On the night of the opening ceremony, 24 January, Cyclone Wanda crossed the coast at Double Island Point north of Noosa. It didn’t have the devastating winds of cyclones like Ada and Althea that smashed the Whitsundays in 1970 and Townsville in 1971, and it weakened rapidly, but the monsoonal trough it forced south to Brisbane stayed there for days. Small oscillations in its movement and intensity generated many stretches of drenching rain.

Across Brisbane, 600 millimetres fell on the first three days of competition in Christchurch — twenty-four inches, or two feet, in the language of the time. This was three times the city’s average rainfall for January, its wettest month. On 28 January the trough weakened and retreated north. A drier, cooler air mass from the south finally brought some blue sky to the capital of the Sunshine State.

The river peaked in the early hours of 29 January at a height not seen since 1893. Residents woke to find about 13,000 buildings damaged. Children due back at school that morning got an extra week added to their Christmas holidays.

Across the Tasman in Christchurch, Australia had won a bag of gold medals while the river rose. Raelene Boyle retained the 100 metres sprint title she won in Edinburgh, fourteen-year-old Newcastle schoolgirl Sonya Gray won the women’s 100 metres freestyle and Mexico Olympic champion Mike Wenden the men’s. As the waters receded, Boyle and Gray added the 200 metres to their 100-metre golds and Don Wagstaff completed a double in the diving pool.

The deputy lord mayor reported Brisbane’s promotional T-shirts “were without doubt the most sought-after item at the Games.” Its souvenir match boxes and coasters “were widely distributed and caused much interest.” Sandwiched amid coverage of the floods, the full-page advertisement for Brisbane’s bid in the Christchurch’s main paper, the Press, caused “some concern,” but it was not fatal because “most people realised that occurrences such as these were not the normal thing.”

Whether or not the 1974 flood was abnormal depended on the time scale. The “River City” had not seen a flood as high in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century it had seen four as high, including three much higher, and a total of eight floods classed as “major” according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s current classification system (3.5 metres at the City Gauge). Only two other “major” floods occurred in the twentieth century, the last in February 1931. This century is different again. The February 2022 flood was Brisbane’s second major flood after the even higher one in January 2011, and a further “minor” one occurred in January 2013.

The inaugural meeting of Brisbane’s Commonwealth Games Committee was held two months before the Christchurch Games. Chaired by lord mayor and sports fan Clem Jones, the meeting was told an application had already been lodged for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games. Business representatives thought the city council’s report on possible venues was technically excellent but lacked ambition. By 1982, they thought, the city “would deserve a sporting complex of world-wide standard.”

Council representatives baulked at the zeal. They “could not commit the City to structures which could become ‘white elephants,’ or to a financial burden which it might be virtually impossible to meet.” After the floods, the committee’s next meeting was deferred, but not for long. Lord Mayor Jones and his deputy flew over the city in the 4KQ helicopter and were “amazed at the number of places which could be regarded as possible sites for the Games.” A sites sub-committee was whisked around nine possible venues in a council bus just three months after the flood’s peak.

The choice narrowed to the Northside versus the Southside. Deputy Mayor Walsh, representing the Chermside ward on the Northside, wanted Marchant Park redeveloped. Mayor Jones, representing the Southside’s Camp Hill ward, liked a site in the new suburb of Nathan, adjacent to the Mt Gravatt Cemetery and Griffith University, which would accept its first students the following year.

In late July, six months after the flood, a decision was reached: the Southside. It would be closer for visitors staying at the Gold Coast and more convenient for residents of the rapidly expanding southern suburbs.

The campaign for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games succeeded, although the likely “phenomenal” cost was much criticised. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, where the Commonwealth Games Federation met to decide the venue for the ’82 Games, Brisbane found itself the only bidder. Montreal’s diabolical financial outcome scared others away.

New lord mayor Frank Sleeman assured Brisbane ratepayers they would pay only for the “bare essentials.” A new stadium would be built in the new suburb, but it would have a permanent grandstand seating just 10,000. “Temporary” seating would accommodate another 48,000. Work began immediately and the venue was first used in late 1975. Two years later, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, it was named the “Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Sports Centre,” or “QEII.”

There was one big problem with siting the main stadium on the top of a hill. One of the signature events at major games, the marathon, traditionally starts and finishes in the stadium. After the local distance-running community rejected a plan for the runners to complete three laps along the nearby South East Freeway, ending with a sharp climb back up to the stadium, organisers agreed to start and finish the race away from the stadium. (It was men’s only; the first women’s marathon was run at the 1986 Games in Edinburgh.)

