Re-Visiting Tom O’Regan’s Australian Television Culture: Why Media Ownership,Regulation and Policy Still Matter

Australian television’s family resemblance to US and UK television is misleading

Australian television shares certain characteristics with the United States and the United Kingdom, countries to which Australia has a close cultural proximity. Nonetheless, critical differences exist. America, an English-speaking immigrant country like Australia, also limited its broadcasting licences, embraced localism principles and operated under media cross ownership regulations. But Australian television is unlike America’s not least because the latter’s television system operates in a far larger, resolutely commercial market, because American television’s owners also owned radio rather than print media, and because the US market has historically high cable and satellite penetration, generating more revenue for programme production in the US ecosystem. Cultural policy has never been a concern for US television providers.

Australia also shares a colonial and cultural heritage with the United Kingdom, and its national broadcaster the ABC is modelled on the BBC (an important source of programme imports). In contrast to the United Kingdom however, where public service broadcasting was the principal and most influential television system for decades, Australia’s commercial broadcasters have always enjoyed a position of thorough dominance. Known as national rather than public service broadcasters, the ABC (and later SBS) operate very differently as a result and have less influence in the Australian television system than the BBC. They also have lower per capita funding than their UK and Canadian counterparts. Recognising these differences helps us to understand how Australian television’s distinctiveness lies ‘at a point somewhere between two seemingly opposed positions: Australian television as a particular invention of television and Australian television as simply an imitation of the transnational form of television’ (O’Regan, 1993: xx).

The dominance of commercial broadcasting in Australia remains important not least because advertiser-funded television has traditionally been the primary site of policy frameworks intended to ensure supply of Australian content. Now that advertisers have found better platforms on which to advertise (such as search and social media), commercial television’s business model is under immense pressure. The national broadcasters’ dependence on government funding renders them highly vulnerable to budget cuts. The availability of funding for Australian television, particularly high cost forms such as drama and children’s programmes is lower than in countries with better funded public service broadcasters (the United Kingdom) or much higher rates of cable and satellite uptake (the United States).

Media policy and regulation shape Australian television

Media policy has shaped Australian television since its inception, including through the early mandating of the local ownership of commercial broadcasters and requirement for local content. The safeguarding of supplies of Australian television through local content quotas, and direct and indirect forms of state subsidy is justified because of television’s role in supporting national culture, and in ‘fostering a sense of citizenship, social identities and creating and representing a common cultural and political core’ (O’Regan, 1993: 81). However, in tracing the history of protections for domestically produced content, Australian Television Culture reminds us that (with the exception of children’s programmes) local content quotas have underpinned rather than created artificial demand for local programmes, particularly drama, that were popular with Australian audiences.

In contrast to the time when Tom was writing, the fragmentation of Australian television with the introduction of digital multi-channels in the mid-2000s increased programming costs for broadcasters without generating any new sources of revenue. Under such conditions, the networks increasingly rely on sport, news and factual entertainment in attempts to attract the mass audiences they desperately needed to sell to advertisers (Goldsmith, 2015). Content quotas now generate rather than underpin demand for the Australian drama that is an increasingly unattractive proposition to advertiser-funded broadcasters operating in a fragmented market.

While nobody in 1993 could have anticipated the disruption that Internet distribution would create for national television services, or that new platforms for advertisers would dramatically erode commercial broadcasters’ revenues, Tom’s assertion that drama as ‘high-budget local programming’ is the most dispensable form of television production (O’Regan, 1993: 77) and that infotainment production would increase without drama content regulations (O’Regan, 1993: 78) is entirely correct. In 2021, content quotas for Australian children’s television were removed on commercial broadcasters, and their Australian drama obligations watered down. These deregulatory developments placed greater responsibility on the ABC for the provision of local drama and children’s programmes at a time when its funding is estimated to be 29.5% lower than it was in 1986 (Dawson, 2020).

Australian television is double faced, both inward and outward looking

By dint of its medium size, and its dependence on imported programmes, which made up half the schedule at the time of the book’s publication, Australian television provides both a ‘local window and a window to the world’ (O’Regan, 1993: 59). In the period the book covers, Tom’s optimistic view that the ‘dynamic interplay’ between local and imported programming benefits Australian television and its audiences shines through. Both imports and local programming were popular with Australian viewers. Local content, including drama, made an important contribution to the creation of ‘a common or civic culture for a disparate population’ (O’Regan, 1993: 81). High cost forms of local television such as drama thus successfully addressed both cultural and commercial imperatives. Imported programmes also added value to Australian television by mitigating against the substantial costs of establishing television’s infrastructure, by subsiding local production costs, by attracting Australian audiences to advertiser supported television and by providing a valuable contrast to local content. In these ways ‘Imported programming is competition for local production and complementary to it’ (O’Regan, 1993: 59).

