In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the key functions of government are performed by The Ministry of Truth. The ministry provides all the news, entertainment, education and the fine arts consumed by the population. Everything broadcast, produced and published is controlled by Big Brother.
In 2006 in Australia there is the federal Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. The department has responsibility for telecommunications, arts and culture, and sport. In recent years the way in which successive federal governments have manipulated media laws to suit the purposes of themselves and the proprietors would do Big Brother proud.
In the dying days of his prime ministership, when Paul Keating heard that Kerry Packer had described John Howard as a "decent man", Keating reacted in a time-honoured way. Keating was furious that Packer wasn't grateful for what Labor had done for him. He threatened to strike at the heart of Packer's commercial interests by legislating to create a fourth television network. There appeared to be no policy behind this vow -- it seemed to be personal.
In the end nothing came of Keating's rant. In a country that prides itself on its free and open media, it would be frightening if a prime minister regarded communications policy as nothing other than a means to reward his friends and punish his enemies.
There was a time (luckily brief) when aspects of Keating's Australia would not look out of place in Vladimir Putin's Russia today. The fault was not even Keating's. He was simply using every means at his disposal to stay in power. The fault lies with both major political parties, which have been complicit in creating a system which makes media policy a plaything of government. Neither side is willing to disturb the status quo. The party in government doesn't want to give up its control, and the party in opposition comforts itself with the knowledge that opposition doesn't last forever.
Government control of the media in Australia ranges across everything from the type of television in the family living room to whether the Ashes should be shown live-to-air. It even extends to the question of, when a television executive buys lunch for a scriptwriter, whether the cost of the sandwiches counts towards the requirement that providers devote at least 10 per cent of program expenditure to new Australian drama. And this doesn't count the government's ownership of the ABC, or the shemozzle of the foreign ownership and cross-media laws.
If a free media is essential to liberal democracy, which it is, the solution is not greater government control. More government regulation of the media only provides more opportunity for political corruption. The answer is actually less regulation of the media or, preferably, none at all.
The argument against such a move has always been that it will lead to media concentration and a small number of owners who will control the major news and entertainment outlets. Whether this is true has never been tested, and in any case would it be worse than the situation that now prevails? The three major television networks are in diverse hands, but this doesn't translate into a diversity of content. The staple of all of the networks is sport and reality television.
Most Orwellian attempts to create a market for local television drama by forcing the networks to produce it have failed. As much as politicians and regulators would like to think they can shape consumer preferences, they can't.
Technology is gradually making newspapers, the traditional form of transmitting news, redundant. The death of newspapers (like the death of printed books) won't happen any time soon, but the trend is obvious.
Americans between the age of 18 and 34 already rate the internet as their main source of information, followed by pay television, free-to-air television and then newspapers. Rupert Murdoch has predicted that by 2040 newspapers could be obsolete.
If the Australian government applied the same logic to the regulation of the internet as it applies to newspapers and television and radio stations, popular websites would be forced to be sold or shut down because they had a dominant market position and had too many viewers. (As bizarre as such a policy would be, recent proposals to put the internet under United Nations control make this scenario possible).
When Helen Coonan releases the federal government policy on cross-media and foreign ownership in the next few weeks, it can only be hoped that she is looking to the future, and not backwards to 1984.
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