A flatter, “city” course was mapped, like those becoming popular in places like New York, Chicago and London. For Brisbane, this meant using the river. The new route started and finished on the south bank, opposite the CBD. It headed out through the city and “The Valley,” across Breakfast Creek to the river at Kingsford Smith Drive, then doubled back to the river bank around the University of Queensland. TV cameras would capture the city at its most picturesque, spectators would get accessible viewing spots, runners would appreciate the cool breeze and flat ground in a city that doesn’t have much of it.

Held the day before the closing ceremony, the marathon did not disappoint. Big crowds lined the route. Australian favourite Robert De Castella found himself well behind two Tanzanians who were close to world record pace at the halfway mark. He set off to chase alone, catching Gidamis Shahanga just before they passed a heaving Regatta Hotel, then ran side-by-side with Juma Ikaanga for a kilometre along Coronation Drive (named in 1937 when George VI was crowned). Morning peak hour traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge slowed as commuters tuned car radios to the struggle. Finally, “Deek” made a decisive break and won by twelve seconds.

Building the main stadium for the Commonwealth Games on a hill in the southern suburbs had helped, paradoxically, and indirectly, to re-energise an old conceit. Decades earlier, tourism promotions dubbed Brisbane the “River City.” Soon, the first of several major arts and cultural organisations began setting up on the South Bank. Expo 88 would draw millions of people from the suburbs, the state, the nation and the world to the banks of the big river.

Despite the best intentions, QEII struggled to avoid the fate those Brisbane City Councillors feared: becoming a white elephant. Track and field events take centre stage in Olympic and Commonwealth Games but local athletics events, even the biggest interschool carnivals, attract much smaller crowds at other times.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, QEII was back in business. On joining the national rugby league competition in the late 1980s, the Brisbane Broncos played at the sport’s traditional home in the city, Lang Park. A few years later, after the temporary seating at QEII was made a little more permanent, they moved there and started drawing Commonwealth Games–like crowds to the renamed “ANZ Stadium.”

Annual State of Origin matches against New South Wales, though, stayed at Lang Park. The regular monster crowds at ANZ declined. Eventually the state government and others decided to revive the old cauldron. The two “Origin” matches played at ANZ in 2001 and 2002 while Lang Park was rebuilt were the last.

In 2003, the Maroons and Broncos returned to the new “Suncorp Stadium.” They have been there ever since, sharing the venue with the Queensland Reds (rugby union) and Brisbane Roar (soccer). Last year, it was at Suncorp that the Matildas played their World Cup quarter-final against France, which ended in that epic, victorious penalty shoot-out.

QEII went back to being a track and field venue, the Queensland Sports and Athletics Centre, “QSAC.” It was used as an evacuation centre during the 2011 floods. After Brisbane won the right to hold the 2032 Olympics, there was a chance it might be revived again as a temporary venue for cricket and AFL while the traditional home of those sports in Queensland, the Gabba, was being remade as the main Olympic stadium at a cost of $2.7 billion.

That was until Monday, when QSAC got an even bigger future. Queensland’s government considered the recommendations of a committee set up to propose further options after the earlier rejection of the Gabba rebuild. The committee recommended that a wholly new stadium be built at Victoria Park, at a cost of over $3 billion, and eventually replace the Gabba as the home of cricket and AFL in Brisbane. Both recommendations were rejected. (Victoria Park was one of the sites rejected by Clem Jones’s 1974 committee.)

The Gabba is going to stay the Gabba, with a modest upgrade. Victoria Park is going to stay Victoria Park.

The winner is… QSAC! The stadium on the hill will rise again to host the track and field events at an Olympic Games fifty years after it staged them for the Commonwealth Games. At a cost of $1.6 billion, permanent seating will be increased to 14,000, and total capacity will touch 40,000 for the period of the Olympics, some way below the 1982 full houses.

The other winner is Suncorp Stadium, with its larger capacity of more than 50,000, which will get the opening and closing ceremonies.

The marathoners? They will surely follow the river again, winding out, back, out and back, sticking to the old, deceptively gentle watercourse that has always drawn people to this place. •

Information about Commonwealth Games planning is taken from Brisbane City Council committee minutes and files, and about the 1974 floods from the Department of Science/Bureau of Meteorology’s “Brisbane Floods January 1974” (AGPS, 1974). Other information drawn from Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023), Margaret Cook’s A River with a City Problem (2019) and Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 (2018), all published by UQP.

