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Chapter Five
Content Regulation and Cultural Policy: The
ABT’s Australian Content Inquiry 1983-1989
Background to the ABT Australian Content Inquiry
The idea that Australian broadcast media should contain Australian content has
existed for as long as the media themselves. As communications technologies
with considerable public reach and cultural significance, it has been a widely held
view that Australian broadcast media - and Australian television in particular -
should utilise local creative talent, be under predominantly Australian ownership
and control, and contribute to the development of national culture. In the case of
commercial broadcasters, this has required the regulatory intervention of
government to secure these goals, as part of the public trust obligations involved
in granting private institutions the right to the means of public communication.
Australian content regulations have been the responsibility of the Australian
Broadcasting Control Board (ABCB) (1948-1976), the Australian Broadcasting
Tribunal (ABT) (1977-1992), and the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA)
from 1993. The Australian content requirements have involved a mix of overall
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levels of Australian content (also known as transmission quotas) and requirements
for the broadcast of particular program types, most notably drama and children’s
programs. There have also been particular requirements of Australian content in
the evening ‘prime time’ schedule, on the basis that this is the period with the
largest audience, and thus when locally produced material may have the widest
cultural impact.
In contrast to the weak commitments to political citizenship in Australian
broadcasting policy, indicated by the patchy history of commitments to public
participation in broadcast media policy formation, the commitment to national
citizenship found in the Australian content regulations for commercial television
has been relatively consistent, although the levels, forms and objectives of
regulation have varied over time. The goal of promoting Australian content has
been enshrined in the conditions of operation of both the national broadcasting
service (ABC) and the commercial broadcasters from their inception. The
Broadcasting Act 1942 enshrined Australian content provision as a condition of
holding a broadcasting licence, for commercial as well as public service
broadcasters, in Section 114 (1) of the Act:
The [Australian Broadcasting] Corporation and licensees shall, as far as
possible, use the services of Australians in the production and presentation
of radio and television programs.
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The Broadcasting Services Act 1992 states in the Objects of the Act the necessity
of ‘facilitating the development of a broadcasting industry in Australia’ (s. 3 (b)),
ensuring ‘that Australians have effective control of the more influential
broadcasting services’ (s. 3 (d)) and promoting ‘the role of broadcasting services
in developing and reflecting a sense of Australian identity, character and cultural
diversity’ (s. 3 (e)).
The argument that quota-setting by regulatory bodies was a necessary
condition for achieving appropriate levels of Australian content on commercial
television had been a long-standing one. The basic arguments have had majority
support among industry participants since the decision in 1960 to set a 40 per cent
Australian content quota (increased to 45 per cent in 1962 and 50 per cent in
1965). Groups representing the audiovisual production industry had argued, since
the 1963 Vincent Report, that local content requirements placed upon commercial
broadcasters were inadequate in light of both the profitability of the commercial
broadcasters and the cultural dimensions of the medium. The ABT’s Self-
Regulation for Broadcasters inquiry in 1977 argued that ‘a distinctively
Australian look for television’ was a desirable ideal, but Tribunal members
disagreed on the appropriateness of Australian content quotas as a means of
achieving this goal (ABT 1977: 29). Even the commercial broadcasters
themselves, while rhetorically opposed to quotas per se, have accepted their
existence as a performance condition, with the important proviso that restrictions
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on the entry of new competitors are recognised as a quid pro quo for meeting such
‘pro-social’ content regulations.
The politics of local content regulation, and media content regulation
generally, are different to those surrounding other areas of media policy such as
media ownership, for two important reasons. First, the ceding of responsibility for
policy development, as well as regulatory oversight, from the government of the
day to the regulatory agency is indicative of the lack of an investment by
government in the outcomes of such processes. There has been considerable
political bipartisanship on the issue of local content regulations, which has also
created the potential for considerable flexibility and autonomy in the policy
process on the part of the responsible regulatory agency. Such autonomy on the
part of regulatory agencies can be contrasted with the approach taken by
governments from both major political parties to media ownership issues. Media
ownership laws in Australia have been characterised by what Anna Yeatman has
termed executive models of policy, where the scope for policy activism outside of
government, narrowly conceived as the Minister and their Department, is
minimised. By contrast, laws governing media content have, since the early
1970s, been more open to what Yeatman describes as a policy process, where
‘policy is conceived as a complex, multi-layered process involving a whole host
of different actors [and] policy activism of various kinds is invoked into being’
(Yeatman 1998: 17). Such bureaucratic autonomy arises at a cost, however, since
policies concerned with infrastructure, ownership, service provision and market
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development have been privileged as the primary concerns of Australian
communications policy, while policies relating to content, users, diversity, quality
and access have been treated as ‘second-order’ policy problems (Spurgeon 1997).
The other significant element with regard to media content regulations in
Australia is that they have been developed in the context of the social contract in
broadcasting. The social contract has been defined as a policy settlement where
high profits for commercial broadcasters arising from oligopolistic market
structures are seen as providing a surplus able to be ‘traded off’ for pro-social
content regulations in areas such as Australian content and children’s
programming. Such a policy trade off occurs in a context where the ‘public trust’
obligations of commercial broadcasters legitimate citizen involvement in
broadcast policy-making, as mediated through regulatory agencies and relevant
interest groups. As a result, the coalition of interests supporting Australian content
regulations is typically a broad one, involving an alliance between the production
industry, public interest and advocacy groups and, in most instances, the
regulatory agency itself.
