datacasting) Bill 2000 was passed in June 2000 with minor amendments related primarily to giving national broadcasters the capacity to develop multichannel services, but with the three-station rule and strict limits on datacasting remaining in place. O’Regan (2000) has, however, cautioned against concluding that the Productivity Commission’s intervention into these debates was a failure. Noting that the Productivity Commission defined its role as an ‘agenda-setting’ and an ‘educative’ one, he observes that the Commission insists that it has ‘the luxury of the long view’, and that its reports ‘are not be judged in a two- to three-year departmental and political cycle, but in a nine-year timeframe’ (O’Regan 2000: 6). What the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry into Broadcasting has forced on to the debate cultures of broadcast media policy is the question of competition policy, and the question of whether critics of current broadcast media policy arrangements should support measures to promote greater competition in the broadcasting sector. To this end, the Commission used the context of pervasive technological change and media convergence to give a sense of urgency to these questions, and to lever dissatisfaction with the status quo.

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Contradictions of the Australian Position on the GATS and Audiovisual Services

The globalisation of Australia’s film and television industries in the 1980s and 1990s had contradicatory impacts. It stimulated investment and growth in the audiovisual sector, including the production of high-budget films such as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Mission: Impossible II. At the same time, organisations such as the Australian Film Commission and the Film Finance Corporation have expressed concerns that ‘ownership and control of the film and television industry is becoming increasingly concentrated into the hands of a shrinking number of global corporations which have the market power and international reach to reap the benefits of the digital revolution’, and that the possibility of a distinctively Australian film and television sector was being eroded through such developments (AFC/AFFC 1999: 21). As a result, the ‘industry’ aspects of film and TV production were being uncoupled from their ‘cultural’ aspects, and an economic structure was emerging that would be increasingly driven by decisions made outside of Australia. Such organisations therefore supported proposals for a cultural exemption or a nw international cultural instrument in the ‘Millennium Round’ of GATS negotiations through the WTO.

96 These tensions are likely to intensify over the next decade. The free trade consensus established in the 1970s and 1980s continues to be a shared position among Australia’s mainstream political parties, partly because Australia’s primary industries benefit from free international trade and because policies of domestic defence for manufacturing are seen to have failed, but also because many Australian service industries have an interest in progressive trade liberalisation, either because they are significant exporters in these sectors (eg. education or tourism), or because domestic policy arrangements have already been significantly liberalised (eg. telecommunications).1 At the same time, given the strong and politically bipartisan support that has existed for cultural policy measures such as Australian content regulations for commercial television as instruments for building national cultural citizenship, and it is likely that articles of the GATS and adjudications of the WTO that threaten such arrangements would attract considerable domestic political opposition.

In this context, the question of regionalism has also become more, not less, important in an era of multilateral trade agreements. It is apparent that the hostile nature of the Project Blue Sky case stemmed not so much from the actual threat presented by New Zealand-produced programming in Australian audiovisual markets, but rather from a fear that any dismantling of local content requirements could promote a ‘race to the bottom’, with competitive dismantling of domestic content regulations in order to attract footloose international capital. It has been argued in this thesis that, as the overwhelmingly dominant partner in

97 such trade relations, Australia has little to fear from trans-Tasman trade liberalisation if it is not the ‘thin end of the wedge’ for abandoning local content regulations. As the issue of bilateralism will not disappear, governments in both Australia and New Zealand should be considering opportunities for regulatory harmonisation and establishing bases for mutually beneficial trading relations in the audiovisual sector.2 A principled bilateralism is likely to provide a better position from which both Australia and New Zealand can strengthen the focus upon the specificities of culture, rather than a perceived opposition to multilateralism per se, that is not consistent with the economic dynamics of the Australian film and television production sectors.

Media Convergence and Convergent Service Industries

The phenomena of digitisation and convergence are, as has been widely noted, the central elements of the early twenty-first century media environment. Convergence across the once discrete fields of computing and information technology, telecommunications, and broadcast and print media has already occurred at the levels of delivery networks, institutional alliances, and new industries and services (Miles 1997; Barr 2000). In the early twenty-first century, the move that is taking place from the convergence of IT, telecommunications and media, towards next-generation convergence, where the implications of convergence extend into the entire services sector, including financial, retail, community, health and education services (CSM 1999: 5-6). Such convergence is

98 associated with structural convergence, or the shift from traditional service industry models to convergent service industry models. The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) has noted some interesting

differences

between

traditional

service

industries,

such

as

telecommunications and broadcasting, and the convergent service industry model:

