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Dr Terry Cutler1
Dr Terry Cutler, Chair, Australia Council
It is a given that the old regulatory models for the promotion of Australian content or local content are simply not sustainable. In my view, they are simply not migratable to new media and the new world. There are some very simple reasons for that. Firstly, so much of the discussion about local content promotion, which is unfortunately mainly concentrated in film and television rather than other content areas, has been around licensing-based regimes premised on scarcity. These models do not hold up in a world of digital convergence. They also collapse in a world of globalisation with increasing cross-border and cross-channel co-production.
The second issue that I want to raise gets to the heart of the question of why Australian or local content might be important, and how we balance the rival claims of cultural importance, social importance and economic importance. I think that one of the unfortunate recent trends in arguments about content has been the triumph of economic justifications for regulatory intervention in content. Terms like ‘creative industries’ can usefully help us to re-think the importance of this activity, but have unintended, perhaps unfortunate, consequences. We can lose a lot if we limit our language and thinking about content to an economic framework, which does not and cannot capture some of the broader social and cultural imperatives. That is because cultural policy can, and probably will, be an integral part of a robust industry policy, but an industry policy can never in itself be sufficient to represent a cultural policy. That’s my axiom for thinking about some major challenges at the Australia Council.
The reason for that is self evident when
you think about it. Even though we can forget this when we talk about
‘cultural industries’, culture is always an outcome. Culture is not an
input in economic terms.
…
The first point I’d like to
make is to re-visit the questions of what constitutes Australian
content in a multicultural Australia and what can we learn about
strategies in this area. It seems to me that there is a lot that we can
learn from indigenous and multicultural arts initiatives. I look at how
indigenous art, or indigenous content, in Australia has developed over
the last 20 years, with a great deal of government support. It has gone
from being very fragmented, almost not on the landscape, to being an
integral, mainstream part of Australian, and certainly local, content.
That process of developing a distinctive voice has actually involved a
re-definition of the local, of the Australian. It has gone from an
initial emphasis on preservation – the curatorial approach to an
indigenous culture – to the re-expression or re-authoring of that
culture within new media to occupy quite radical new spaces; which have
taken us a long way from its origins. I find that a very interesting
way of thinking about our parochial approach to other areas of
Australian content. The object lesson is that indigenous content has
been about re-defining the intersection between the local and the
other, and creating and occupying radical new spaces. We are slowly
beginning a process where we are seeing the same thing happening in a
whole area of multicultural content and multicultural art, which in
turn raises some interesting questions about what is distinctively
Australian in a multicultural borderless world. That, then, goes back
to some very specific things about the point of origin of the creator
in terms of things like light and landscape – none of which can be
influenced by economic interventions or regulatory controls. It’s very
similar to the way in which a distinctive Australian voice in the early
19th century reflected a particular local environment in which people
had to re-interpret global practice.
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