Arguments for Australian content regulations are characteristically framed
around a metanarrative of cultural nationalism, whereby Australia realises itself as
a culture through the development of local drama and other forms of television
content, and the growing self-awareness and self-recognition of the Australian
national community that results from exposure to national cultural forms. In 1968,
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Mungo MacCallum argued that ‘drama … reflects us to ourselves, helps us to
know ourselves, and passes on the information to the rest of the world. A
community without drama is undeveloped’ (MacCallum 1968: 67). Similarly, in
the late 1980s, Gil Appleton would argue that that ‘the shock of self-recognition
... had been the key to the success of Australian programs’ (Appleton 1988: 203).
While the development of a local audiovisual production industry is clearly a
significant outcome of such regulations, this is generally downplayed in contrast
to the cultural dimension. Moreover, in spite of their characteristically ‘principled’
opposition to program quotas on the basis of their adverse effects on public
choice, requirements such as the Australian content quota have their uses for the
commercial broadcasters, as they can be presented as a potential casualty of any
moves to increase the amount of competition in the broadcasting industry through
permitting new entrants or the development of new services.
Arguments for Australian Content Regulations for Commercial
Television Broadcasters
Five sets of arguments have been put forward in favour of Australian content
regulations for Australian commercial television broadcasters. First, there is the
argument for such regulations on the basis of the large cost differential between
producing local programs and importing programs from overseas. It has been
estimated that the average cost of imported programs is in the range of 10-30 per
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cent of the cost of the equivalent locally produced material (BTCE 1991: 124-
126), and that, in the absence of regulation to guarantee minimum levels of local
production, profit-maximising commercial television stations will primarily
purchase and screen imported material. There is the additional but related concern
that the world market for television products provides unfair benefits to television
program producers from the United States, who can export programs at low
marginal costs (close to marginal cost of reproduction), due to the size of their
domestic market, dominance of international distribution, and the fact that
successful product realises its costs in the North American television market prior
to its export (Hoskins and Mirus 1988; Collins 1990a; O’Regan 1992).
Second, there are arguments for local content regulations in order to
promote the development of a local audiovisual production industry able to
provide regular employment for Australian creative personnel in both on- and off-
screen roles. It had become apparent by the early 1960s that employment
regulations for the use of Australians would only be implemented if local
production took place across a range of sectors. For such local film and television
production to occur, however, there needed to be trained local personnel, in order
to develop the linkages between the television industry and a series of other
industries, and thus promote a national cultural infrastructure in the audiovisual
sector (Cunningham 1992; cf. Moran 1985). In this light, arguably the first major
local content decision in Australia came in 1960 with the requirement (later to be
codified as Television Production Standards (TPS) 18 and 19) that no more than
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20 per cent of material in any advertisement screened on Australian television
may be produced outside of Australia, unless Australian creative personnel were
used. This effective prohibition on the importation of television advertisements as
an explicit industry and employment protection policy, which remained in place
until 1990, played a very important role in underwriting all forms of audiovisual
production in Australia, as Cunningham pointed out when he argued that
‘television drama production in Australian could not have developed its present
scope and depth without the industrial infrastructure of the advertising industry’
(Cunningham 1992: 72).
The promotion of diversity and innovation in the production and
scheduling of Australian programs on Australian commercial television is a third
principle underpinning Australian content regulations. This principle was part of
the reasoning behind the introduction of a ‘points system’ in 1973 to allocate
different amounts of points to different program categories, and require
commercial stations to meet the points targets as well as transmission quotas. The
intention has been to ensure that local production is encouraged in areas which are
under-represented in current program schedules, are deemed to be of higher
‘quality’ or to have cultural significance, or which are costlier and/or riskier than
other program types. The flip side has been a desire to minimise reliance upon
televised sport, quiz and game shows, or low-cost studio-based programs in order
to meet the Australian content quota.
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The promotion of Australian national culture has been the fourth, and
most significant, force behind calls for Australian content regulations. The view
that locally produced television, and particularly local drama, contributed to
Australian audiences’ ‘shock of self-recognition’ and greater self-awareness of
their own culture, had been put in a number of statements since the 1960s, and has
usually been tied to the development of local content quotas for drama. By the
1980s, the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal was arguing that greater national
cultural self-awareness had been achieved in Australia, in part because of the
success of Australian content regulations, which have forced the commercial
stations to meet the demand of local audiences for local programming (Appleton
1988). Moreover, this ‘cultural’ argument for Australian content regulations came
to be associated with the proposition that Australian television should have a
recognisably Australian ‘look’, as part of its role in promoting a distinctively
Australian national culture. This latter development would prove to be
controversial.
Finally, Australian content quotas were seen as a measure of the
willingness of Australian governments and policy-makers to oppose ‘cultural
domination’ and ‘cultural imperialism’. This argument for Australian content
regulation has strong links to arguments about the role of culture in developing
national citizenship and identity, and the cultural nationalist belief that an
independent Australian society - in the political, economic and cultural spheres -
was the condition for social justice and societal development (Turner 1979).
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Cultural nationalists believed that the lack of a local film and television
production industry prevented the cultivation of a distinctive national imaginary,
and linked this to concerns about American ‘cultural imperialism’ and the
‘dependency’ theory of Australian capitalist development, arguing that in the
absence of protectionist economic policies, Australia was simply a ‘client state’ of
multinational capitalism (Crough and Wheelwright 1983; Rohdie 1987).
