Australian Cultural Policy Unravelled

This book explores the impacts of digitisation and sector internationalisation on national drama production, and their consequences for industry, audiences, and domestic storytelling. Using Australia as a case study, it provides a systematic evaluation of the efficacy of cultural policy intended to support the production and circulation of national drama from 2001-23.

During the first two decades of the 21st century, new digital distribution technologies transformed the business of television worldwide, bringing conditions of abundance that ended mass media logics grounded in scarcity of content and providers. In doing so digitisation upended longstanding norms around the funding, production, and circulation of national television drama. In this period, the conditions for which cultural policy was first created changed radically due to digital distribution and sector internationalisation. This book’s analyses of the responses of policy makers, broadcasters, production companies and screen agencies to television’s distribution revolution evaluates their collective impacts on Australian television drama. It explains how 21st century dynamics undermined cultural policy supporting the production of Australian drama with cultural value, leading to a catastrophic fall in hours made. This book argues that the scale of disruption digitisation causes to television in the transnational and national space requires a bold re-imagining of cultural policy instruments intended to support Australian drama.

This account will be of interest to screen industry practitioners, policy makers and scholars, and, more generally, to anyone wondering whatever happened to Australian drama.

Anna Potter PhD is Professor in Digital Media and Cultural Studies in Queensland University of Technology’s School of Communication where she is Academic Lead, Research and a Chief Investigator in the Digital Media Research Centre. A leading authority on children’s television, national drama and media policy, she is the author of Creativity, Culture, and Commerce: Producing Australian Children’s Television with Public Value (Intellect, 2015), Producing Children’s Television in the On-Demand Age (Intellect, 2020) and multiple journal article and book chapters.

Marion McCutcheon PhD is a communications economist and holds the position of Senior Research Fellow at the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre. She has extensive experience in providing policy-focussed research and advice within the Australian Government, and as an academic researcher focussing on the media industries and creative industries. Her interests include the role of the creative industries in economic systems, and how society benefits from investing in culture. Recent work includes the book Transnational TV Crime: From Scandinavia to the Outback with the University of Wollongong’s Sue Turnbull.