The Howard Government has decided that capitalism and globalism erode culture. As a consequence they have decided that establishing culture is the role of government. Sadly their view of what constitutes Australian culture is myopic, and backward looking. It is non-adaptive, and overly nationalistic - an attempt to keep the government and nation-state relevant. Government can encourage culture through reducing the artificial barriers to interaction, innovation and cultural memory.

Switch The Channel

The drive through eastern Pennsylvania is picturesque. Rolling fields of corn are broken by rivers, towns and the occasional city such as Harrisburg and Allentown. The scenery goes through many, and drastic changes. Sadly the music over the radio does not.

Between the major cities such as Washington DC and New York is a deadspot which Clear Channel has moved into. The spectrum is dominated by stations called the Hawk, or the River, or the Eagle. These stations pump out exceedingly soporific and non-challenging music. There is only so much Phil Collins and Bachman Turner Overdrive the mind can take before the select button is left in a permanent state of motion.

Capitalism is brutal toward art, it only rewards profitable art, and mainstream success is dependent upon almost absolute popularity. The cities and populations centers are kinder, the sheer numbers of consumers allow for greater diversity in media. The spectrum around New York is jammed with radio stations for every niche, spanish, metal, rap, hip-hop, book talk, talkback, college radio and so-on.

Eastern Pennsylvania is barren by comparison. I can recall as a teen not being able to pick up 2JJJ on the radio in far western Sydney. This was prior to 2JJJ going national and expanding their broadcast range. As a consequence I was limited to the repetitive mush of 2MMM or 2DAY FM. It wasnt until I moved into Eastern Sydney that I got exposed the underground Sydney music scene. I have been a fan of Sydney pop ever since.

Gary Sauer-Thompson makes the point that capitalism leaves little place for culture, and only tolerates culture if it is profitable, or can be used to leverage a profit. Economic liberty and culture are diametrically opposed. Culture exists despite capitalism, not because of it.

The Howard Government has decided that a unifying culture is important to maintain a nation state's identity and they have been using the power of Government to try and enforce a culture in an environment of social and economic liberty. This will ultimately fail, liberty is stronger than a nation-state, and more persistent than any government.

The Government's intrusion in this area requires a great deal of energy and expense to try and get people to follow their view of an Australian mono-culture. Liberty has a lower energy point, and is a more natural residual interaction point for a society. The Howard Government will undoubtedly be voted out one day, and the constant attention, expense and energy expended on trying to establish the anglo-australian culture will be forgotten, or morphed. It is no replacement for the emergant interactive properties of individuals interacting without interference.

If the Government truly wants to ensure an Australian culture survives, adapts and flourishes under globalisation and economic liberty, then they need to ensure the cost of interaction between individuals is zero. This will mean several artifical barriers which government controls will need to dropped to zero, and the rents extracted from them removed.

One of the greatest inhibitions to culture is the intellectual property laws that have been expanding without end. Copyright should not exist beyond a generation with a renewal being required after ten years. This would enable the majority of unprofitable culture to be shared without cost after a decade, with the highly popular being returned to the culture after a generation. In addition, the copyright cartels need to have their power broken in Australia.

The other area is to drop the cost of communication to near zero. This will mean opening up the spectrum to the public. Instead of cartels of public allocated bandwidth, or treating spectrum as a scarce good through auctioning, the spectrum should be opened to all with minimal regulation. WiFi has seen a boom of innovation, and a rapid dropping of cost. This is because it has been used as an abundant public good, rather than government controlled scarcity.

Thirdly, the government and social conservatives have to trust the people to innovate and advance the culture. Advocating an old, aged, and non-resonant view of Australian culture will not do. Maximum liberty is the only means for a culture to adapt to the constant challenges of society and economy. Government and the nation-state really don't come into it, and to be honest, aren't welcome.

cam
Cam Riley: South Sea Republic. Freedom, liberty, equity and an Australian Republic.

