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Conclusion to Part One

Part One of this thesis has analysed the relationship between culture and policy in

three ways. First, it has sought to establish a relationship between culture and

policy, not at an abstract or ahistorical level, but as a tangible outcome of the

management of Australian commercial broadcasting by state regulatory

institutions towards goals such as the promotion of national citizenship and

national culture. Second, the institutional field of Australian broadcasting is seen

as a dense and complex one, where policy directions are promoted in the context

of a policy system characterised by concentration of ownership, the ‘soft property’

status attached to broadcast licences, and a policy culture where dominant

interests - most notably the commercial broadcast licensees - have possessed the

capacity to declare important aspects of their operations ‘off limits’ to regulatory

authorities. Regulations to govern the conduct of commercial broadcasting have

thus tended to operate by indirect means, and to imply a regulatory quid prop quo

between the monopoly profits of the industry and the achievement of citizenship

goals and cultural policy objectives. Finally, the likelihood of academic criticism

achieving influence over policy outcomes is connected to the capacity to translate

critical discourses into the language of policy communities, and to link up with

forms of policy activism developed through personal and institutional networks of

activists, industry groups, unions, community groups and bureaucrats.

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Citizenship provides an important link between media as culture and the

development of institutional regulatory forms and policy frameworks. The

paradox of citizenship in liberal democracies, where free subjects are required to

consent to their institutional governance as populations, means that there is an

ongoing tension between rule through expertise and popular sovereignty. This is

connected to an ongoing debate about the extent to which ‘active citizenship’

should be promoted, where citizens actively participate in the institutional

structures of governance. The question of national citizenship, and its relationship

to national culture, is also an important animator of media policy. In international

terms, Australian television has been among the most open to imported

programming in the world, and the development of cultural nationalist media

policies does not precede media globalisation; rather, the two competing

problematics have coexisted from the inception of television in Australia in 1956.

This makes Australia a particularly interesting case study in the

development of forms of cultural policy that aim to maintain discourses of

national citizenship in the context of media globalisation, as it has always been a

central question of Australian broadcast media policy. It has also given a

distinctive complexion to the ways in which the relationship between culture and

policy is addressed in the context of Australian media and cultural studies. It is

apparent that the ‘policy turn’ in Australian media and cultural studies arose partly

out of the need to better translate the concerns of intellectuals and cultural critics

to decision-making processes in social and cultural institutions, but also out of a

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need to address the binary opposition between nationalist and anti-nationalist

discourses that had marked a divide between policy activists and critical

intellectuals in debates such as those surrounding Australian content regulations

for commercial television.

The second part of this thesis will move from general conceptual analysis

to detailed empirical case studies in Australian media policy formation. The

themes established in the first part of the thesis continue, nonetheless, to inform

this empirical work. It is established that the development of media content as a

cultural form is intricately linked with regulatory processes, the application of

professional expertise to media governance, and political contestation between

competing institutional agents. This is apparent in the four case studies developed:

moves to expand public participation by the ABT in the 1970s; the debate

surrounding Australian content regulations in the 1980s; the period leading up to

the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 being passed; and the implications of

international trade agreements for domestic media policy arrangements. In each of

these cases we see tensions between different ways of addressing the Australian

media audience as citizens: over the period from 1972 to 2000, such audiences are

variously hailed as public participants in the policy process; as national citizens

seeking affirmation through media content; as sovereign consumers seeking

greater program choice; and as members of a global audience accessing media as

content industries.