Australian Content: Industry Policy and Cultural Policy
The first three arguments listed above for Australian content regulations -
comparative cost disadvantage, industry development and diversity of product -
can be classified as economic or industry policy goals, with only the latter two -
development of national culture, and resistance to cultural domination - having an
explicitly cultural remit. In spite of the significance of economic factors in
providing a rationale for Australian content regulations, the stress has
characteristically been upon their cultural significance. Over the course of the
1980s, however, economic arguments would acquire a growing significance in the
framing of public policy in Australia, and this had an impact on the Australian
Content inquiry.
Economic analysis has been used to evaluate Australian commercial
broadcast television content regulation, most notably by Papandrea (1997), but
also by Brown and Cave (1992), Burgin and Molloy (1993) and the Bureau of
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Transport and Communications Economics (1991). Brown and Cave distinguish
between economic regulation, involving government intervention to compensate
for market failure, and social regulation, involving the pursuit by government of
‘public interest’ objectives through intervention, such as protection from
unsuitable material or the development of national culture. They note that
Australian content rules ‘have both the economic function of protecting domestic
industry, and the social functions of promoting national pride and cultural values’
(Brown and Cave 1992: 379). Franco Papandrea (1997) draws upon the growing
body of literature dealing with the economics of art and culture, to identify four
areas of ‘market failure’ that form the basis of content-based government
intervention in broadcasting markets:
1. public good arguments, which propose that the there are collective benefits
to a community from the availability of artistic and cultural goods and
services;
2. merit good arguments, which propose that collective benefits may be
derived from the availability of artistic and cultural goods and services that
are inadequately registered under current consumption decisions, due to a
lack of awareness of the value of artistic and cultural goods and services in
the community;
3. option value or existence value arguments, which propose that the
community as a whole values the existence of artistic and cultural goods
and services, in order that they can be consumed at a later point in time, or
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because the good or service is seen to add to the collective well-being of
the community, even if particular individuals do not use or consume it.
4. externality arguments, which stress the benefits of artistic and cultural
goods and services being available to the community as a whole, including
enhancement of local or national tourism industries, benefits to the local or
national economy from an economically viable arts and cultural industries
sector, the educative role of the arts and culture, and the movement of
creative personnel between the ‘subsidised’ and ‘commercial’ sectors as
part of their lifetime employment trajectories.
Economic policy discourse and cultural policy discourse work from
different frames of reference, which in turn influence their understanding of
policies such as Australian content regulation. Economists have tended, in the
majority of cases, to be sceptical of traditional arguments for public support for
the arts and cultural industries, being particularly concerned that ‘market failure’
arguments for public support of the arts and cultural industries may entail a
combination of paternalism and special pleading to use public revenue for the
benefit of particular well-organised interests (Peacock 1997; Norton 1996; Court
1994). For its critics, which include some economists, the analytical bases of
cultural economics in methodological individualism, consumer sovereignty and
rational choice theory are seen as generating an inherent bias against ‘culture’,
since it is a concept that is inherently intangible in form and content, collective in
orientation, and difficult to measure in terms of outcomes (Throsby 1997). By
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contrast, cultural nationalist perspectives typically take the society or the nation,
rather than the individual, as their analytical point of reference, and frame cultural
policy in terms of serving social collectivities rather than individual consumers. In
the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the debate over Australian content regulations
for commercial television increasingly became a competition between these two
forms of policy discourse, their associated debate cultures and their distinctive
understandings of cultural citizenship.
The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal’s Australian Content
Inquiry 1983-1989
The Australian Broadcasting Tribunal announced in March 1983 that it would be
undertaking an inquiry to determine program standards in respect of the
Australian content of television programs and advertisements, as part of its overall
revision of television program standards. Announcement of the initial inquiry was
accompanied by the release of a Discussion Paper and a Background Paper. These
papers argued that the introduction of the points system for Australian content in
1973 had led to an increase in the amount of local programming broadcast, an
increase in the prime-time broadcast of locally produced drama, and an increase
in the percentage of revenues spent by the commercial networks on locally
produced material from 68 per cent in 1973-74 to 78 per cent in 1980-81 (ABT
1991a: 136-137). These findings indicated that, in general terms, Australian
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content regulations were achieving policy objectives. Nonetheless, there was a
concern that the points system had set compliance levels below those which were
desirable or achievable by the commercial stations, in terms of quantity of
Australian programs, and particularly in terms of diversity of program types. This
conclusion echoed Kate Harrison’s influential critique of the points system as
constituting a form of ‘symbolic policy’, where the regulator was seen to enforce
a set of outcomes which would in fact have been achieved in the absence of
regulation, as an alternative to greater public scrutiny or more rigorous regulation
of broadcaster conduct (Harrison 1980).
One consistent feature of the ABT’s conduct of the inquiry was the strong
emphasis placed upon the wide dissemination of detailed information on matters
relevant to the inquiry. A second, and related, feature of the Australian Content
Inquiry was that the ABT had considerable scope to direct the timing of its
process and the direction of its findings, as governmental scrutiny was not high.
Julie James Bailey, who joined the ABT in 1983 when the inquiry commenced,
was of the view that the inquiry would involve a ‘long learning process’ for
Tribunal members, and that a priority was ‘to get a lot of Background Papers,
because what you could do at the Tribunal was to get a lot of information out’.1
The inquiry was deferred in November 1984 by the appeal by the multinational
advertising organisation Saatchi & Saatchi, challenging the power of the Tribunal
to conduct an inquiry into Australian content standards for advertisements, which
led to an amendment to the Broadcasting and Television Act in July 1985 that
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ensured the Tribunal was able to set and administer advertising standards as well
as program standards.
