Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Communication policy
– to intervene in markets or let them take their course – are never far from the
surface. To the extent that the internet and Australia’s most popular social media
platforms all originated in the USA, it is unsurprising that policy debate about
them occurs against a background of American ‘First Amendment’ jurisprudence:
‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’.
The USA, however, is also home to antitrust laws, first enacted in 1890. When
finally replicated in Australia in the 1970s, these imported a similar principle
(consumers are best served when businesses compete freely) along with a different
policy stance – the state might need to intervene in markets, rather than stay
out of them, to ensure competition is free. In communications policy, aggressive
antitrust action, like the break-up of the dominant telephone company AT&T in
the 1980s, offer American precedents as significant as the long line of Supreme
Court decisions striking down laws held to infringe free speech. ‘Free markets’ and
‘government’ intervention’ are not universal policy solutions but ‘two caricatured
abstractions’. 46
Tracing the development of the policy settlement in Australian broadcasting
from the 1950s, when commercial stations and their interests dominated,
regulatory agencies were weak, public trust obligations were unevenly applied, and
the forces for change were weaker than those favouring institutional continuity,
TerryFlewarguedmorethanadecadeagothatthescaleofchangesinthemedia
landscape meant it was already inadequate to construct a social-democratic media
policy that was ‘essentially defensive’. 47 Considering communications policy in the
future, policy makers may have less – and less-effective – tools available to address
challenges, because so many of Australia’s most influential communications services
are now provided by corporations that are not licensed, funded or owned
by Australian governments. The liberalisation and privatisation of communications
markets and enterprises and the migration of broadcast television from analogue to
digital transmission provided once-off opportunities to recraft policy settlements –
to spend some of the proceeds of Telstra privatisation improving communications
in under-served communities, and to create a satellite platform that finally equalised
the availability of free-to-air TV services across the country. Beyond the likely
privatisation of the NBN once construction is complete, big moments of rupture
like these, providing scope for sweeping policy change and especially trade-offs
among different constituencies, may be harder to identify.
Conclusions
Networked digital communications and the liberalisation, privatisation and partial
renationalisation of Australia’s communications markets and institutions have
46 Gruen 2018.
47 Flew 2006.
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