By Tracy Sorensen
Television antennas on roofs all over this country will soon be joined by satellite dishes. Pay television will have arrived. Just like the pubs and clubs which now subscribe to Sky Channel, giving patrons extra audiovisual stimulation to compete with the din of poker machines and juke boxes, households will be able to choose whether or not to join the new "library in the sky".
What will be on the "shelves"? Scantily clad female "news readers" introducing wet T-shirt competitions? Hours of ancient US sit-coms? Will the new broadcasting arrangements bring 24-hour news services, quality drama from around the world and specialist and educational programs?
There will be plenty of time for speculation. The moratorium on pay television (other than the limited services such as those received by hotels) ends on October 1, but disagreement among the Liberals, Democrats and Labor over who gets to bid for licences has held up the passage of crucial legislation in federal parliament.
Whether or not Labor succeeds in making the world safe for its corporate media mates (like Kerry Packer) this time round, one thing is clear: pay television will, as writers in the Australian's Creating the Future series breathlessly note, take us another step in the direction of the "globalised broadcasting future".
The orbiting of high-powered satellites with massive "footprints" crossing national borders, is, writes ABC assistant managing director Malcolm Long, "eroding the notion that broadcast services are essentially about targeting audiences within the boundaries of particular countries".
In a recent Creating the Future article, Long notes that regional or language affiliations will become more important, with the international development of services like STAR-TV's Mandarin service in Asia.
Such services, and the increasing segmentation of broadcasting into specialised program streams, will give consumers "a whole raft of local and international television and radio delivered to homes by a domestic satellite dish or by optical fibre cable, or both".
But while celebrating the new possibilities, Long warns of a threat to "our distinct Australian culture" which will be "difficult to nurture in the globalising broadcasting future".
It's this perceived threat to national culture, and a desire to keep its members in work, that motivates the Media Alliance (formerly the Australian Journalists Association and Actors Equity) to keep up the pressure for Australian content rules for broadcasters. According to federal secretary Anne Britton, there are rules in the latest draft of the pay TV legislation for 10% of the budget of any predominantly drama channel to be earmarked for Australian programming.
"Now, 10% is better than nothing, but it's pretty lousy. Ten per cent means, depending on whose figures you use, between $7 and 12 million a year", Britton told Green Left. "That buys you maybe a moderate budget feature, maybe seven telemovies, maybe a few mini-series, not sufficient to ensure that there is an effective Australian presence on the screen.
"Having said that, it is a marked improvement from cabinet's earlier position which was that Australian content regulation was unnecessary for pay."
Because the broadcast media have a profound effect on the way people think, says Britton, it should be given special consideration: the protection of Australian television programs could not be compared to "the protection of the whitegoods industry".
"Television is without doubt our most popular art form, it's what people spend a lot of their lives doing. If the only programming you see is that of another country, then I think at the end of the day, you end up with a very distorted view of the world we live in."
A compelling reason for protecting Australian programs against competition from US programs ("foreign" is not a useful word, says Britton, when US programs account for 60% of television drama, and US films account for 95% of box office receipts) was the "massive cost differential". LA Law, for example, costs Channel 10 about $12,000 an hour, while an hour of E Street costs $110-130,000.
These views are widespread among journalists and actors. But a prominent film and theatre critic, who asked not to be named, points out that the left should think carefully about supporting moves to maximise Australian content rules.
He argues that the Media Alliance blends two issues — the industrial question of protecting members' jobs, and the social question of one's attitude to a "national culture" — which should be kept apart.
Promoting the idea that there was a national culture to be nurtured obscured the fact that most of what passes for "national" culture is actually commercial, or bourgeois, culture. This is what gave people a distorted view of the world; not the fact that it was produced in studios in Los Angeles rather than Sydney.
But what about hearing ideas in one's own language, in one's own accent? "If it's [radical media analyst and activist] Noam Chomsky, I'd rather hear him talking than a lot of Australian commentators. Let's not say: 'Because it's Australian it's good'." From a political and cultural point of view, he said, how could an Australian program like Chances qualify for any sort of left support when put beside, say, an excellent US documentary on Guatemala or homelessness in Washington? The left, he said, ought to be supporting progressive programs from wherever they came. Supporting Australian content regulations without putting this question first was poor strategy.
Looking for more funding for the production of progressive programs; more quality control regulations that weeded out some of the "crap" that passed for serious programming; and more public control over institutions such as the new Australian Broadcasting Association (soon to take over from the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal) to "resolutely withstand commercial pressures" could be part of a left strategy, he suggested.