The Saatchi & Saatchi appeal provides an interesting case study in how
the media policy activism of the 1970s had transformed the behaviour of the ABT
as a regulatory agency. As media policy activists such as Julie James Bailey,
Mark Armstrong and Ray Watterson came to be Tribunal members in the 1980s,
they brought with them a strong sense of the dangers of regulatory capture by the
broadcasting industry, and a willingness to ‘tilt the playing field’ towards the
interest groups as a means of promoting countervailing power. Bailey provides an
interesting example of how Tribunal members could develop a ‘public interest’
orientation in areas which required adjudication through the courts, in the case of
the 1984 Saatchi & Saatchi appeal about the ABT’s powers to set advertising
standards:
The Saatchi & Saatchi appeal ... was all about standards and regulation,
and it went all the way up to the High Court, and it turned out the Tribunal
did not have the power. Now Mark [Armstrong] had always said that he
wasn't sure, and ... he said there was a 60/40 chance the Tribunal did not
have the power, so in fact he was vindicated. Part of the reason [why]
there were, if you look at that period with the Tribunal, far more [legal]
challenges ... is that you would always have two opinions. You'll have the
commercial licensee’s lawyers’ opinion, in their favour, and you'll have a
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public interest opinion. We made a decision, I did, and Mark and Ray
[Watterson] did, that we would always take the public interest opinion,
because the commercial stations could always afford to take us to court,
and we could get the thing ironed out in the court. But if you took the
reverse, which the [Australian Broadcasting] Control Board had always
done, then the public can never challenge it in the courts. So you never get
legally clear indications of where the law stands. So it was very much a
decision, and that is why there was so much litigation in that period.2
When the Australian Content Inquiry resumed in January 1986, a call for
submissions led to the receipt of 570 public submissions and 61 industry
submissions by August 1986. In addition, the Tribunal circulated a pamphlet,
titled ‘Seen anything good on telly lately?’, and also placed an advertisement in
several capital city newspapers titled ‘What do you think of Australian programs
on commercial television?’, inviting people to comment on Australian TV
programs currently screening, their likes and dislikes, and whether they would
like to see more - and less - of particular program types. By early 1987, the
Tribunal had received 653 responses through this community outreach campaign.
By 1987, a bifurcation in the Tribunal’s approach to evidence could be seen,
between the public submissions, which increasingly constituted empirical data to
assist the Tribunal in its deliberations, and the submissions of industry
organisations and interest groups with an ongoing interest in policy in the area of
Australian content rules. In contrast to the difficulties faced by the ABT in the
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licence renewal hearings to effectively integrate its findings and decisions in
individual licence renewal hearings with its overarching administrative,
regulatory and policy-making roles, the ABT was now developing a more ongoing
and consistent approach to its dealings with the broad range of interest groups and
industry organisations who were stakeholders in Australian broadcasting policy,
that included a stress upon information provision and promoting opportunities for
dialogue between competing interests. The Tribunal’s conduct of the Australian
Content Inquiry offered considerable opportunity for organised groups with an
ongoing interest in media reform to participate in the policy formation process,
giving those participant groups involved the opportunity to develop their
organisational, informational and lobbying skills in media policy.
Industry and Interest Group Positions
The ABT’s Australian Content Inquiry had seen the consolidation of a pattern that
had emerged in the 1960s, where the production industry representatives and the
variety of media interest and advocacy groups formed a coalition of interests
around support for strengthening Australian content requirements for commercial
television, in opposition to the commercial networks and FACTS as their
representative body. The preferences of the production industry/media interest
groups were also largely consistent with those of the Tribunal. They saw the
primary objective of Australian content standards as cultural, and shared with the
ABT the virtuous circle argument that forms of cultural regulation such as
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program quotas had brought forth a supply of local television program production,
which had in turn proved popular with local audiences and thus contributed to the
development of national culture and national self-awareness. The development of
a local television production industry was, in this analysis, a happy by-product of
this cultural policy (Appleton 1988).
While it is difficult to generalise on the perspective of the production
industry, given the diversity of roles and interests and the differing size and
influence of individuals and organisations in the sector, there was a consistent
position put forward by organisations and individuals representing the film and
television production industry to the Australian Content Inquiry. The preferences
of the production industry were for: a strengthening of overall local content
requirements; intensified focus upon particular program formats, such as drama
and children’s programming; use of regulation to achieve greater quality and
diversity of local content; and a stress upon ‘prime time’ (6.00 pm to 10.00 pm) as
the period in which the operation of effective quotas was most important. Some
submissions placed a greater emphasis upon the promotion of particular program
formats, such as SPAA’s response to the Tribunal’s paper on documentary, which
called for a quota of 104 hours of first-release, independently produced
documentary for all Australian commercial stations, comparable to the drama
quota under the points system (Broad 1987). Others, such as the Film and
Television Institute (WA), the Australian Writers Guild (WA) and the Australian
Writers Guild (Queensland) called for regional as well as national quotas, in
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response to the perceived decline in ‘localism’ in programming since national
networking had been introduced (FTI (WA Branch) 1986; AWG (WA Branch)
1986; AWG (Qld Branch) 1986). A consistent feature of the production industry
submissions and contributions was an abiding discontent with the conduct of the
Australian commercial networks, who were perceived as pushing all program
development costs on to independent producers, being narrow in their perception
of what was acceptable programming for Australian TV audiences, and even their
ability to threaten the livelihood of producers who gave detailed evidence to the
Tribunal.