The post Olympic origins appeared first on Inside Story.

Michael Wolff, prolific chronicler of American media mega-trends, wrote a book about it, Autumn of the Moguls. Network TV was a mess, he said. The music business was a mess. Jayson Blair’s saga of journalistic fraud at the New York Times had left Arthur Sulzberger Jr “not at all a sun god, but merely a mogul manqué.” A “countdown” was under way for ageing Rupert Murdoch at News Corporation, Sumner Redstone at Viacom, Michael Eisner at Disney. Barry Diller was giving the media industry “the finger,” leaving behind his “old mogul life” in charge of a Hollywood studio and TV network to concentrate on a company that owned Expedia, Ticketmaster and other digital businesses.

The idea resonated strongly in Australia. Rupert Murdoch had started out there a long time ago and now dominated the commercial media scene with another elder, the third-generation Packer mogul, Kerry. When Kerry died in 2005 and son James sold the family’s cherished television business, the forecast for moguls looked on target, though not especially astute given the older Packer’s heart had stopped once before.

Moguls generally, though, were hanging on. “Self-made” media boss Kerry Stokes was now being described as a mogul, having taken control of the Seven Network in the 1990s and then added newspapers when cross-media ownership rules were relaxed in the 2000s.

In America, the autumn proved long. There is still enough life in Murdoch moguldom for Michael Wolff to have published another book about its impending death, The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, just the other day. While Redstone did finally die, Eisner’s successor at Disney, Bob Iger, stayed and stayed, buying and buying. He stepped down, only to be called back as CEO last year. Tech titans Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos added “media” to their realms, Jobs through his own investment in Pixar and Apple’s pioneering plays in digital music, movies and television; Bezos by acquiring the Washington Post and founding Amazon Studios and Prime Video.

Then, a year ago, the CEO of another Silicon Valley giant decided to buy one of the town squares of online speech. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter might be going as poorly as AOL/Time Warner, the fin-de-siècle merger that Wolff thought marked “the beginning of the end” and the start of “a new phase, a whole new era, of resistance and revision.” But it happened, Twitter continues to exist, though with a new name and direction, and Musk is still in charge, behaving much like those mercurial, autocratic moguls of old. Obituaries are being written for the company and the deal, but so too is a new book about Musk. It devotes a lot of pages to the Twitter/X saga and its content-moderation challenges, and it is written by no less than the biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger: Walter Isaacson.

Media moguls don’t endure merely because particular men live long: they all die in the end. Nor do they survive because the specific media technologies they happen to control turn out to be attractive to users, although that helps: some moguls have been good at parlaying control of one medium into dominance of another, from radio and newspapers into television; from movies to programming for TV, video cassettes and DVDs; from free-to-air broadcast television to multi-channel cable and satellite subscription services. Not even the propensity for some with fortunes from other fields to crave power over a society’s messages can fully explain the dogged durability of media moguls.

Moguls endure because their ranks are constantly replenished by a culture that craves them and because storytellers find subjects to satisfy the hunger. Exactly which of society’s messages constitute “media” has proved malleable. Of newspapers, news and information, Wolff wrote in Autumn, “If you knew anything about anything, you understood them to be not just equivocal businesses but plastic concepts. They were in transition and if you weren’t ready to be part of that transformation you and your business would die.”

More broadly, he thought a mogul was “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour, willing to march off and take territory and subdue populations and embrace the unknown and do whatever was necessary to do to make the future possible ― no matter what the future was.”

That is the kind of person Walter Isaacson saw in Elon Musk — pioneer of Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla — and it was why he wanted to write about him. He had seen the type before. Steve Jobs, too, was a man with huge ambition and capacity to direct the building of new products and experiences, to transform the lives of the people who used them and the industries that created them. Jobs is referred to several times in Elon Musk, and it is clear that Isaacson sees the two in a similar frame. They are heroes standing in the way of American Decline, outsized personalities who think big and take risks while controlling every detail. They stamp themselves on their enterprises and outputs. Their personal quests, he thinks, shift the nation and the world.

Musk agreed to let Isaacson “shadow” him for two years, and Isaacson tells us what he saw and heard. With Musk’s encouragement, he interviewed “friends, colleagues, family members, adversaries, and ex-wives” as well, and he tells us what they told him. This method makes it a book in two parts.

