Network Insight Institute

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.
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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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