3
The Australian Content Inquiry triggered the re-emergence of older media
interest and advocacy groups, such as the ‘TV - Make it Australian’ Committee,
and the emergence of relatively new organisations such as the Communications
Law Centre (CLC). There was a lot of overlap and crossover between these
interest groups, as indicated by the role played by Actors Equity in re-establishing
‘TV - Make it Australian’,4 and the Communications Law Centre’s role in
preparing its submission. The case for Australian content regulations made in the
CLC and ‘TV - Make It Australian’ submissions emphasised the ‘public trust’
nature of television licences and how it legitimated such regulations in exchange
for private access to scarce spectrum space; the significant social and cultural role
played by Australian television in reflecting Australia for Australians; the
importance of Australian TV program production to development of the arts and
Australian cultural life, given the importance of the sector as an employer of
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creative personnel and its reach to large audiences; and the need for regulation to
provide the stability necessary to build a strong local production industry in the
context of structural and regulatory change (Spurgeon 1987).
As the major institutional agents in a structure of regulated oligopoly, the
statements of commercial television broadcasters in public inquiries typically
have both a moral or normative dimension, alongside a more pragmatic or
strategic set of arguments. The Federation of Australian Commercial Television
Stations (FACTS) argued against revising the current Australian content standards
on the basis that the commercial TV networks were in fact meeting the revealed
preference of Australian TV viewers for local content, and that the failure of the
Tribunal to update Australian content standards has in fact been ‘a benign neglect
which has served to show that competition, rather than regulatory intervention, is
best qualified to provide the quantity, range and quality of programs that best
accord with the tastes and preferences of the public’ (FACTS 1988: 85). The
FACTS submission also argued that the commercial TV industry was currently
operating at full capacity and at what economists would call ‘normal’ profit levels,
so that there would be a ‘zero-sum’ logic to any increase in Australian content
quotas, with an increase in quantity leading to a reduction in quality or in the
number of locally produced programs in unregulated areas. Finally, the FACTS
submission contained what may be described as a ‘fall-back’ position, where it
indicated that should a strengthened Australian drama quota be introduced
anyway, its members’ preference was for one which maximised network
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flexibility in commissioning, producing and scheduling Australian drama
programs, and which gave an enhanced weighting to more expensive drama
formats or to ‘one-off’ drama programs.
The FACTS submission raises a perennial issue in this debate, which is
whether commercial networks would have commissioned new Australian
programming, particularly in higher-cost areas such as drama where import
competition is strongest, in the absence of regulations requiring them to. The
answer given by FACTS is that they would have been responsive to consumer
preferences for such material. The counter-argument, put by the interest groups,
was that they failed to broadcast such material until forced to, at which point
consumer preference for such material was revealed. Another issue raised is the
extent to which broadcasters can increase the amount of local programs in their
schedule and reduce the amount of imported programs, or change the mix of
programs within local and import categories, without there being such an adverse
impact upon profits that it inhibits future investment decisions. This raised the
issue for the Tribunal of acquiring reliable information on the relative costs of
different programming types, both domestic and imported. Sandra Alexander’s
consultant’s report for the Tribunal, released in November 1987, was a detailed
attempt to develop data on the person-hours involved in production of Australian
programs across the range of program types, based upon questionnaires and face-
to-face interviews with 200 program production personnel (ABT 1991). The
results are shown in Table 5.1:
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Table 5.1
Average Person Hours Per Hour of Screen Time of Various
Program Types 1987
Studio only (eg. chat shows) 124.2
Sport outside broadcast 183.9
News 202.9
Studio game show 874.9
Studio drama 4452.4
Documentary 6250.8Major outside broadcast 6543.4
Telemovie 12133.3
Miniseries 14836.1
Feature film 29140.5
Source: ABT 1991: 98-99.
Constituting Public Process in Media Policy: Institutional
Pluralism and the Professionalisation of Media Activism
Media policy formation has been assessed not only in terms of its outcomes, but
also through the extent to which policy processes are open to participation,
intervention and formal scrutiny. While the Whitlam Labor government (1972-75)
delivered on its promises in terms of policy outcomes such as strengthened local
content requirements, critics pointed to its failure to reform and open up the
institutions of media policy formation and regulation to greater public
participation and external scrutiny. By contrast, the Australian Broadcasting
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Tribunal was founded with a strong commitment to open and inclusive processes
of decision-making through licence renewal processes. It had, however, come to
be characterised by uncertainty about its objectives, performance criteria and
anticipated outcomes in these activities, and was unable to articulate its
adjudications toward individual broadcasting licensees to a broader set of policy
formation principles. By the time of the Australian Content Inquiry, the Tribunal
was being criticised as ineffectual, not just by the broadcasting industry and
government, but also by the constituency of media reformers and activist
organisations that had emerged since the 1960s, which drew upon ‘public interest’
or ‘consumer rights’ discourses to lobby for media reform.
