BROADCASTING POLICY in AUSTRALIA Political Influences and the Federal Government's Role in the Establishment and Development Of
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BROADCASTING POLICY IN AUSTRALIA Political Influences and the Federal Government's Role in the Establishment and Development of Public/Community Broadcasting in Australia - A History 1939 to 1992 Phœbe Neva Thornley BA Dip.Ed. (Sydney) Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Newcastle, New South Wales © Phœbe Thornley February 1999 CHAPTER ONE - INTRODUCTION. This thesis is an argument about Australian government broadcasting policy, particularly as it relates to public broadcasting.1 The topic originated from the coalescence of two paths of experience. Since 1985 I have been involved in public broadcasting, firstly in helping to establish the community station, 2CCC-FM, on the Central Coast of NSW, and later, as a volunteer at 2NUR-FM, the station at the University of Newcastle. Returning to a university environment inspired the resumption of historical studies, an undergraduate passion. The public broadcasting connection provided an awareness that although the sector was about twenty years old, no comprehensive history had been written. There was an urgent need to fill this vacuum as some documents were already missing and much valuable potential oral material was about to be lost with some of the pioneers nearing the ends of their lives.2 __________ 1. When the idea of public broadcasting was conceived the Australian government defined it as all non-profit, non-government broadcasting, with community broadcasting as that part of public broadcasting which involved stations serving particular geographic areas. See Working Party on Public Broadcasting, Report to the Minister for the Media, Canberra, AGPS, 1975, p.1. With the Broadcasting Services Act, in 1992, the government confused the situation by calling the ABC public broadcasting and all that which was non-profit and non-government, community broadcasting. For the period under discussion, the original terms were used and seem more appropriate here. For this thesis public broadcasting has been defined as all that broadcasting which was both non-profit and non-government with community broadcasting as that part of public broadcasting which involved stations serving particular geographic areas. Broadcasting itself is basically point to multi-point communication by wireless transmission. 2. Interviews or correspondence has been engaged in with 35 people who were involved in one way or another. Three of them are now deceased. The question of the value of this kind of source material is dealt with later in this chapter. 1. Initially the primary concern was with the development of this third sector of broadcasting and the myths that had evolved around it. It soon became apparent that what little had been written on the subject was either by public broadcasters themselves and a mere chronicle, or was slanted towards the interests of communications theorists. The quality of this work has been rather colourfully described by the historian, Humphrey McQueen: 'it is just as well that media scholars are (Mayer excepted) lazier than academics generally, since they cannot communicate'.3 Graeme Osborne and Glen Lewis have been less derogatory in their description of communications scholarship and have listed many of the publications in the field. However, they concluded that the work is still far from satisfactory: There has been a discontinuity of discourses about the uses of communication in Australia since the 1960s - more than just a normal generational change of emphasis. One reason for this was that the first generation of full-time communication tertiary academics were fully occupied teaching and had little time for research. Another was that the discourses about the media in Australia that did emerge in the 1970s rarely had any historical dimension. The new research models tended to be social science rather than humanities based, and showed little interest in earlier discourses.4 They only found continuity in a few specific areas, such as the 'liberal to-left critiques of the effects of the media', the question of the concentration of media ownership and the argument about the Australian content component of programming.5 Furthermore, although they observed that there had been criticism of the 'stop-start nature of broadcasting policy', they noted that there was no consistency in the analyses given.6 In fact Osborne and Lewis discovered three different sets of analysis of __________ 3. Humphrey McQueen, 'Newsfront', Meanjin, vol.38, no.2, July, 1979, p.266. 4. Graeme Osborne and Glen Lewis, Communications Traditions in 20th century Australia, Melbourne, OUP, 1995, p.142. 5. ibid., pp.142-143. 6. ibid., pp.144. 2. post-war Australian broadcasting policy. First was the chaos and confusion view put forward by critics like Myles Wright, former Chairman of the ABCB and Henry Mayer, father of media studies in Australia and founding editor of the journal Media Information Australia. This theory held that policy was unpredictable and irrational, really no method at all. Osborne and Lewis found that others, such as James Malone, Federal Director of FACTS and Peter White of La Trobe University, saw technological developments as determining Australia's broadcasting policy. A third conception of broadcasting policy was identified by Osborne and Lewis. This interpreted policy development as an incremental process determined by political pressures and administrative procedures, and was held by the previous broadcasting administrator, Geoff Evans and broadcasting law expert and sometime Chairman of the ABC, Mark Armstrong.7 All these ideas have some limited merit but it has to be remembered that none of these analyses were made from an historical perspective nor did they consider public broadcasting. Not only were Osborne and Lewis correct in their assessment that there has been little historical analysis, but the issue of the political influences and the government's role in the development of public broadcasting, has been almost entirely overlooked. In this thesis, political influences refers to all those factors which determine both the way the government makes decisions, and the decisions themselves. This overall interaction is also called the politics of public broadcasting. These aspects of the subject are fundamental to this thesis because regulation and control of broadcasting became part of the federal government's responsibility for communication as this medium emerged in the years following federation. This was not the regulation and control of programming, which, when implemented can be used to exercise a measure of social control over the listeners. The restriction of broadcasting programs as a means of social control has been covered to some extent by the works cited by Osborne and Lewis, and as will be seen later, by some of those public broadcasters who have written about the sector. The regulation and __________ 7. ibid. 3. control of broadcasting, that was of concern to the federal government in this context, was of the medium itself and was necessary in a way that it was not for newspapers because of the different technical nature of the medium. The example of free local newspapers illustrates the point. Any number of such newspapers can be delivered to people's letterboxes and they can read them all, sequentially. If a number of radio stations broadcast on the same frequency concurrently, none of them can be distinguished from a general noise. It was realised from the start that broadcasting cannot exist as a satisfactory medium of communication without the regulation and control of the use of the airwaves themselves, and the federal government took on this role. Kevin Livingston's two articles on the attitudes of colonial governments to public communication just prior to federation provided an understanding of the relationship between Australia's constitution and broadcasting policy.8 However, the constitution did not clarify how the government should view the use of the airwaves. There were two basic possibilities, as a public service and as a commercial enterprise. But even within the concept of broadcasting as a public service, there were a number of options, simply providing what listeners demanded or seeking to educate for citizenship. David Wilkinson and Mike Pedler have explained it slightly differently by asserting that, in any public service enterprise, those in charge have to determine whether they are dealing with 'customers' or 'citizens'.9 Since the constitution did not address any of these issues tremendous scope remained for various political influences to attempt to push government policy in different directions. This thesis analyses the political influences at work, the unique response __________ 8. Kevin Livingston, 'Australia's 19th century communication revolution', Australian Journal of Communication, vol.20, no.1, 1993, pp.154-165; Kevin Livingston, 'Anticipating federation: the federalising of telecommunications in Australia', Australian Historical Studies, vol.26, no.102, April 1994, pp.97-118. 9. David Wilkinson and Mike Pedler, 'Strategic thinking in public service', B. Garratt, ed., Developing Strategic Thought, London, Harper Collins, 1995, pp.223-245. 4. of the Australian government among governments of the English speaking world, and the resultant policies which determined the development of broadcasting generally, and later, public broadcasting specifically. One aspect of radio broadcasting which is not covered at all in this thesis is Radio Australia, the short wave service