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December 29, 2005
Kerry Packer, the Australian media baron, has died. There is masses of commentary in the Australian newspapers. This death marks an end of an era, one in which political patronage (by the Hawke/Keating federal government in the 1980s) built Kerry Packer's fortune, and he emerged the dominant commercial player in the Australian television industry.
Bill Leak
The background is one whereby the nation-state used the instruments of protection, content regulation and subsidy to foster an infant screen production industry (film and television) to ensure that Australians were able to choose to watch Australian TV shows. The deal was that federal Government would protect free-to-air television and the networks would produce Australian drama. This would contribute to Australia's national culture and so prevent our national culture being dominated by the cultural expression of other countries (the UK and the US).
The argument is well stated by Gillian Armstrong.She says the significance of our national culture is that:
It's our identity as Australians. It's what makes us unique: our language, our idioms, our character, our stories, our humour, our outlook on life. These things are not fixed but are challenged and reaffirmed by our cultural expression. They are reflected by the stories we tell and the images we see.
Thus the nationalist position of the 1970s when confronted by the international attractiveness of American film and television.
The nation is defined as a spontaneous association of humans bound together by shared language, culture, ethnicity and beliefs. Armstrong's nationalism presupposes a normative congruence of political institutions, economic activity and cultural identity and experience. Without such congruence, communities are unstable and their members are denied their patrimony of feeling "at home." Hence the inference: there can be no political sovereignty without cultural sovereignty.
The concept "national culture'', which has been both a central organizing category in the shaping of economic and cultural production, currently fits the reality of television less and less in a globalised world. The internationalization of mass culture threatens national identity and the stability of the political institutions and systems which are assumed to rest on it.
I guess that there will be an increasing decoupling of public policy from culture in the future.
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