Comments
  • siento . # .
    Art and capitalism: There is not one kind of capitalism. Capitalism has many flavours that are local. Australian capitalism is different from US capitalism which is different from German capitalism which is different from all the others.

    Capitalism is not really an \'ism\'. It is more a description of the actual lump of systems that use the market in varying degrees to organise society.

    This said, capitalisms impact on art is positive on the whole as it makes people richer and thus more able to spend their time on culture.

    But the lack of a real doctrine of capitalism means that it is really difficult to say what is more \'capitalistic\'.

    Why is it more \'capitalistic\' to have or not have monopoly legislation? This has a big impact on culture. If the US had regulations that limited media ownership it then there would be more variety in radio ownership.

    Is extending the lifetime of copyright more or less capitalistic?

    Is it more capitalistic to spend 3.3% of GDP on the military or to spend an extra percent on training artists and thus subsidizing the culture industry?

    Another term that might be used to refer to these questions is \'deregulation\', but even there things become interesting. Is it more deregulating to get rid of intellectual property and copy right or less?

    Australia subsidises quite a bit of culture. Some of this is highly effective, in particular JJJ which is effectively subsidized advertising and distribution for Australian music and some of it seems to be pretty ineffective as shown by the subsidy of the Australian film industry. But working out what the cost/benefit of these subsidies is is difficult. It\'s like trying to cost out buying working German submarines or building our own non-submersible ones.

    It would be good to see more JJJ style art subsidy. And getting the ABC and SBS to pay lots of people small amounts of money to produce original content by different people rather than just buying stuff or paying for people who have had their go, Roy and HG I\'m looking at you. The BBC is a fairly good model for this, with stuff like radio plays leading to lots of new BBC TV content like the new Dr Who and Little Britain, both of which started out as radio plays.

    The ABC and SBS need some more funding, but they should also be pushed toward producing as much new stuff as possible as cheaply as possible. The other way to do this is to subsidize things like Melbourne channel 31, which produces a lot of local content and got people like Rove going. Australia\'s dynamic public radio sector does this sort of stuff really well.

    Also, with the net coming in as well as more TV stations via digital broadcasting there are lots of opportunities to give more small amounts of grass roots money as a sort of research subsidy for Australia\'s culture industry.
  • cam . # .
    JJJ, ABC and SBS are required: .... because the only way to broadcast, or permeate culture lies in the capital intensive industries of Television and Radio. Both of which have barriers of entry, partly maintained by the sheer start up cost of the infrastructure, but also because the government treats spectrum as a scarce resource. That latter drives up the price and gives monopolies over it. Yet with WiFi we are seeing spectrum being treated as an abundant good, and its price has dropped so quickly, that it is given away free with a cup of coffee.

    I am arguing that if the government treats the wider spectrum as an abundant good and opens it up, so that anyone can broadcast, and compete with the likes of the ABC, Channel 7/9/10 for little cost. Then that will encourage the permeation/creation component of culture.

    Like that MFC challenge on HuSi, the equipment cost me less than $1500. I did it with a $100 amplifiers, a $25 microphone, a $150 guitar, a $180 bass, a $25 drum machine software, plus a $900 iBook with Garageband.

    If the cost of creating content and broadcasting can be reduced so that we all become content creators, rather than consumers, then culture will richer for it. At the moment it is like plumbing, rather than a wetlands. Culture has to be bifurcated through the pipe of the mass-media first. If it is a wetlands, then it is an open-sea that we can wade into.

    So dropping the cost of broadcasting through major competition with an open spectrum would aid that.

    On the copyright issue, broadcasting, which can also be thought of as cultural sharing, is limited by government granted monopolies over created works. If this is limited to a generation, then it will increase the tempo of culture by making cultural memory reside closer to the present.

    WWII historians are limited in their ability to publish as copyright now covers many of the works of that time. Fortunately my area of interest, WWI is not covered, even in the US copyright only goes back as far as 1923, so WWI historians are safe. But it raises the cost of historians of more modern times who wish to preserve that cultural memory through publishing.

    cam