Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
industry that is efficient, competitive and responsive to Australian needs. These
are enduring themes, articulated in distinctive policy responses in different eras.
So regular mail deliveries and public payphones have been overtaken by fast fixed
broadband and wide mobile coverage as the most important basic services.
Broadcast radio and television are now less important to emerging generations
than to older media users. The High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision 14 rewrote the
political and cultural framework within which ‘Australian content’ needs to be
imagined. Existing mechanisms for dealing with fairness and accuracy in news
and current affairs have been overwhelmed in the digital era: policy responses to
‘fake news’ are a work-in-progress. 15 Communications networks have always been
instruments of defence, national security and law enforcement but the rules and
tools of surveillance have changed constantly: foreign shareholding in Telstra is still
capped at 35 per cent and in 2012 and 2018 the federal government banned Chinese
telecoms equipment makers Huawei and ZTE from supplying equipment for the
NBN and 5G networks. 16
There is a strong element of bipartisanship in these broadly expressed goals but
communications is often a heavily contested, highly political field. This is partly
because the goals themselves sometimes conflict with each other: introducing a
major overhaul of broadcasting law in the early 1990s that introduced statutory
objects for the first time, the minister acknowledged ‘there are some tensions
between the objects that will need to be balanced by the regulator and the courts’. 17
Suppliers, regulators and customers can legitimately disagree about the benchmark
set in the Telecommunications Act 1997 (Cth): ‘accessible and affordable carriage
services … supplied at performance standards that reasonably meet the social,
industrial and commercial needs of the Australian community’. 18 The National
Classification Code says ‘adults should be able to read, hear, see and play what
they want’, but also that ‘everyone should be protected from exposure to unsolicited
material that they find offensive’. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
is ‘by far the nation’s most trusted media organisation’, according to a Roy Morgan
survey in May 2018, 19 although some in politics deeply distrust it: ‘our enemies
talking to our friends’, said former Howard government adviser Graeme Morris in
1997. 20
The broadening and deepening of the social and economic role of networked
digital technologies has changed the politics of communications in at least two
ways. First, the political power of particular media forms, especially commercial
TV, newspapers and talkback radio, has diminished, along with the unrivalled
14 Mabo and others v Queensland (No. 2) [1992] HCA 23; (1992) 175 CLR 1 (Mabo).
15 Nelson and Taneja 2018; Viner 2016.
16 Slezak and Bogle 2018.
17 Collins 1992, 3600.
18 Telecommunications Act 1997, section 3.
19 Roy Morgan 2018.
20 Hartcher 2009.
528