Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
infrastructure’, but ‘limited understanding’ of the possibilities of e-governance and
lagging focus on land use planning. 44 The findings highlight the policy challenges
that digital networks provide to political structures that were crafted a long time
ago – a feature shared with other overarching issues like climate change.
Debates and non-agenda issues
New forms of media and communication have often had dramatic impacts on
existing practices and institutions. The rise of social media platforms is particularly
significant for politics and policy in Australia for at least three reasons. First,
these platforms have undermined the business models for news organisations,
broadcasters and telcos that have been such important vehicles for achieving public
policy goals. The seriousness of the challenges was demonstrated by the decision
to have the ACCC conduct a Digital Platforms Inquiry in 2018, with a final report
published in 2019. Second, social media have changed the ways issues make it onto
andoffpolicyagendasandhowpeopleandpoliticiansrespond.Mainstreammedia
remain important but they are less dominant conduits for communication between
electors and their representatives. Third, social media platforms have themselves
become important policy-making institutions. Facebook and Google and their
wholly owned subsidiaries Instagram and YouTube, for example, are now among
society’s most powerful information and cultural intermediaries. The terms and
conditions of service they specify and the decisions they take in response to
complaints now comprise jurisdictions with at least as much influence as law, the
courts and formal systems of industry co- and self-regulation. An example of this
agenda-setting and policy-making role is the decision by the rental accommodation
app Airbnb to remove listings in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank
‘that are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians’. Acknowledging
Airbnb itself was ‘certainly not the experts when it comes to the historical disputes
in this region’ and that the listings were not illegal under US law, Airbnb
nonetheless developed a five-point framework to guide decisions about listings in
occupied territories generally and decided, in this case, to remove the 200 listings
on its site. 45
Much of the revolution in digital communications has not been controllable
by the telecommunications and broadcasting institutions that managed so much
technological change in Australia in the 20th century. New services like online
and mobile search, streaming audio and video, social media and smartphone apps
arrived without the government policy inquiries, public funding or legislative
change that accompanied direct-dial telephones, AM and FM radio, television, the
domestic satellite and digital TV. Yet old debates about the role of government
44 Tooran 2015.
45 Airbnb 2018; Kershner 2018.
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