In the first part, the biographer is assembling evidence about things that have already happened. A lot of this is familiar from other works about Musk, especially the amateur psycho-sleuthing about a brutal upbringing and possible Asperger’s producing a ruthless guy who struggles with empathy but dreams big, drives people hard, sometimes sleeps in his own factories, and achieves the impossible over and over again. Ashlee Vance and Tim Higgins have covered this and it is not clear that Isaacson adds much to their excellent work beyond the constant presence of Musk’s own voice.

Once Isaacson is there himself from 2021, in the thick of the unfolding events, the second part of the book becomes a different exercise. The biographer is now a witness to the roiling present, not an inquisitor about history. How reliable a witness is for the reader to judge, but we are there for the thrilling ride. Isaacson becomes part of Musk’s family, a trusted confidante. He is in Musk’s house, his car. He receives messages from him at crazy hours about really weird stuff. He offers advice, judges Musk’s moves.

While he is doing all this, he gets lucky. Musk, already a mogul, decides to buy Twitter. Is this “media”? If so, Michael Wolff’s autumn is over. Elon Musk is going to become a media mogul in front of Walter Isaacson’s eyes.

Or is it the other way around? Is it Musk who has got lucky? With his road-tested storyteller in the passenger seat, his every word, every angle, every image, will be recorded, stored, shaped. A book, half-written already. What better time for “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour” to march off and take media? •

Elon Musk
By Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster | $59.99 | 670 pages

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When the first mobile calls were made in the 1970s, there were staggering differences in the level of access to (landline) telephone services and how they were delivered. The United States had thirty-three telephones per hundred people at the beginning of that decade. In Africa, the figure was “trivially low,” and still just 1.5 nearly twenty-five years later.

Some telecommunications equipment like network switches and handsets was traded internationally, but a good deal was produced domestically, with global patents embedded in distinctive local designs. Although a United Nations agency coordinated international regulation of the business, services in most countries were offered to customers through unique, national enterprises, controlled and financed by governments. Customers could place calls across borders but most of the traffic was local and interstate.

The model for the future was open borders and less state involvement. More equipment would be traded across national boundaries, sourced from fewer, larger factories where global manufacturers would centralise production. Globally endorsed principles would smooth away the idiosyncrasies of national regulation and policy. Privatised state-owned enterprises, stripped of their monopolies, would allow telecoms corporations to expand into other national markets. These incumbents and new entrants would be able to target global customer bases. As people and businesses crossed borders more easily and frequently, the telephone would host more global conversations.

In sum, technologies, policies, institutions and practices would coalesce. The devices and the rules, the companies and the customers, would all look and act more like each other.

The mobile phone helped to make much of this happen. It did it in numbered waves — 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, now 5G, and soon enough 6G — each one a generational transformation in technology that provided a decisive opportunity to disrupt policies, organisations and practices. Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly chart the first four of these generations in Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry.

The early mobile licences in the 1980s gave governments a felicitous opportunity to introduce competition for their mainly state-owned incumbents. The second (digital) generation, in the 1990s, helped to reduce the cost of what had been a premium service, making mobile a consumer proposition even in developing countries, where billions of people were finally able to make phone calls for the first time. “2G” also added text messages to the functionality of mobile “phones.”

Hotter demand for radiofrequency spectrum encouraged governments to change the way they allocated and charged for it. Mobile operators bid fabulous sums in the early 2000s to acquire the spectrum they wanted for the next generation of technology that promised the-internet-on-your-mobile. 3G did not quite deliver this but the “smartphones” created to capitalise on it accelerated demand for a technology that would. That was 4G, adopted commercially in Scandinavian countries in 2009 and by Vodafone and others in Australia a few years later.

If there was a time when the idealised model of mobile telephony came close to matching the reality revealed in the mirror, this moment in the early 2010s might have been it. The distribution of mobile services around the world now looked more like the distribution of people. China and India dominated both. In 1990, the United States had led the world with five million mobile services. By 2010, China had 859 million and India 752 million. US numbers had grown too but were now well behind, with 285 million. Most of the other places in the top ten were taken by countries like Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam and Pakistan, rather than the Europeans and North Americans that led in 1990.

Mobile operators around the world were adopting a single technical standard for 4G (essentially), Long Term Evolution, or LTE, not multiple ones as they had done with previous generations. Mobile market structures looked similar in many places that had introduced services at quite different times. Competition existed almost everywhere, though there was not as much as regulators would have liked. Oligopoly had become the global fashion: early adopters like the United States and Britain, where multiple competitors had started up, were experiencing consolidation; late adopters that began with single operators now had sustainable rivalry.

