With secrecy shrouding negotiations for the Free Trade Agreement with the US, we can only speculate on what it might hold for Australian media. But as the negotiations race to conclusion early in 2004 the media industry is becoming very alarmed.

Lynden Barber writes in The Australian 19/11/03:

Media industry groups, previously assured by the federal Government that culture would not be on the agenda, hit the panic buttons after John Howard told George W Bush three weeks ago that Australia was prepared to be flexible over new media regulation.

Existing TV drama quotas and film subsidies are not being contested by the US. But the future will be digital and the Americans do want to limit the ability of foreign governments to regulate it. Forthcoming services include digital TV, video-on-demand and technologies yet to be developed. The US insists it is not possible to regulate these services. Local screen lobbyists strongly deny this.

Screen Producers Association of Australia executive director Geoff Brown says the Government may be prepared to accept film distribution and cinema exhibition being hived off from any future regulation, on the basis that the area has never been regulated.

The trouble is, Brown says, that in 20 years movies will probably be beamed into Australian cinemas directly from Los Angeles via satellite. ‘Given that scenario, what chance [is there of] local product getting access? Indeed, what chance is there of any local distribution? We just can’t accept that we should be limited in any capacity.’

The Media Report 6/11/03 also tackled this topic.

Richard Harris: What we’re actually asking of the government, is to retain the flexibility to regulate into the future. I guess our argument is that the very fact that we don’t know the future in many ways is in fact the reason why you want to retain that flexibility.

Mick O’Regan: Well let me ask you to give an example of the sort of scenario that you would wish to avoid.

Richard Harris: A very simple example was the way New Zealand signed up to WTO protocol saying that they wouldn’t regulate into the future. Five years later a new government comes into power and says ‘we want to have New Zealand content regulations’ - and they find that they can’t because of the Free Trade Agreement. So that is how it works.

Richard Harris is Exec Director Aust Directors’ Association

In defence of Australian stories

In my 1987 play Emerald City, Colin, a screenwriter, defends the need for Australian stories to be told on our screens: "Why bother whether we have our own stories or not? My only answer to that is that we have a right to them. We are human beings with our own feelings, strengths and weaknesses and we need to know what we are like, and we need to know that we are important enough to have fictions written about us, or we will always feel that real life happens somewhere else and is spoken in accents other than our own."

David Williamson The Age 24/11/03