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.

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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

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towards international distribution that challenges the goal of modern nation-

building 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 policy-

induced 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 ‘cash-

for-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.

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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:

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• 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,

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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

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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
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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 anti-

competitive 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

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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 Liberal-

National 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.
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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
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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
industries
• Well-defined market boundaries
• Strong economies of scale leading
to dominant infrastructure providers
who regulate access to content
• Standardised and ‘mass appeal’
content
• Limits to international distribution; • User customisation of applications,
scope of service markets typically
domestic rather than international
• Disaggregation of infrastructure,
delivery mechanisms and
applications or content
• Blurring of traditional market
boundaries
• Reduced barriers to entry for new
players, and greater product and
service innovation
services and content
• Internationalisation of service
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

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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-per-

view, the less relevant content-based rules will become. Second, the significance
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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
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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
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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
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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

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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)

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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,

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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, sector-

specific 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’

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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,

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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
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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
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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 left-

reformist 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

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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-
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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).