Multinational corporations with mobile operations spanning many territories (like Singtel, owner of Optus, and Vodafone) were now the norm; those mainly focused on a single national market (like Telstra) were the exception. Mobile telephones had become everything devices for everyone, everywhere. No longer just tools for conversation and texting, they were cameras, diaries, contact books, money machines, street directories and maps, tour guides, health monitors, entertainment screens and much else.

The moment was not perfect and in any case it didn’t last. As some forces were stimulating the convergence of technologies, policies, institutions and practices, others were pulling them apart. Perhaps most striking has been the fall and rise of the corporations delivering different elements of the equipment and services that make up the mobile business.

In the mid 1990s, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens and Alcatel, all based in Europe, and Motorola, headquartered in the United States, together supplied between 80 and 90 per cent of the world markets for 2G (GSM) base stations, switching systems and handsets.

Ericsson is still Ericsson, a telecoms equipment giant, supplying 5G and other equipment to Telstra and many operators around the world. It is already “well underway” with research on 6G, which it hopes will deliver “truly omnipresent wireless intelligence” early in the 2030s. But Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent progressively merged into what is now Nokia Networks. And Motorola split into two: “Motorola Solutions,” still based in Chicago, concentrating on “public safety and enterprise security”; the mobile device business sold to Google and then — minus many of its patents — to Lenovo.

Lenovo is one of several Chinese companies, all of them established in what Garcia-Swartz and Campbell-Kelly call the “first wave” of Chinese entrepreneurship in the 1980s, that became global communications equipment behemoths. Two others, Huawei and ZTE, both founded in Shenzen, used their success in the local market as a platform for international expansion. By the mid 2010s, they were “diversified telecommunications conglomerates that had transformed the world telecommunications-equipment market.” In 2018, Huawei was the global cellular infrastructure market leader, with 31 per cent market share, ahead of Ericsson (27 per cent), Nokia (22 per cent) and ZTE (11 per cent). They are now “among the world leaders in 5G-related intellectual property.”

The market for mobile handsets has also been upended. Each generation of mobile technology spawned winners and losers. Success, even dominance, in one era didn’t guarantee so much as survival in the next. The most disruptive changes came with smartphones, first deployed over 3G and then on 4G networks. These brought new names to the mobile industry and big changes to the inner workings of phones. Smartphone operating systems and the more sophisticated “baseband” processors needed to drive increasingly complex phones became discrete fields of competition. Some of the biggest winners were companies outside the traditional telecommunications industry which levered their assets, skills and capital into these new fields.

When Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, mobile phones using the Symbian operating system (co-owned by Psion, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola) had nearly two-thirds of the market. Six years later, Symbian had virtually disappeared. The iPhone had changed the world but it had not overrun it. Around 15 per cent of global handsets sold in 2013 ran Apple’s iOS operating system; nearly 80 per cent were running Google’s Android, released the year after the iPhone.

Manufacturers paid no licence fee to incorporate Google’s open source operating system into their handsets. One of them, Korea’s Samsung, increased its share of global handset sales from about 3 per cent in 2009 to around 30 per cent three years later, according to Statista, as sales by the early smartphone leaders, Nokia and Blackberry, collapsed. A decade on, Samsung sold around 22 per cent of the smartphones shipped across the world in the first quarter of 2023, and Apple 20 per cent, while three relatively young Chinese brands, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, accounted for a total of around 29 per cent.

The story doesn’t end in China, nor even in Asia. The “new frontier for cellular carriers and equipment manufacturers,” say Garcia-Swartz and Campbell-Kelly, is Africa. Here, the mobile phone network operators provide a remarkable illustration of that continuing confluence of technology, power, business and culture.

A “first wave” of private mobile operations came from three “emerging-market multinationals” created and headquartered in Africa — Telcel (Zaire), the enterprise that eventually became Celtel (Uganda) and MTN (South Africa). A few European operators had a “modest presence” in the 1990s, including Vodafone in partnership with incumbents in South Africa (Vodacom); the British Cable and Wireless in MTN; France Telecom in former French colonies like Ivory Coast and Senegal. Then mobile operators from the Arabian Peninsula, including UAE-based Etisalat, expanded into Africa in the 2000s by buying stakes in existing operators and launching services in other territories. In the 2010s, Indian operator Bharti Airtel acquired the operator that had taken over and expanded Celtel.

