Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
Fairfax Media by Nine Entertainment Corporation was justified as a merger of
old newspaper and TV assets to create a media company for the future, but it
was also an opportunistic acquisition of the currently faster-growing Domain (real
estate advertising) and Stan (video streaming) businesses at a moment of ‘elevated
valuation’ of Nine’s stock. 9
The tech giants that have risen to such prominence in the communications
and media landscape – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google/Alphabet,
the so-called FAANGs, as well as the durable Microsoft – are based overseas,
unlike so many of the telecommunications, television and newspaper companies
that dominated in Australia in the second half of the 20th century. Traditional
measures of the scale of foreign involvement in domestic markets, like ‘foreign
direct investment’ and numbers of local employees, are not good proxies for the
level of influence achieved by US-based platforms. A large part of their power arises
from the data they are able to collect and analyse about their users. This data has
itself become an economic resource, ‘the oil of the digital era’. Some argue it has
changed the nature of competition so fundamentally that it necessitates a ‘radical
rethink’ of competition policy. 10 Atthesametime,thecorporatebehemothsofthe
formal ‘data economy’ borrow from and interact with an informal economy of usergenerated
content, open source software, crowd-funded projects, unremunerated
labour and organisational cross-subsidies. 11 The scale and sophistication of the
data and analytical tools promise new levels of knowledge for policy makers, while
the complexity of online and offline behaviour reinforces the fundamental
unknowability of social practices. 12
Actors and politics of the domain
The Australian Policy Handbook’s summary of the institutions of Australian public
policy lists various elements of government (the executive, the Cabinet, public
servants, ministerial advisers) and opposition, the ‘third sector’, the ‘fourth estate’,
social movements, lobbyists and stakeholders. 13 In communications, several
specific institutions deserve particular attention. Publicly funded regulators (the
Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Australian Competition and
Consumer Commission) and industry-funded complaints-handling organisations
(the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, the Australian Press Council)
play significant roles. The prevalence of state-funded organisations, discussed in
the next section, means governments still play a major role in providing
communications services as well as regulating service providers. The fourth estate,
9 Hewett 2018.
10 ‘The world’s most valuable resource’ 2017.
11 Lobato and Thomas 2015.
12 Given 2012.
13 Althaus, Bridgman and Davis 2018, 18–31.
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