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THE FREE TRADE TANGO

Aren Z. Aizura investigates the implications of cosy trade relations between Australia and the US on the local culture industry.

Australians at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year would have been proud to represent their country. Crackerbag, by first-time feature director Glendyn Ivin, won the Palme D’Or for Short Films. Unlike recent years at the Oscars, it’s not often an Australian film wins any kind of prize at Cannes. The Meditteranean sun provided just the right light in which Ivin and his producer could bask.

The same week, in similarly balmy Hawaii, diplomats mingled, champagne glasses in hand. The cause for celebration: a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the United States of America and its little brother, Australia. Chief negotiators Stephen Deady and Ralph Ives, the Australian and American representatives respectively, held a chipper press conference. Initial negotiations for the quickest free trade agreement negotiated anywhere in the world were right on schedule. ‘Genuine and good progress’ had been made.

The word ‘negotiations’ seems to confirm Australia’s entry into the realm of serious global politics. But like the phrase ‘a level playing-field’, it implies a position of power that Australia does not necessarily enjoy. This is why the mention of ‘culture’ and ‘the audiovisual industry’ in these negotiations has galvanised the Australian film, television and arts industry into full alert. Although no one knows precisely what effects the FTA will have on Australian culture, hardly anyone thinks those effects can be good. For those who make culture in Australia, the FTA reasserts the question of ‘Australian national identity’; how does locally-produced culture feed this identity and what would happen if local ‘products’ were to vanish?

Prelude to the embrace

Australia’s history on trade under both Labor and Liberal governments places it firmly in neo-liberal territory. Diplomatically isolated from Asia, with a politically-entrenched fear of invasion by non-white, poverty-stricken people from the north, the Howard government has instead tried to maximise its ties to other English-speaking nations. Read: the United Kingdom and the United States. These nations also happen to be among the most enthusiastic advocates of market deregulation. An FTA with the US is supposed to secure permanent diplomatic relations. But while Australian negotiators have points they want to score, the American agenda is clear: to ‘address’ barriers that US exporters face in the Australian market. That is, to remove them.
What does this mean in terms of culture? Australia currently has content laws for free-to-air television that stipulate that 65 per cent of primetime content must be made in Australia. To remove ‘trade barriers’ would mean changing those content laws. The other issue is government subsidy, or funding. Australia has one of the world’s most supported culture industries. Many artforms (including the growing film industry) need funding to survive. Under a free trade agreement, this might be regarded as ‘unfair’ support.

The US negotiating team neglected to mention ‘the audiovisual industry’ until the first official negotiating meeting in March; only two more negotiating meetings are scheduled before the end of the year, by which time both parties would like the deal sewn up. Thus far, the Howard government’s response to queries for more detail has been anything but reassuring. ‘Obviously you can’t rule anything in or out…’ Communications Minister Richard Alston told ABC television in May (the only comment he’s made about the FTA), ‘but all of the indications to date tell me that we won’t be having to make the sort of concessions that some people are afraid of.’
But since March, media coverage on the issue of ‘culture’ in the free trade agreement has exploded. A number of arts and entertainment organisations formed the Australian Coalition for Cultural Diversity (ACCD). Together with the Australian Film Commission (AFC), they’ve been lobbying very hard. The AFC even held a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival about free trade. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance recently launched a campaign called ‘free2baustralian’, featuring spokespeople such as Gary Sweet, from Stingers, and other primetime celebrities decrying an American take-over.

Around the time of the Hawaii negotiations, Richard Harris, spokesperson for the ACCD and the Executive Director of the Australian Screen Director’s Guild, serendipitously discovered a polling survey about the FTA in which 71 per cent of respondents said they would oppose it ‘if there were less Australian films and television shows on our screens’. With film and television identified as the second ‘big consumer issue’ after pharmaceutical benefits, Harris considers this result ‘gold-dust’. ‘That sort of polling is what matters to the government’, he says. ‘They don’t really care if the [film] production industry is squealing... they care about general, normal Australians caring.’ It looks like he might be right. The government has re-emphasised its commitment to ‘protecting’ Australian screen culture. In May, negotiators proposed a solution to the problem: a ‘standstill’ on free-to-air content laws. This would mean that current content and arts funding laws would be set in stone.