By 2015, the Big 5 mobile constellations in Africa were MTN, Bharti Airtel, Vodacom, Orange (France Telecom’s rebrand) and Etisalat, an eclectic mix of homegrown enterprise, colonial continuity and neighbourhood expansion.

The rise of China and its corporations also, eventually, provoked a political and strategic backlash that is unpicking physical and commercial networks, especially in telecommunications. Australia effectively banned Chinese telecoms equipment makers Huawei and ZTE from supplying equipment for the National Broadband Network in 2012 and local 5G networks in 2018.

New, celebratory buzzwords like “reshoring” and “friend-shoring” have been coined for the partial dismantling of the globally dispersed manufacturing supply chains once trumpeted as the apogee of a global age. The annual reports of the “communications access coordinator” established under Australia’s 2018 Telecommunications Sector Security Reforms identify “complex multi-vendor/subcontractor, multi-jurisdiction supply chains” not as economic marvels but as misunderstood security risks.

Mobile data traffic and 5G subscriptions are swelling around the world, but Ericsson forecasts overall mobile subscriptions to grow only modestly over the next few years. Global smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2023 were 13 per cent below the figure in 2022 and “red cap” (reduced capacity) devices have been announced. Mobile operators are struggling to generate adequate returns on the needed investment: a recent report from Venture Insights (commissioned by Optus) warned of a “digital investment gap” between the capital required to upgrade networks to support surging usage and the revenues earned from customers hooked on falling prices or increasing value from their mobile plans.

In the late 1990s, a black-clad IT consultant told me what was needed to bring my small legal centre’s computer network up to the cusp of the twenty-first century. He was right about almost everything: desktop iMacs and email for all staff; ethernet to connect us. It seems embarrassingly obvious in retrospect.

It was so obvious to the consultant that he took almost no notes. The few he needed were composed with an electric pen, magically applied to the screen of a small device he held in his other hand, an Apple Newton. Crestfallen, I realised we couldn’t afford The Future after all.

Apple’s Newton was eventually buried in the deepest grave the 1990s offered for devices and practices that missed their moment: parodied in an episode of The Simpsons. Steve Jobs killed it off when he returned to Apple for his “second act.” The idea of interacting with a handheld screen without using a keyboard was great; this iteration was expensive and unreliable. Newton came to be seen as an interesting but ultimately comical wrong turn on the road to the touchscreen smartphones that took over the mobile communications world in the 2010s.

The regular, generational rhythms of mobile personal communications from 1G to 6G paint a misleading predictability across the surface of this capricious industry. Messages are exchanged seamlessly within and across borders and cultures, while power and profit draw technologies and institutions into fickle, fragile forms. •

Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry
By Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly | MIT Press | US$45 | 387 pages

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Several decades and many books and awards later, contemplating his own experience of “the changes wrought by ageing,” Dyer has returned to the topic he thinks has been his theme all along: giving up. A passionate follower of tennis, it seemed important to finish his new book, The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings, before the retirement of “Roger.” Dyer has never met Roger Federer but it’s still just Roger, “always and only Roger.” Then, a year into the writing, Covid struck and much of the book “ended up being written while life as we know it came to an end.”

Dyer is an endlessly original writer, the author of books with arresting titles about music, art, travel and much more: But Beautiful, about jazz; Out of Sheer Rage, about D.H. Lawrence; a collection of essays, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, about almost everything except yoga. In The Last Days, he marshals testimony from these passions to explore “things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out.” It’s not “a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally,” more “a congeries of experiences, things, and cultural artefacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life.”

A clutch of book and movie titles illustrates the pull of “The Last…”: of the Mohicans, Tycoon, Picture Show, Emperor, Year at Marienbad, Tango in Paris. Coupling The Last with Summer seems especially beguiling. There are subcategories of endings and striking examples. “We love a crook’s last heist, ‘After-this-one-I’m-out.’” Armies and artists can meet perversely quick ends after “catastrophic early success.” Some experiences, like reading Edith Wharton, are more blissful because they have been deferred, savoured nearer the end than the start of a reading life. The temple built and destroyed each year at Burning Man acquires spiritual power at speed, in part because those who come to each temporary Black Rock City know and accept that the temple is about to burn.

One way to end is to quit. That can take guts, a kind of “self-discipline normally associated with persistence.” You quit on a book that is giving you no pleasure: “Just because something’s a classic doesn’t mean it’s any good.” You quit on a film, that “unforgiving medium” where there is “not even the possibility of redemption after the first botched minutes.” You long to quit on a poetry reading, even one you are enjoying, grateful for the wind-up words: “I’ll read two more poems.”

