There is that scene in the original Star Wars where R2D2 beats Chewbacca in some kind of holographic monster chess. The Wookie complains about the loss. Han Solo points out to C3PO that Wookies are known to rip the arms out of their enemies, which prompts C3PO to instructs R2D2, "R2, let the Wookie win."
Such is life in the sphere of media policy in Australia. Here's something from Pleiades that shows just how it works.
Given the importance of the Convergence Review to the eventual shape of the content industries in Australia, it’s pleasing to see that a debate about the policy and regulatory frameworks surrounding them has finally emerged. Yesterday saw the release of a high-quality research paper on convergence by the University of New South Wales’ Catharine Lumby and Kate Crawford, who are senior academics at the Journalism and Media Research Centre there.
Entitled The Adaptive Moment: A Fresh Approach to Convergent Media in Australia, the paper does a much better job than the Convergence Review Committee of setting out the patchwork quilt of competing state and Commonwealth regulations that supposedly govern Australian communications, media, broadcasting and the internet.
It’s not a pretty picture. As they point out, because the internet is “a multifaceted, distributed network with no centralised gatekeeper”, the “vast range of communication options it contains were once governed by distinct policy areas”. As a result, “policy responses to convergence end up being ramshackle and jerry-built”.
The bottom line is that they're likely to roll into one a regulatory body that oversees the whole range of media as a 'one stop shop' with community standards. The best thing about this idea is that it probably gets rid of more jobs of regulators. But can you imagine how powerful this body would become? That is possibly a recipe for various kinds of expression to be oppressed and suppressed by a central body with an axe to grind. Should we see a prolonged period of conservative rule, it won't be long before people would be lining up with pitchforks looking to flay Bill Henson again.
The other nugget in the article is this bit:
It’s also worth thinking about how convergence will shape Australia’s future arts and cultural policies. Historically, there has been almost no understanding among arts policy makers that the internet or broadcast media are even relevant to cultural policy — as the Australia Council’s laughably late and ill-considered attempts to create an arts strategy “for a digital era” attest.
Lumby’s and Crawford’s paper shows what might be achieved if cultural policy was reconsidered in light of the rapid change sweeping the communications and media sector. But the very fact that the Convergence Review and the National Cultural Policy are being pursued in parallel, with apparently little to do with each other, shows how tough it is to get governments to think outside of their existing silos.
All of this makes the notion of cultural policy even laughable.
The perennial problem for Australia is that the government is always the first and last sponsor of cultural projects. Our publishers and exhibitors and galleries are either too small to amass the kind of capital to initiate their own projects, or these projects tend to be extensions of corporate PR more than genuine attempts to enrich our cultural experience. It's pretty obvious that cultural activities are really not valued by the wider community so it is hard for the government to see a utility in it beyond chest-thumping when somebody wins an Oscar or a Booker Prize.
This isn't to say artists should be entitled to hand outs from the public purse, rather, that it is clear that Australia is only interested in its cultural industries as something to point at and say, "see? we've got one. Now let's talk about the cricket."
Other countries don't quite have this kind of government-led policy formation. In America and Europe and Japan, cultural policy is often signing off after the fact as things keep happening. Culture is something that happens regardless of what bureaucrats say or do, or what guidelines for controlling the expression are laid down. Artists will do as their talent dictates. Cultural Producers will produce as their circumstance dictate. It's not really a problem that the greater community has little appreciation of this fact. We've been happy to be a nation of bogans in the past, it's not worth pretending that having a cultural policy is going to help us grow up from being a nation of bogans in the future. In that sense, discussions about cultural policy is just all window dressing.
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