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Conclusion to Part Two

Part Two of this thesis had tracked both continuity and change in Australian

broadcast media policy from the 1970s to the 1990s. The major continuity has

involved the institutional framework and policy settlement that has been termed

the ‘social contract’ in this thesis. The ‘social contract’ is an arrangement whereby

the public nature of the airwaves provides the formal basis for state regulation of

broadcaster conduct, and the highly profitable nature of the television industry

and its oligopolistic market structure provide the substantive basis on which

surplus profits can be redistributed to ‘pro-social’ forms of programming, most

notably in the areas of Australian content and children’s programming. This has

given those groups concerned with this regulatory quid pro quo, such as

representatives of the Australian media production industries, a strong interest in

regulations which guarantee a share for locally produced content in the domestic

market. This has been aligned to cultural nationalist discourses which propose

that, as the most popular cultural medium, television has a significant role in

representing the nation to its people through its program content. Through

measures such as Australian content regulations, the amount of Australian

programming on the commercial broadcasting networks has grown significantly

from the 1960s to the present, despite Australia having a broadcast media system

which, on the basis of linguistic and cultural proximity to the United States and

Britain, the world’s leading exporters of audiovisual content, is among the most

trade-exposed nations in the world in the area of broadcast television.

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The late 1980s saw two important shifts in the dominant discourses of

Australian public policy, which were to have important impacts upon the conduct

of broadcast media regulation and the capacity of media reformers to participate

in the media policy process. First, with the creation of the Department of

Transport and Communications (DOTAC) as a ‘mega-department’ in 1987,

broadcasting policy was increasingly a subset of wider policies of microeconomic

reform, aimed at making all Australian industries, particularly those that were

involved in the provision of basic infrastructure to other sectors of the economy

and had been subject to high levels of public ownership and/or state regulation,

more responsive to the commercial marketplace. The second important shift in

broadcast media policy in the 1990s is the growing importance of economic

analysis to policy discourse in Australia. While such a shift is often attributed to a

uniquely Australian contamination of the policy process by ‘economic

rationalism’, it can in fact be seen as indicative of global trends towards ‘neo-

liberal’ or ‘post-Fordist’ modes of governance, whereby the will to ‘govern

without governing society’ (Rose 1996: 61) achieves new forms of expression

through the extension of principles of economy upon the practice of government.

The development of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 through DOTAC

is illustrative of many of these elements, particularly in the desire for ‘light touch’

regulation and ‘regulation by exception’, where the role of regulatory agencies is

shifted from one of being detailed monitors of the conduct of existing industry
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participants to being informed forward planners of regulatory conduct in the

context of continuous change as a result of new technologies, new services, and

new types of industry participant. New forms of regulation would also need to

address the globalisation of media as a service industry, where the long-standing

assumption that broadcasters operated within a defined and regulated national

space would be challenged by the capacity of new delivery technologies, such as

cable and satellite, to deliver audiovisual materials across the boundaries defined

by nation-states.

The outcomes of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 reveal a far more

mixed picture. One clear consequence of the change in legislation, policy

discourse and institutional practices in the 1990s was that the scope for public

interest and media advocacy groups to be involved in policy became considerably

more attenuated and discretionary. While liberal-pluralist models of the policy

process saw such involvement as providing a necessary source of countervailing

power in the context of industry concentration, the emergent neo-liberal

approaches saw such involvement as symptomatic of a sector where limits upon

the full functioning of markets had led to the emergence of interest-group

coalitions, and a ‘political market’ that operated to the detriment of consumer

interests. The claim that interest groups could or should ‘speak for’ media

audiences was thus increasingly questioned by government agencies.

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It is less apparent, however, that the new regulatory regime promoted

greater competition in broadcasting, or indeed that it depoliticised and simplified

regulatory processes. The period from 1992 to 1998 saw commercial

broadcasters, and particularly the capital city networks, earn profits that were well

above national averages, and barriers to entry for new competitors remained under

Section 28 of the Broadcasting Services Act, which prevented the operation of

more than three commercial broadcasters in a licence area, despite the lack of

transparency in the relationship between such economic protection and the

realisation of public interest outcomes. Further, the establishment of pay

television, which constituted the principal competitor to commercial broadcasting

in this period, was delayed by failings in the policy process. The ABA’s emphasis

on co-regulation and more discretionary dealings with the commercial

broadcasters, while welcomed in the sector itself, has also been subject to

criticism, particularly in the wake of the ‘cash-for-comment’ scandal in

commercial radio, and the failure of self-regulatory codes to prevent such

unethical practices from developing. Finally, the political manoeuvrings around

censorship and program classification do not point to a depoliticisation of this

potentially contentious area of media content regulation; rather, what has emerged

is conflict within government, between those who see the implications of media

diversification as necessitating a certain degree of ‘letting go’ of control in this

area, and those who see this as requiring intensified efforts to morally manage

populations through regulating access to problematic forms of media content.

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