Having quit, extra endings can be generated by Coming Back. Artists do this — Jean Rhys and Duke Ellington are among Dyer’s exemplars who did it while still alive. J.S. Bach, Nietsche and van Gogh outdid them by rejuvenating from the grave. But it’s sport that’s the home of comebacks. Tennis seems tailored to produce them. The winner must win the last point. There is no end until then, no lead that cannot be run down. Every champion has come back from the clifftop of “match point,” that single point their opponent might have won but didn’t, an ending deferred then turned around.

Without being able to read or play a note of music, Dyer has written superbly about it. Tennis he plays, twice a week, on courts beside the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica. “The glow of those four hours suffuses the whole week,” he says. It exhausts him now, leaves him unable to do much else for the rest of the day. He is constantly injured. The book must not become “an injury diary or sprain journal,” but these pains are worrying. It’s “not just tennis elbow, it’s elbow elbow.” He stockpiles tennis balls, overgrip, shoes, racquets, hoping to “goad the poor corpus into eking out some kind of on-court existence even as it announces a daily increasing reluctance to do so.”

The endings and post-retirement lives of Roger’s predecessors at the top of the men’s game get special analysis. John McEnroe wrote not one but two memoirs, Serious and But Seriously, the second “focusing on the years he’d spent reminiscing about the period covered by the previous volume.” The champion he dethroned, Bjorn Borg, seemed “heir to some non-specific Scandinavian malaise: an all-court jumble of Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Strindberg, held in check during the course of his career by a sweaty headband (or, conceivably, caused by the headband?).” Pete Sampras, whose record of fourteen Grand Slam victories Federer overtook, is “one of the most contented spirits in sport. He played a lot of tennis and then stopped playing tennis.”

It is still not clear if The Last Days made it to publication before Federer’s last day. He has not played a tournament since losing in straight sets in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon last year and has no ATP ranking for the first time in twenty-five years. Few really imagine he could win another major tournament. He has already staged his comeback, that astounding twelve months in 2017 and 2018 when, having failed to win a major since 2012, he won the Australian Open, then Wimbledon, then the Australian Open again.

He is supposed to be playing the Laver Cup in London in late September, an exhibition event where he will make up an old guard Team Europe with Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, followed by the Swiss Indoors in his hometown Basel. Attending but not playing Wimbledon two months ago, he talked about coming back “one more time,” a last summer on the lawns. Dyer would love it, but he knows it’s over. Roger Federer might get back on a court, even a centre court, but the era when “aesthetics and victory could go hand in hand” is ending.

A writer is naturally interested in how endings creep up in his chosen craft. Dyer’s poorly paid relatives looked forward to their retirements. “It was a form of promotion, practically an ambition.” Writers, he thinks, are more likely to keep to themselves their declining ability to form useful sentences or convince publishers to publish them. And “If part of the job is sitting in a chair at home with your feet up, reading, then the difference between work and retirement is imperceptible.” Retirement, for Dyer, will be “the phase of life in which I will do nothing but watch tennis.”

One of the many blurb writers who have tried to encapsulate Geoff Dyer called him “insouciant.” It is true but not wholly true. “Wouldn’t it be marvellous if it were possible to be a serious writer without taking oneself at all seriously?” he muses. “Not just socially, that’s easy…; I mean while actually doing the work.” Having published eleven books of non-fiction and four novels, Dyer has lived with the daily effort of finishing projects while fearing each might be the end of his writing life. The words wind up insouciant; the work that produces them is insistent.

Dyer writes absorbingly about Beethoven’s and Turner’s “late” periods. He contemplates adding a writer to complete the analytical triangle with the German composer and English painter, but rethinks the device when he realises he has one already.

At the US Open in 2021, like everyone else, Dyer was stunned by Emma Raducanu’s victory. In only her fourth tour-level tournament, the eighteen-year-old won her way through three qualifying rounds to make the main draw, then seven matches in a row without dropping a set. No qualifier had ever made the final, the last match, of a Grand Slam. Even more startling: Geoff Dyer found he was “starting to forget about Roger.”