The ABT had sought to fashion a role for itself in facilitating and
promoting the participation of community-based and ‘public interest’ groups, as
well as other industry groups such as the film and TV production sector, or
industry unions. This can be seen as part of a conscious process by Tribunal
members to make the agency less of what Dunleavy and O’Leary (1987) have
termed a ‘cipher’, or an advocate of broadcasting industry interests by default in
the absence of countervailing interests, more of a ‘broker’ of competing interests
and a ‘guardian’ of the ‘public interest’, operationalised through forms of
selective assistance in order to strengthen the role of non-dominant interests.
The development of ‘insider’ policy activism in the Tribunal through the
Australian Content Inquiry arose out of a number of related factors. One was the
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role played by the Tribunal’s licence renewal inquiries. While they were largely
ineffectual in modifying broadcaster performance, their existence had meant that
the groups that chose to remain involved in such processes had developed
political lobbying skills and broadened their involvement in media policy issues.
The Australian Content Inquiry also marked a continuation of the process of
professionalisation of research and policy participation functions within media
organisations and their representative agencies. Responsibility for contributing to
policy formation processes had, in the 1980s, gradually been shifting from
organisation directors and board members, full-time activists and freelance
academics to a professional cadre of research and policy professionals, who could
be employed on a full-time basis to monitor and contribute to policy formation on
behalf of their organisations. An indicator of this trend can be seen at the
Tribunal’s The Price of Being Australian (ABT 1988) where, of the 178
conference registrants, 11 (6 per cent) were there on the basis of their research
and/or policy roles within their organisations. For Anne Britton, former National
Secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), such
involvement in policy processes is ‘good self-interest’. Britton observed that
Actors’ Equity had in the late 1980s a principle of ‘spending about 40 per cent of
our resources on policy, or so-called job creation issues’, as part of serving its
members’ interests, since ‘it’s good that actors are interested in working in their
own country, because that translates into a national audiovisual policy’. 5
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The Communications Law Centre provides an important case study in the
development of an organisation that sought to systematically engage with the
policy process from a ‘public interest’ perspective. The CLC was established in
1988, as a result of the sustained involvement of the Public Interest Advocacy
Centre (PIAC) in media-related activities through the licence renewal process. Its
establishment was driven by the desire of its founding director, Kate Harrison, to
develop a Centre that could have sustained involvement as activists in policy on a
‘public interest’ basis. The CLC could do this by linking on the one hand with the
legal sector and the movements which sought to bring legal advice to the
community, and on the other with the university sector, which could provide a
relatively strong and stable institutional affiliation for activist organisations.
Working across a range of communications media, from telecommunications to
broadcasting to film, and on issues ranging from ownership to content to privacy
and copyright laws, the CLC developed into an organisation which could develop
a ‘bureaucratic’ response to the issues raised in media policy activism. Christina
Spurgeon, a researcher at the CLC from 1988 to 1995, observed that the CLC was
seen as ‘professionalising [the] public interest’ when it was launched, since it had
to address the nuts-and-bolts of ‘how we might go about getting concerns like
access and equity … to register in a meaningful sort of way with … bureaucratic
systems and structures.’6 In order to do this effectively, Spurgeon argues, ‘you
need to have the resources ... the time and skills base to go out and talk to people,
and to convince various bureaucracies that it was worth their while to spend time
with you.’ 7 For Spurgeon, the Australian Content Inquiry was an occasion where
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the commitment of the ABT to undertaking research, and providing information
which could be used by all parties, meant that ‘we actually had an intelligent
debate, rather than opposition camps just throwing rhetoric at each other, and then
some kind of political decision being handed down, which is how it could have
gone.’ It marked a significant moment in the ‘professionalisation of the public
inquiry process’ and, for an organisation such as the CLC, a ‘scaling up’ of their
involvement.
The other trend which emerged in the late 1980s was the involvement of
academics as participants in policy processes, acting on behalf of organised
constituencies rather than in an ‘unattached’ and freelance intellectual capacity.
Stuart Cunningham was a central figure in this debate, linking engagement with
the ‘cultural policy debate’ in Australian cultural studies with involvement in
policy debates such as the Australian Content Inquiry (Cunningham 1992, 1993,
1994). Graeme Turner observed that signs of a sea-change in cultural, media and
communications studies were beginning to occur in Australia during this period,
as research and advisory centres linked universities to stakeholders in government
and the media industries. Such Centres included the Institute for Cultural Policy
Studies (ICPS), established at Griffith University in 1989, and the Australian Key
Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, funded by the Australian Research Council
as a National Key Centre for Teaching and Research in 1995. For Turner, such
developments ‘move cultural studies away from pure theory to a field of
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cooperative … relationships’, enabling cultural studies academics ‘to intervene in
cultural production at the level of policy and planning’ (Turner 1989: 5).
(Mis)Representing Australianness: The ‘Australian Look’
Controversy and the Australian Content Standard
One area in which cultural analysis had influence, albeit indirectly, was in debates
about the use of ‘on-screen indicators’ for Australian content, or the ‘Australian
Look’ controversy. When the ABT released its Draft Proposal for an Australian
Content standard for commercial television on 9 December 1988, it argued that
the need to regulate for Australian content emanated from the need to preserve an
Australian Look, ensure Australian drama, encourage quality productions, and
encourage diversity of program types (ABT 1991b). The Draft Proposal put
forward a minimum overall quota of 50 per cent of Australian programs to be
broadcast between 6.00 am and midnight over the period of a year, commencing 1
July 1989, with the intention to increase this quota to 60 per cent by 1 July 1994,
with a comparable quota to apply during ‘prime time’, between 6.00 pm and
midnight. In order to encourage quality and diversity of Australian programming,
as well as promoting local drama, the Tribunal proposed a minimum score for
adult drama, children’s drama and diversity programs (which included variety
series, variety specials, social documentary, arts programs and new concepts). The
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aims of the quota and minimum score systems were to encourage programs that
were:
(a) recognisably Australian in theme, perspective, language and character;
(b) designed specifically for Australians;
(c) relevant to Australians;
(d) under Australian creative and financial control, and which ‘showcase
Australian talent on-screen and behind the camera’ (‘on-screen
indicators’);
(e) acknowledge the diverse backgrounds which make up the Australian
people.
