Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
theassistancetothefilmandTVindustryisnowprovidedthisway,astax‘offsets’
or rebates encouraging production (‘Producer Offset’), large budget film and TV
projects shot in Australia (‘Location Offset’) and post-production, digital and visual
effects production in Australia (‘PDV Offset’). 30
Institutions
Australian governments have created many organisations to undertake communications
activities. Their forms differ widely. Australia Post and National Broadband
Network Co are government-business enterprises whose shares are wholly owned
by the Commonwealth. One is old, the country’s oldest continually operating
organisation; the other is young, created only in 2009. The national broadcasters
(the ABC and SBS, into which the National Indigenous TV service was merged in
2012), the National Library and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School
do not have shares, but are corporate Commonwealth entities set up under their
own legislation. Their boards are appointed by the responsible ministers and
funding is provided mainly from the federal budget. Another, different kind of
organisation is the National Relay Service, a non-government organisation that has
a contract with the federal government to run a call centre enabling people with
hearing disabilities to make telephone calls. The contract is re-tendered when it
expires and is funded by a levy on telecommunications carriers imposed under
federal legislation.
Making policy
The ‘Australian policy cycle’ described in The Australian Policy Handbook 31 is a
useful way of conceptualising the way issues are identified and responses
developed, implemented and evaluated, but it is rare for communications policy
to proceed in so orderly a manner. The field is rife with large, detailed reports
from government agencies and parliamentary committees that had little immediate
impact, and relatively brief ministerial media releases that announced fundamental
changes. In telecommunications, the NBN, announced by the Rudd government
in April 2009, was an example of the latter. The ‘Beazley Statement’ that ended
Telecom Australia’s monopoly in the early 1990s was another, although it can also
be interpreted as a delayed response to the recommendations of the Davidson
Committee, which was shelved by the Fraser Coalition government that
commissioned it. 32 The big changes to spectrum management implemented in the
Radiocommunications Act 1992 (Cth) were a rare example of a neat ‘policy cycle’:
a report from the federal government’s Bureau of Transport and Communications
30 Screen Australia n.d.
31 Althaus, Bridgman and Davis 2018, 43–53.
32 Raiche 1997, 2.
532