Table 8.1 Traditional and Convergent Service Industry Models

Traditional Service Industry Model Convergent Service Industry Model • Distinct and vertically integrated • Disaggregation of infrastructure, industries delivery mechanisms and applications or content • Well-defined market boundaries • Blurring of traditional market • Strong economies of scale leading boundaries to dominant infrastructure providers • Reduced barriers to entry for new who regulate access to content players, and greater product and • Standardised and ‘mass appeal’ service innovation content • User customisation of applications, • Limits to international distribution; services and content scope of service markets typically • Internationalisation of service domestic rather than international markets, especially where services are delivered electronically Source: DCITA 2000.

In traditional service industries, national regulators are able to control service providers on an industry-by-industry basis by controlling entry to domestic infrastructure markets. Content was able to be regulated through the conditions attached to access to scarce electromagnetic spectrum resources within

99 the domestic market. By contrast, convergent service industry models are seen as being characterised by fluidity of content and services, disaggregation of the infrastructure from the content, and internationalised forms of network-based content distribution. The challenge arising in such an environment is how to meet cultural policy objectives such as Australian content, children’s programming and diversity of content where the traditional mechanism of indirectly achieving content outcomes through the regulation of industry and market structures may be les applicable than they have been in the period from the 1960s to the present.

The central policy issues arsing from convergence for broadcast media policy so far have been the conversion from analogue to digital television, and the question of rules for datacasting. Characteristically, technological questions have so far predominated, with questions related to content in the new media environment being relegated to ‘second-order’ issues. The question of securing public interest obligations in an era of digital broadcasting has, however, been widely considered in the United States and Britain (Advisory Committee 1998; Firestone and Garmer 1998; Graham 1998). Two conclusions are apparent from this literature. The first is that rules-based interventions such as Australian content or children’s programming quotas are likely to be less effective over time, and their effectiveness in the new environment will be inversely related to the development of new types of service; the more that efficiencies in spectrum use lead to new types of service, such as themed channels, datacasting and pay-perview, the less relevant content-based rules will become. Second, the significance

100 of a well-funded public broadcasting institution, oriented toward quality programming, cultural and community development, political and national citizenship, and responding to areas of market failure in the commercial broadcasting sector, becomes more rather than less significant in the digital media environment, even if it is also the case that more channels and services enhance viewer choice. Graham (1998) argues that issues relating to gaps in the broadcast media environment increasingly require qualitative judgments by broadcasters rather than formal rules regulated by government agencies, because the effective achievement of such pro-social goals requires an organisational culture where there is a commitment to such goals, rather than to their evasion or a reluctant commitment to minimum compliance.3

There are important interconnections between competition policy, international trade law and media convergence in terms of their impact upon domestic broadcast media policy. The OECD envisages that that ‘with the increasing number and variety of network-based services, competition policy … needs to play a much greater role in the regulation of audiovisual content’ (OECD 1999: 12), while international trade theorists argue that the international harmonisation of competition policies and the relationship between international trade policies and domestic competition policies will ‘emerge as one of the major new issues on the trade policy agenda in the years ahead’ (Trebilcock and Howse 1995: 124). While the Productivity Commission chose not to refer to international trade agreements in its Final Report, Recommendation 11.4 of its Report for an

101 independent public inquiry into Australian audiovisual and cultural policy to be completed by 2004 explicitly refers to the problems likely to arise with current Australian content regulations in the context of convergence and the emergence of new services:

In the long term, the current system of Australian content regulation is likely to become unsustainable as a means of addressing the social and cultural objectives of broadcasting. An alternative, technologically neutral policy approach should be developed - one which will not impede future media innovation or convergence, and which is well integrated into the audiovisual industry and cultural policy more broadly. (Productivity Commission 2000: 420)

The End of the Social Contract?

The powerful forces of national competition policy, international trade law and media convergence are likely to render the ‘social contract’ in Australian commercial television, where industry protection is exchanged for content regulations, untenable. At the same time, an important lesson of the 1990s was that claims about the immanent ‘death of broadcasting’ can be premature (Given 1998). Australia’s commercial television networks continue to be powerful and profitable economic entities, powerful political entities, and to have invested heavily across new media from their base in ‘old’ media. Moreover, for all the

102 bright talk about media abundance and networked interactivity, there remain major unresolved questions concerning culture, citizenship and the role of public policy in Australian television. The three major issues that remain unresolved are:

•

How to secure levels and types of Australian programming that meet cultural development objectives as well as sustaining a viable audiovisual production industry in an era of media globalisation and disciplines under the GATS that set limits upon the capacity to use public policy to deliver competitive advantages to domestic producers;

•

How to guarantee the availability of a diverse range of program genres in formats that are widely accessible to all sections of the community, particularly in the areas of children’s programming and local production;

•

How to ensure that media distributors have some degree of accountability to the public as citizens in their use of public resources for commercial purposes.