For scholars grappling with the challenges of contemporary policy reform, the reminder that the cultural argument for Australian content was initially made on the grounds of audiences needing protection from the ill effects of imports, subsequently developed into cultural sovereignty justifications in the 1980s, and later prioritised ‘cultural expression, diversity and innovation’ in the 1990s (O’Regan, 1993: 75) is particularly useful. Similarly, as Tom states, broadcasting policy is industry policy as well as cultural policy, which has arguably led to arguments for what is effectively industry protectionism becoming cloaked in cultural justifications (Potter, 2015). As Tom observed, ‘Television’s import mix is becoming more important as additional television services develop, advertising growth becomes limited, and new services erode the audience shares of existing licensees’ (O’Regan 1993: 104). The same is true today, although the demands of industry advocates and politicians for a ‘level’ regulatory playing field fail to acknowledge the different business models and content strategies under which subscription video on demand services (SVODs) and linear broadcasters operate.

Media ownership matters

Media ownership structures have always affected the production, distribution and visibility of Australian television, and continue to do so. As the chapter dedicated to entrepreneurial television emphasises, Australian policymakers’ reliance on commercial ‘entrepreneurial’ television for the production of television with high cultural value, such as drama and children’s programmes, carries many risks. The ownership ructions, financial profligacy and policy changes of 1986–1992 exposed the vulnerability of Australia’s advertiser-funded broadcasting to mismanagement, and any reduction in their advertising revenue flows. The disastrous effects of television stations’ ownership changes were exacerbated in the 1980s by economic conditions that included high interest rates and a ‘dramatic slowdown in the rate of increase of advertising revenues’ (O’Regan 1993: 50). Combined, they led to a reduction in the quality and quantity of domestic content production, particularly mini-series, drama and documentary, by Networks Seven, Nine and Ten. A concomitant reliance on the ABC for scripted drama production developed, often in partnership with independent producers, which also entailed making use of other sources of public funding from screen organisations.

The vulnerability of drama production to commercial television’s fortunes is seen again in the 2020s, compounded by the effects of COVID-19 and a deregulatory government that has removed children’s quota obligations and watered down adult drama obligations. Commercial broadcasters, under pressure from the programming demands of multichannelling and declining advertising revenues are again defunding high-cost genres, particularly drama and children’s programmes. The ownership of Australian television remains just as relevant. Nine Entertainment, which owns Network Nine, also owns online news brands including Fairfax Media’s The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, SVOD provider Stan and real estate portal Domain. Kerry Stokes, a long-time Liberal party donor, owns Seven West Media, which includes Network Seven, and America’s CBSViacom owns Network Ten. The political influence wielded by Seven and Nine’s news provision gives their parent companies a significant influence in policy debates, not dissimilar to the influence owners like Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch had in the 1980s and 1990s. ²

Australian television includes dedicated multi-cultural and Indigenous television services

The introduction of SBS in 1980 was integral to the modernisation of Australian television from ‘the regional, monocultural’ into a much more multi-cultural television system that gave representation to minority viewpoints. Its arrival thus signalled the ‘multicultural invention of TV’ in Australia, focused on ‘the Australian experience of migration and marginalisation’ (O’Regan 1993: 167). Greeted with hostility by commentators, commercial broadcasters, the production sector and a disgruntled ABC, SBS effected change both in terms of the programming it offered multi-cultural audiences and in terms of its impact on the rest of Australian television. The latter included the provision of new models for television programming. SBS allowed content innovation, diversified representation and prioritised prime time international news coverage including through its unique nightly world news bulletin. It normalised multilingual programming and the high-quality sub-titling of programmes.

Indigenous television services and programmes, and Indigenous organisations that controlled television services began to emerge in Australia in the 1980s, guided by the principles of self-determination. By 1993, a range of community-based initiatives to support Indigenous television services had developed in Australia, including Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS) units: small, all-in-one radio and television units that allowed communities to produce and broadcast local content. At the time of the book’s publication, while Indigenous television programming and services had increased, existing service Imparja Television, which operated a regional commercial television licence, was struggling because its operators had very little control over the television it bought. As a result, Indigenous content made up only about 2% of the schedule. The 2007 launch of 24-hour digital channel National Indigenous Television (NITV) service, based in the SBS network, saw Indigenous television firmly located in public service broadcasting for the first time, rather than community media.