The protected market

The US’s tactical power in matters of cultural trade can only be understood by comparing the differences between the two nations. Australia’s film and television industry is, in trade jargon, a ‘protected market’. Last year, Australian films grossed a mere five per cent of box office takings. Film production is subsidised by a range of organisations — funding bodies, film schools, SBS and ABC commissioning.

Arts funding is an even more complex web of support. As well as propagating new and experimental works, arts funding bodies at local, state and federal levels keep established industries solvent. Mainstream book publishers, for instance, regularly receive funding from the Australia Council to publish new books. The Australian Opera, Australian Ballet and Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras receive large pieces of the annual federal-funding pie.
By contrast, US arts culture sustains itself through a network of philanthropic trusts and private investment. Hollywood’s immense cultural and economic power means most American film production companies don’t need government subsidies. Rather, Hollywood applies political pressure on its government. Frank Morgan, a media lecturer at Newcastle University and a veteran cultural lobbyist, remembers when Jack Valenti, the head of the US Motion Picture Distributors’ Alliance, visited Australia on trade talks in the 1980s. Valenti met with then Arts Minister Barry Cohen, who remarked that Australia was not big enough to be a serious economic threat to the US; his aim was only to protect Australian culture. ‘Valenti dropped his voice to a sinister register and said, “Minister, if your culture needs protecting, it probably doesn’t need to survive.” ’

When asked how a standstill on current culture laws would work, Richard Harris is sceptical. ‘A standstill is as bad as any other option’, he says. ‘It leaves the government with no room to move — to deal with changes in technology, changing cultural practices, changes to the ways that people use the media or the ways in which media is produced.’ Digital television and pay television would have no content quotas — which might be troublesome if all television becomes digital as tech gurus are prophesying.

This is not only a problem for large-scale broadcasting. Arts practice, too, changes with technology. The Australia Council’s New Media Fund is only a few years old; interactive computer games are the hot new artform (see ‘Escape From Woomera’). Its Community Cultural Development Fund is only two years old, and over the past three years a number of youth initiatives have been added to the annual funding round. A funding standstill under the FTA would mean less adaptation to new artforms by funding bodies — who are, after all, supposed to be encouraging innovation in the arts.

Harris says the standstill option has been sold to the Australian government as a concession. It’s part of a game in which the US collects FTAs with minor countries as ‘trump cards’ in preparation for its assault on a bigger fish, the European Union. He believes the only viable alternative is a ‘cultural exemption’, pioneered in Canada, which means that any cultural product is exempted from the terms of the agreement. Chile and Singapore, both recent signatories to free trade deals with the US, have gained cultural exemptions. But just like a ‘standstill’, cultural exemptions are plagued with problems. All cultural products must be listed in the agreement, and if any aren’t, they’re fair game for trade.

Domestic terror

Frank Morgan traces concern about the position of the US on screen culture back to the early 1990s, and cites the Uruguay round of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talks. ‘The Americans wanted to make commercial broadcasting the standard. They saw any kind of government funding for broadcasting or the arts or film as an intervention in the primitive capitalist trading environment they preferred. Any government spending on the arts would be in breach of international law. Although this was opposed, notably by the French, the US never renounced its position.’ Morgan points out that while media and communications culture in the US is the fastest-growing industry, the US economy is looking fairly desperate in 2003. All good reasons to be cautious.

But understanding the issue as wholesale US cultural invasion neglects the entire story. These trade deals are taking place in a domestic context, with a federal government hell-bent on opening up as many markets as it can to foreign investment. The Howard government’s assault on cross-media and foreign media ownership laws is an example. Currently, 25 per cent of a newspaper and 15 per cent of a television station can be foreign-owned. Cross-media laws mean that a corporation (foreign or domestic) cannot brand itself across every broadcasting medium available. Labor, the Greens and the Democrats have opposed every media ownership bill Alston has presented to parliament thus far. Eventually, one supposes, a deal will be brokered; the government only has to wait for the correct lever. And Alston continues his campaign to disable publicly-funded television. His tactics have recently become so shameless as to accuse the ABC Radio program AM of ‘anti-American bias’.