A further issue arises about the politics of media reform. It has been argued in this thesis that the ‘public trust’ doctrine of commercial broadcasters’ use of the public airwaves provided the basis for ongoing activism in the policy process by media reform and advocacy groups, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. Such capacity for intervention by organised interest groups was diluted significantly with the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, but it is apparent that such legislation been

103 neither consistent in its neo-liberal orientation towards consumer sovereignty, nor have the co-regulatory regimes it has promoted sufficiently addressed public concerns about the conduct of media organisations.

A major policy issue is how promote Australian content across all sectors of Australian television in ways that are not premised upon the regulation of market entry into the commercial free-to-air broadcasting sector. Strategies are needed for the production and distribution of local content that do not hinge upon the restriction of competition or upon the restriction of development of new technologies and services, and which are not at odds with national goals of Australia becoming an ‘information economy’. Evidence is emerging that the existence of a largely unregulated pay TV sector is proving to be of benefit to particular program genres such as documentary (Cunningham, 2000), while it is increasingly apparent that program quotas in areas such as children’s programming have not prevented a plummet in licence fees paid by networks to producers (Aisbett, 1999). In this light, it may be worth having another look at schemes to support local production that are not premised upon a binary opposition between a regulated commercial free-to-air and an unregulated pay TV sector, and to consider how local production can be stimulated by subsidies and financial incentives as well as quotas. There is also a major need to consider the current and possible future roles of national public broadcasters in the sustaining of a viable local television production industry. The relationship between funding of national public broadcasters and activity in the local audiovisual production

104 industry, across a range of program genres, is an issue that needs particular attention.

Further Research Questions

Among the many issues arising from this study, five questions can be identified as requiring further research. One is the nature of media and cultural markets, and the relationships between investment, production, distribution and consumption, both domestically and internationally, in these sectors. It has been observed in this thesis that, while there exists an important body of literature that seeks to analyse the nature and dynamics of the cultural industries, there also exists a strong tendency to dismiss such concerns as products of a misguided ‘economic rationalism’, or to dichotomise media and cultural industries between the commercial and state-subsidised sectors. Such thinking has been shown by leading social-democratic theorists such as Hugh Stretton (1987) and Alec Nove (1983) to be inadequate at a general level, with Stretton arguing that:

Wherever they work as they should, especially where they work without generating undue inequalities of wealth and power, Left thinkers should value them [markets] as highly as any privatiser does. Indeed, more highly: the Left has such necessary tasks for government, and so much to lose from inefficient or cumbersome bureaucracy, that it should economise bureaucracy every way it can. (Stretton, 1987: 27)

105

Thinking that dichotomises the relationship between markets and government administration is likely to prove even more problematic as there is a shift in cultural policy away from the subsidisation of the arts and artists, towards the development of infrastructural support for the creative industries. Charles Leadbetter has defined creative industries as those cultural industries such as music, entertainment and fashion that are:

driven … not by trained professionals but cultural entrepreneurs who make the most of other people’s talent and creativity. In creative industries, large organisations provide access to the market, through retailing and distribution, but the creativity comes from a pool of independent content producers. (Leadbetter 1999: 49)

While this way of thinking has not yet strongly developed in broadcasting, it is very much characteristic of ‘new economy’ areas of the cultural sector, such as games, software and Web site development. A convergence between these modes of production and distribution with the traditional, ‘Fordist’ models of industries such as broadcasting is anticipated by organisations such as the Creative Industries Task Force developed in Britain in 1998. The Task Force, developed by the UK Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport, links television, radio and film in with a diverse range of industry sectors, ranging from other areas of media such as advertising, music, performing arts and publishing, to fields such as fashion,

106 crafts, design, interactive leisure software, and architecture (Creative Industries Task Force 1998). It is also consistent with the move towards digitisation and convergence, as there is increasingly an uncoupling of content from its delivery platforms, and policies towards the content industries are likely to differ from those towards the distributors of content, as is the case in computing and telecommunications (OECD 1998; DCITA 2000).