Australian Television Culture anticipates many of the problems that would beset Australian television in the future but is nonetheless a deeply optimistic book. Although itself a historical document now, Tom’s book remains a valuable text because despite all the industrial, economic and technological upheavals that have affected Australian television over the last three decades, it retains its distinctive culture and history. What we initially see as astonishingly new will often have played out before, as Tom invariably recognised. Australian Television Culture continues to provide strong foundations on which future scholars can build.

Ownership structures and public value

Two interconnected themes which are present in Australian Television Culture and which Tom and I wrote about together are the enduring importance of media ownership structures to the production and circulation of Australian television, and the centrality of regulation, including local content protections, to safeguarding television’s delivery of social and cultural outcomes. We were both intrigued by the structural changes to the Australian production sector that were occurring with increasing frequency during the mid-2000s. Significant numbers of Australian production companies (including CrackerJack, Southern Star, Matchbox Pictures, Screentime and Essential Entertainment) were being bought up by largely US conglomerates.

Despite their foreign ownership and structural connections to global super-indie production companies, the Australia-based companies continued to access public subsidies, including from organisations such as Screen Australia. Together, we explored the implications of this ‘globalisation from within’ (O’Regan and Potter, 2013). As we noted, ownership by a large, international conglomerate brings considerable benefits to the company that has been acquired: access to global distribution and financing networks, superior market intelligence, specialised production knowledge and a means to effectively negotiate an at times chaotic international media marketplace. Whether or not Australian taxpayers derive value from these industrial arrangements is less clear, another question that characterised many of our conversations.

We found Mark Moore’s (1995) work on public value a useful lens through which to view the tensions between regulation that creates public value, and thereby justifies state subsidy generated through the coercive power of taxation, and regulation that appears to prioritise economic objectives. The public value of Australian television is quite separate from any monetary gains made through its licencing, sale and the exploitation of IP, and is derived from its capacity to situate Australians in their national cultural contexts. Policy frameworks have ensured in the past that Australian television, especially drama and children’s programmes, contributes to the goals of national cultural representation, and hence generates public value for Australian taxpayers who are subsiding a substantial proportion of its costs.

We were both aware that the increased internationalisation of Australian television and television’s Internet distribution had undermined policy instruments such as the Children’s Television Standards that were intended to help secure the goals of national cultural representation. New generally US-based search and social media platforms for advertising were also attracting revenue that in the past would have gone to Australia’s commercial broadcasters. Tom and I wondered how national policy frameworks could – or if they even should – accommodate these transformations and continue to create public value. Earlier shifts in policy making in the 2000s that prioritised commercial rather than cultural objectives encouraged Australian screen industries’ increased participation in globally dispersed systems of production, as well as levels of screen business expansion that are likely to prove unsustainable. These developments had eroded the principles of regulating television in the public interest, and the achievement of social and cultural objectives.

We re-visited our interest in the creation of public value through regulation in a chapter we wrote together in early 2020 (O’Regan and Potter, in press), in which we mapped some of the impacts of television’s new platforms on the production of screen content, its regulation, on news, current affairs and documentary, and on consumer protections, such as children’s right to privacy. Tom’s sense of optimism and belief in the need to regulate media in the public interest permeate our chapter’s arguments. The difficulties inherent in regulating online media and global digital platforms, we suggest, are no justification for abandoning long-standing principles of public interest.

Once we separate public interest conceptions from particular, longstanding regulatory and policy mechanisms we can see how underlying public interest values that have guided media regulation and media development policies and priorities since the 1930s continue to be relevant . . . They remain crucial to an effective media landscape and have vital effects on social cohesion, public welfare, childhood and consumer development and protection and trust in public speech. (O’Regan and Potter, in press)

The significance of the ownership and regulation of Australian television, and the challenges of securing television’s cultural and social objectives through policy making remain just as relevant now as they were in 1993. Indeed, the multinational ownership of Australian television channels and production companies, and the effects of policy on the production, circulation and public value of Australian drama make up two of three sub-projects of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project 2021–2023 ‘Making Australian Television in the 21st Century’, led by Amanda Lotz, Kevin Sanson and me.

As a scholar, mentor and loyal friend Tom is missed by so many. But his enormous contributions to his discipline, his institutions and his colleagues, particularly to the PhD students like me that he supervised, and mentored so generously for years after, continue to bear fruit. And Australian Television Culture remains a must read text for anyone trying to make sense of the complex, fascinating and at times bewildering entity that is Australian television.