The most contentious elements of the Tribunal’s Draft Proposal were those
that depended upon an ‘Australian Look’ criteria, and its use of ‘on-screen
indicators’ to determine the ‘Australianness’ of a program. The ‘Australian Look’
was a concept that had its origins in the 1977 ABT Self-Regulation Inquiry,
defined in terms of a series of ‘on-screen indicators’ based around:
•theme (content and topic);
• perspective (an Australian viewpoint);
•language (Australian speech, including idiom and accents);
•character (incorporating scenes and costumes, character portrayal,
interpretation of material and accurate casting).
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Critical responses to the ABT’s Draft Proposal were submitted by industry
organisations such as the Australian Writers Guild, the Australian Film
Commission, the Australian Film Finance Corporation, the Communications Law
Centre, Film Australia, the Grundy Organisation, Crawfords Productions and the
Screen Producers Association of Australia. Moran (1989) and Given (1989) also
published critiques of the ‘Australian Look’ in academic journals. The criticisms
were that the ‘Australian Look’ concept and its indicators were based upon flawed
and backward-looking assumptions about Australian culture; were subjective in
their application; were likely to discourage investment; failed to recognise the
growing importance of foreign investment in Australian productions, and the need
to be able to export higher-cost local productions; and were a constraint upon
creativity. It was also argued that the test was incompatible with tests of
‘Australianness’ applied by other funding bodies such as the Australian Film
Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Commission, or the Income
Taxation Act ’s 10BA Certification Requirement for Film (CLC 1989).
In light of the extent of consultation by the Tribunal with the range of
interested parties on Australian content, who had also traditionally been its allies
and supporters, the question remains as to why the ABT produced a Draft
Proposal based upon a test that was so at odds with so many of these interests.
Jock Given has noted that a recurring contextual issue was the fear of the
‘runaway production’, or material made in Australian by US interests without
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regard for local context. The New Mission: Impossible, produced in Brisbane and
on the Gold Coast was, for Given, the touchstone of these anxieties about global
television:
To me, Mission Impossible was the touchstone of the whole inquiry.
People looked at it and said that this is what we don’t want to happen. It’s
very difficult to describe, but we’ve got something very concrete in front
of us, this is not an Australian program.8
Bailey argued that the problem lay to some degree with the unwillingness
of ‘academics working in Australian cultural studies and film studies to have
come forward and alerted the Tribunal to the debates about defining “Australian”
and participated in the drafting of the final standards’ (Bailey 1994: 70). Bailey’s
argument is, however, disingenuous for three reasons. First, the major critics of
the proposal were not academics at the ‘margins’, but the production industry and
public interest groups that the Tribunal had been in consistent liaison with
throughout the inquiry. Given recalls how, when he commenced with the AFC
after previously working with DOTAC, he ‘walked in … to a strange environment
where the Broadcasting Tribunal, which I thought would be much lauded by the
film and television production industry, was being reviled for the craziness of this
proposal’.9 Second, the proposal had its critics within the Tribunal itself. Debra
Richards noted that the ‘Australian Look’ proposal came from an attempt by the
Tribunal to prioritise cultural issues, but that:
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When we went out with the ‘Australian look’ - and I must say it was
probably a lot of us who didn’t want to go out with the ‘Australian look’,
particularly among the staff ... our main priority was the ‘cultural
argument’ and trying to put that as our main priority ... So, in an effort, I
think, to push the cultural side of it, there was this proposal for ‘Australian
look’. We had been trying to walk away from that from the time it went
out there, frankly ... there are all the problems that go with that … how do
you determine the ‘Australian look’ of a program that is science fiction, or
fantasy, or …does the ‘Australian look’ have to have two kangaroos, three
koalas and gum trees? 10
Finally, insofar as academic work had been relevant to the Australian
Content inquiry, it had questioned the assumptions and underlying premises of
cultural nationalism that had informed media reform and other related campaigns
in the 1960s and 1970s. Bailey’s claim that academic research in this area was not
accessible or relevant is tendentious, given the accessible nature of writing of
many of the key texts putting these arguments (eg. White 1981; Rowse 1985;
Castles et. al. 1988). The very public debates about multiculturalism and
Australian identity in the late 1980s should also have given the Tribunal more
pause than they did about attempting to legislate for an ‘Australian Look’ in
commercial television. Since the ‘Australian Look’ proposal was generated
without reference to any of the key stakeholders in the inquiry, in spite of
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extensive consultations with them over a long period of time, it is unlikely that,
contrary to Bailey’s assumptions, more submissions from academics would have
swayed the Tribunal from cultural nationalism. Rather, cultural nationalism had
become an ingrained policy discourse among those addressing the issue of
Australian content regulations from a cultural perspective.