Future research will also have to engage not only with the internationalisation of media industries and media markets, but also with the internationalisation of media governance. There are mutually reinforcing elements between competition policy, international trade law and media convergence that are moving media regulation away from frameworks that are national, sectorspecific and discretionary, towards frameworks that are generic, compatible with international trade law and legally binding. Such trends can be seen as pointing towards the internationalisation of media governance, where domestic laws, policies and regulatory frameworks are developed with at least one eye on their compatibility with binding bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral trade agreements. In this respect, the significance of Australian broadcasting regulations to multilateral trade agreements such as the GATS may have less to do with the compatibility of existing legislation to this framework, and more to do with how the existence of the GATS framework will shape future forms of broadcasting regulation. It is in this respect that the proposal to shift GATS negotiations from a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘a la carte’ approach to a ‘top-down’ or ‘across-the-board’

107 approach, where compliance with the GATS framework exists unless specified otherwise, impinges significantly upon the future of Australian content policies.

The relationship between media and citizenship clearly requires further consideration. It has been argued that citizenship is both a political and a cultural phenomenon. Citizenship has also been a national phenomenon, where individuals become part of a society that provides certain rights in exchange for particular obligations, but where there are ongoing processes, that are primarily cultural, where a ‘nationing’ of citizens takes place in order to develop a binding sense of membership of and commitment to an identified nation-state sand national-political community. I have argued in this thesis that, in relation to national citizenship and questions of national culture, there has been considerable analysis of the role played by media in such processes of identity formation. Work on the role played by print media in the formation of nations, histories of public broadcasting, analyses of the implications of international media economics for the maintenance of distinctive national broadcast media systems, and critiques of the dominant structure of international communications flows have all played an important role in clarifying the issues involved in the relationship between media and citizenship.

One point that is apparent is that the framework of strong citizenship, where there is strong congruence between culture and polity, is not an experience that is characteristic of most national populations outside of Europe. As a result,

108 accounts developed from the metropolitan centres tend to overstate the crisis of culture, citizenship and the nation-state that is presented by economic, political and cultural globalisation. In countries like Australia, the development of national television cultures has always occurred, as Tom O’Regan observes, ‘at the intersection of international, national, regional and local scales’, in a wider context where ‘limited and shared sovereignty is nothing new’ (O’Regan 1993: xiv, 101). ‘Settler’ or ‘new’ countries such as Australia have been characterised by a high level of permeability to imported economic, political and cultural influences, as well as high levels of migration from a wide range of countries A paradoxical consequence, observed by Castles and Davidson (2000) is that the difficulties such societies face in asserting national sovereignty and a distinctive national identity (‘strong’ citizenship) has enabled them to be more open to multiculturalism, on the basis of the weak ties between a dominant conception of the national culture and notions of citizenship and identity. Debates about the relationship between culture and citizenship need to give greater consideration of those societies characterised by a historically ‘weak’ form of citizenship, and whether they have proved more amenable to discourses of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism than those societies where a ‘strong’ congruence between political, national and cultural citizenship has prevailed.

The relationship between media and political citizenship has not been strongly explored in the academic literature. The dominant academic literature on citizenship (eg. Heater 1990; Davidson 1997) has been reluctant to attribute any

109 significance to the means of mass communication to the formation of citizens. This is in spite of the awareness in the field that the ‘ideal’ models of citizenship are, in complex, modern and industrialised societies, ‘mediated’ not only through such institutional forms as representative democracy, but by technologies and cultural practices associated with ‘mediated interaction’ between government and citizens. Within media studies, the debate has too often been polarised between a Panglossian vision of a media in liberal-capitalist societies that serves its citizens because it is free of government controls, and a ‘tragic’ account of such media as inevitably corrupted by corporate power and commercialism, that presents such media as being in absolute contrast to the fading vision of public broadcasting which fearlessly and wisely serves civil society and the public sphere. This thesis has aimed to show that, in terms of political as well as national forms of citizenship, commercial broadcast media matter. Moreover, they matter not simply in terms of their reach to wide sections of the population, but in terms of how the policy and regulatory frameworks within which they operate influence their conduct as broadcasters and, hence, their role in citizen formation.