‘Digital convergence’ is another worry. By 2025 it’s likely that the boundaries between internet and television will have disappeared; cable will be ubiquitous, feeding interactive digital broadband into most middle-class Australian homes. ‘Free-to-air’ television may be obsolete. It’s worth paying attention to who will own the means of cable distribution; telecommunications is another market the Howard government wants to ‘open up’ to foreign investment. American access to the Australian telecommunications sector is one of the government’s prime bargaining chips in the FTA.
If ‘regulation’ has any meaning to the Howard government, it’s less about the protection of Australian-made culture, and more about policing the content that streams through the lines. It’s no accident that internet pornography legislation and a beefed-up censorship board have been high on the Howard agenda. Security and surveillance of culture are far more important to the conservatives in power than supporting a healthy diverse local media culture.

Whose identity?

Then there’s the question of what constitutes Australian culture. The unabashed nationalism of slogans like ‘free2baustralian’ seems to gloss over the enormous differences within the culture industry, and in politics generally, over what ‘Australian-ness’ means.

When the political Right defines national identity, many culture-makers have professed, with pride, to being ‘un-Australian’. National, cultural products like Home and Away, Blue Heelers and Neighbours depict Australia as those who’ve never lived here might imagine it: white; placidly suburban (or better, rural); full of good Aussie blokes and sheilas. Australian identity on these terms is often a nostalgic fantasy of the good old days before Aboriginal land rights, non-Anglo immigration or angst-ridden, uncertain modernity. Perhaps local content quotas contribute to this misconception of Australian cultural identity? Here we might find ourselves in uneasy company with right-wing critic Imre Salusinsky, who wrote in The Age in May 2001, ‘the ideological buttress that for so long supported local-content quotas — industry assistance, based on national identity — has gradually crumbled, exposed as pure ethnophobia, and as devoid of substance as the rantings of Big Kev.’

And yet, most of the 2002 AFI Awards went to films that defied white, middle-class narratives. Beneath Clouds, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Australian Rules, and The Tracker, stories about Aboriginal Australians, even if they weren’t all by Aboriginal filmmakers, all won significant awards. Importantly, these films are not definable in terms of the identities they produce. All are complex and engaging works. Beneath Clouds, especially, explores what it’s like to be caught between cultures, negotiating an autonomous space that shifts in relation to different situations.
Walking on Water (2002) is about the death of Gavin, a man with HIV who’s asked his best friends to assist him to die at home. There is no Anglo-centrism here, the two main characters are Greek. But neither does the ethnicity of the protagonists direct the narrative. Instead, conflicts arise between the rural, straight-laced family members who arrive at Gavin’s deathbed and his cosmopolitan friends, both straight and gay, who live with their own tensions and desires. Directed by Tony Ayres, a Melbourne-based director, Walking on Water took two years to finance through a combination of grants. SBS Independent, the Adelaide Festival and the NSW Film and TV Office all contributed funds. Ayres believes he has been fortunate enough to work with people who have always believed in what he can do as a filmmaker, but that the ‘marginal’ subjects he chooses mean his films won’t be widely shown. ‘The kind of work I’m making would not be possible if [film] subsidies didn’t exist’, he says.

This is where the liberal model of the ‘free market’ falls flat. Culture-making is fluid and resilient; thousands of years of attempts at censorship by the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and various governments have shown that whatever laws are made, people will keep making whatever kinds of culture they need. And just as it’s impossible to regulate, so is culture impossible to commodify. The corporate fear of box office flops and rating disasters would only be heightened in an environment where American companies had monopolised television channels and film distribution. It’s vital that the creation of new books, music, artforms, television programs and cinema does not depend on their saleability.

Coping strategies

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with this FTA is the fact that nobody’s questions have been adequately answered. Aboriginal artists and cultural producers are asking how free trade will work for them, especially with regard to intellectual property and copyright. This is an area the negotiators have not even begun to address.

The elaborate mating dance of free trade negotiations will continue all year, and if we’re lucky, well into next year too. That an FTA will ensue seems inevitable, and culture may very likely be traded off. What will creators do if cultural subsidies are affected? Tony Ayres is unequivocal on this point. ‘I would have to locate my career internationally — either by moving to the United States or the UK.’

In the event, it might be time to think through strategies to cope with our newfound American intimacy. More independent film co-productions? Simultaneous industrial actions with American film industry workers to demand comparable working conditions and wages? American philanthropic trusts sponsoring new Australian television shows? If this is not what we want, now is certainly the time to fight.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is soliciting submissions from interested individuals and organisations about all aspects of the FTA. To find out more, go to http://www.dfat.gov.au

AREN Z. AIZURA is a Melbourne writer, editor and zine-maker.

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