Negotiations in 1989 saw a retreat by the Tribunal from the Draft
Proposal’s emphasis upon on-screen indicators of Australian content, or the
‘Australian Look’, towards a less prescriptive ‘Australian factor’ test, which
emphasised off-screen indicators and the significance of Australian creative
control. While some Tribunal members, such as Julie James-Bailey, expressed
concern that the loss of rigorous on-screen indicators would mean the
disappearance of ‘Australian ideas’ in expensive drama formats such as miniseries
and telemovies, 11 most industry representatives welcomed the move towards less
prescriptive criteria. Kim Williams, Chairman of the Australian Film Finance
Corporation, captured the spirit of these discussions in his view that they had led
to ‘some degree of confidence that what Australians produce is, ipso facto,
Australian’. 12
The late 1980s marked the period of what Tom O’Regan (1993) has
termed the ‘rise and fall of entrepreneurial TV’, as debt-financed expansion
undertaken by the Qintex, Bond and Westfield groups, who took over the Seven,
Nine and Ten networks in 1987 in response to the changes in media ownership
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laws in 1986-87, proved to be unsustainable in the wake of the stock market crash
of November 1987. The situation was to worsen for the sector in 1990-91, as it
was faced with continuing high debt levels, rising interest rates, and a sharp fall in
the rate of growth in advertising revenues from 15 per cent to 6 per cent, leading
to a sharp deterioration in the profitability of commercial television networks, as
shown in Table 5.2:
Table 5.2
Rates of Return to Capital City Commercial Television Stations
1987/88-1990/91 (per cent)
1987-88 3.9
1988-89 0.3
1989-90 -0.2
1990-91 -2.6
Source: BTCE 1995: 81.
As a result of this deteriorating financial situation, the commercial
networks demanded a phased introduction of the Australian content transmission
quota to 50 per cent. The Final Draft Proposal retained the combined quota/point
system, setting an Australian transmission quota of 35 per cent of broadcast time
between 6.00 am and midnight in the first year of operation, to be incrementally
increased to 50 per cent by the fourth year of operation, and to later increase to 60
per cent by the sixth year of operation. In spite of a dissenting view within the
Tribunal presented by Julie James Bailey (Bailey in ABT 1991c: 38), the
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Tribunal’s majority view was that industry profitability and viability were the
primary concerns, and that the meeting of local content quotas was a positive
spin-off from a profitable commercial broadcasting industry. At the end of
perhaps the most penetrating inquiry into their conduct, the commercial free-to-air
broadcasters were able to reach a familiar quid pro quo with the regulators, the
production sector and interest groups: the delivery of prescribed levels of local
content, in exchange for guaranteed long-term profitability, minimal scrutiny of
internal decision-making, and restrictions upon competition.
Conclusion
The Australian Content Inquiry commenced by the ABT in 1983 took
place in the context of some very significant shifts in how media reform
movements organised around the policy process, as well as in the ways in which
regulatory agencies facilitated their participation. In contrast to the diffuse nature
of concerns raised in the licence renewal hearings, the Australian Content inquiry
was focused around the particular issue of the amount of locally produced
programming that commercial broadcasters could legitimately be expected to
screen, with an emphasis upon particular program genres.
The participatory processes that came to develop in the course of the
inquiry also supported the ongoing involvement of organised advocacy and public
interest groups, and in this way contributed to what Christina Spurgeon (1997)
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has described as the ‘professionalisation of the public interest’ in the 1980s, that
was in turn facilitated by the ABT as a regulatory agency. The inquiry marks an
important case study in what Anna Yeatman (1999) has referred to as ‘activism in
the policy process’, particularly in the ways in which alliances developed between
policy ‘insiders’ in the regulatory agencies and ‘outsiders’ in the advocacy and
public interest groups.
A further development arising from this period concerned shifts in the
debate cultures of media and cultural studies, as some Australian academics
working in these fields sought to align their activism to the activities of policy-
oriented organisations, through a tailoring of their analysis and participation to
mainstream policy discourses and the temporalities of current policy processes.
Such influences became particularly relevant as the ABT presented its
controversial recommendation in the 1988 Draft proposal that Australian
television programs should possess an ‘Australian look’, as measured by a series
of ‘on-screen indicators’.
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1 Interview with Julie James Bailey, 10 July 1995.2 Ibid.3 Record of meeting between the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal and representatives from industry organisations,
Melbourne, 29 July 1987. See also SPAA, Submission DOC009, op. cit.4 Britton observes that at this time ‘TV - Make it Australian’ was ‘largely spearheaded by Actors Equity’.
Interview with Anne Britton, 28 September 1998.5 Ibid.6 Interview with Dr. Christina Spurgeon, Lecturer in Media Studies, Queensland University of Technology, 28
October 1997.7 Ibid .8 Interview with Jock Given, Director, Communications Law Centre, 18 November 1997. On The New Mission:
Impossible, see Miller (1998).9 Given ibid.10 Interview with Debra Richards, Director, Program Services, Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, 19 November
1997.11 Ms J. James-Bailey, Member, ABT. in Commonwealth of Australia, Australian Content Proposals for
Commercial Television, Transcript of Proceedings, Perth, 8 February 1989.12 Mr Kim Williams, Chairman, Australian Film Finance Corporation, in Commonwealth of Australia, Australian
Content Proposals for Commercial Television, Transcript of Proceedings, Sydney, 9 February 1989.