An issue that has been an animating concern of this thesis has been whether broadcast media audiences as citizens have rights in shaping the conduct of commercial broadcasters, and how such citizenship capacities are best organised and facilitated through the media policy formation process. In the early 2000s, such questions are asked in the context of technological, structural and policy shifts that may mean the gradual demise of the one-to-many modes of

110 communication on which broadcasting regulation has historically been premised, as well as the ability to influence the conduct through policy of identifiable industry players within a definable national space by industry-specific regulatory agencies. It has been agued in this thesis that, while the parameters in which such issues are addressed have changed as the conditions underpinning the ‘social contract’ between broadcasters, regulatory agencies and media policy reformers have changed, the concerns that motivate the formation of such institutional settlements remain. These concerns include: ensuring satisfactory levels of locally produced broadcast media material in the context of global media economics; guarantees of program diversity; the availability of locally produced material across a range of program genres and delivery platforms; and the capacity for citizens to have input into the uses of media as influential public resources.

A final issue raised in this thesis has been the relationship of intellectuals to the media policy process. The cultural policy studies debate in Australia in the 1990s made a series of telling points about the importance of media and cultural studies academics engaging with decision-making cultural institutions, and successfully linked these arguments to the ongoing capacity to engage in leftreformist cultural politics, which has been the historical focus of media and cultural studies. It has been argued in this thesis that such interventions were also important in drawing attention to the network of activist-intellectuals operating in state agencies, community and public interest organisations, and media and cultural practitioners, and the scope for academics to contribute to important

111 public policy debates that would affect cultural and creative practice in Australia. An important observation made in this thesis has been that the traditional understanding of the ‘cultural policy debate’ as primarily driven by concerns within the interdisciplinary fields of media and cultural studies is mistaken. An equally important trigger of thinking about media and cultural policy in Australia was the need to devise new advocacy strategies for policies that support a national cultural infrastructure, such as Australian content regulations for commercial television, while recognising the limitations of traditional ‘cultural nationalist’ forms of advocacy in light of the critique of claims about the uniqueness of Australian national culture.

Such discussions in the 2000s will need to take account of three developments. The first is digitisation and convergence, and the ways in which broadcast media will lose its distinctiveness, and become part of a spectrum of convergent services industries, characterised by widened consumer choice, greater user-pays access to content and services, and the uncoupling of content and services from delivery platforms and infrastructure. In such an environment, concerns will shift from protectionist measures such as content quotas, towards measures to stimulate innovative local content across delivery platforms that cater to increasingly diverse audiences and communities. Second, the linking of media to the spectrum of creative industries will mean an increasingly significant role for the commercial sector in the creation and delivery of cultural content. It has been argued in this thesis that dichotomies between the commercial and state-

112 supported sectors have been unhelpful in understanding the role of media in citizen-formation, and activists in the media policy process will be increasingly engaging with private sector organisations as well as public regulatory agencies. Finally, the association of citizenship with nation-states may be changing, with the combined forces of globalisation, multiculturalism, new technologies such as the Internet, and what John Hartley (1999) has termed a trend towards ‘D-I-Y citizenship’, or the formation of identities as a kind of cultural bricolage. If these trends do come to pass, intellectuals and policy activists will be less able to speak on behalf of people as citizens within identifiable national spaces. It has been shown in this thesis that, even in a context of dramatic technological and structural change, the contribution of academics to the debate cultures that inform Australian broadcast media policy will continue to be important, and the role which intellectuals have played in the initiation of diverse forms of policy activism in the broadcast media sector provides useful signposts for such engagements.

1

Support for a ‘cultural exemption’ or an equivalent initiative would involve Australian trade negotiators taking a position that was in opposition to the United States - a position that is not characteristic of Australia’s international diplomatic history - and aligning itself with countries with which it has not had historically strong ties, such as France and Canada. An Australian alignment with France is particularly unlikely in light of past opposition to French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, while the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy is of particular concern to Australia as a leading agricultural exporter and founder of the ‘Cairns Group’ of nations seeking liberalisation of world agricultural trade. 2 The election of a Labor government in New Zealand in 2000 has promoted a rethink of previous policies of dismantling all forms of national cultural protection, and there is discussion about the possibility of reintroducing some for of local content quotas. A problem will, however, be the fact that New Zealand has previously signed away the right to such exemptions from the disciplines of the GATS (Lealand 2000). 3 In the United States, commercial free-to-air broadcasters are obliged by the FCC to broadcast three hours of children’s programming. It has often been noted that compliance with this rule is frequently poor, often involving adding on educational materials to cartoons and sports programs (Geller, 1998).