A year on, the players are back at Flushing Meadow for the 2022 Open and Raducanu has been knocked out in the first round. Dyer might be in New York, or watching on television. As likely, he’ll be out in California, on the Ocean View courts, his “long limbs flailing away,” chasing down every ball he can. “I’m not going anywhere but if I were I’d be going out on my shield even if the shield, in my case, is a desk.” •

The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings
By Geoff Dyer | Canongate | $39.99 | 283 pages

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A book is a chance to pull fragments like these together and discern a larger story. This one, by Wall Street Journal automotive and technology reporter Tim Higgins, is mainly about Tesla, not Musk’s space and solar energy companies, SpaceX and SolarCity. But Tesla took over SolarCity five years ago (the controversial transaction is described in detail here), and the connections across Musk’s commercial and personal activities mean anyone writing about him needs to deal with them all. “He’s charging after a personal calling,” wrote Ashlee Vance in his 2016 biography, “one that’s intertwined with his soul and injected into the deepest parts of his mind.” Vance dubbed it “the unified field theory of Elon Musk.”

As Higgins was wrapping up the text of Power Play early in 2021, the Economist published a debate between a Tesla bull and a Tesla bear. Sales of the Model 3 were surging and a sixth straight profitable quarter was announced, the first time Tesla had been profitable in each quarter of a calendar year. Its share price had increased eightfold in twelve months.

The Tesla bull declared the share price “will travel in only one direction — up.” It was “a mistake to judge the company by the standards of the firms it will leave in its tracks.” Tesla was not a carmaker, it was a technology firm that would disrupt personal transport, energy, robotics, healthcare and more. Its leader was a visionary with a “genius for turning the future into dollars.”

The bear was just as confident. Tesla’s share price would travel in reverse. It had done an extraordinary job “building a brand swiftly and making electric cars trendy.” Now though, competition was increasing, Tesla was losing market share and missing production targets. The hype about self-driving cars had worn off as their problems became clearer. Musk himself was spread too thinly. “The strains from Tesla’s expansion could again bring out his demons.”

So far, the Tesla bull is winning. In December, Time magazine declared Elon Musk its 2021 Person of the Year. Tesla Common Stock closed the first day of trading on the NASDAQ in 2022 at around $1200, a 64 per cent increase over the year, after the company reported vehicle deliveries in 2021 of 936,000, up from 510,000 in 2020. (Along with other tech stocks, they have fallen a long way since, closing at $930 on 24 January.) At the time of writing, according to Forbes Real Time Billionaires, Musk was comfortably the world’s richest person, his net worth nearly twice that of the fourth-richest person, Bill Gates.

“Elon has all these ideas and I can’t move fast enough,” confided Tesla co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard in late 2006 as he battled to produce the company’s first cars. By August, the company had a new CEO and Eberhard had moved to a new position as president of technology. Before the end of the year he was gone altogether, although he retained a shareholding.

Incidents like this happen many, many times through Higgins’s flowing account of the rise of the pioneering electric vehicle company. This one, common in the life of high-tech startups, is especially decisive. It’s the moment when “a founder’s skills are exceeded,” writes Higgins. “[Eberhard] knew it, and so did Musk.”

Eberhard and Musk, the largest shareholder and chair of the company, discussed bringing in a chief financial officer and a new CEO. News of the search leaked, embarrassing Eberhard. The start date for production of Tesla’s first cars kept being deferred and their likely cost rising. The company needed money. Musk spoke to Eberhard. A few days later the board approved his “resignation” as CEO and new job title. Later, it got very messy. Eberhard sued Musk, they settled, they sang each other’s praises. In the meantime, the company got an interim CEO, then a new CEO. Eventually Musk took over as CEO himself, a position he has held ever since.

The technology, the cars, the funding dramas, the manufacturing and marketing, the deals, the losses and the profits; these provide the raw data for Higgins’s tale. The current that ripples through it all, though, are the stories like these, about Musk’s handling of people. Higgins’s title captures it perfectly. To do things as big as the ones Musk wants to accomplish you need a lot of people and they need to do remarkable work for you, their very best, long day after exhausting day.

“Elon” — his surname has become superfluous — seems simultaneously magnetic and repellent. The magnet seeks, finds and attracts the best and brightest people to do the work he needs them to do. These are not just brilliant young Stanford engineers who have already self-selected for tech jobs at the most interesting and promising Silicon Valley companies. They are experienced auto industry executives and production line workers, people who know how cars are made and how big motor vehicle companies work but are frustrated by their inefficiencies and conservatism. They are marketing people who understand advertising but are prepared to work for a company that doesn’t want to pay for it. They are retailers who understand the behaviour of consumers and might have been surprised by Tesla’s passionate early ones. These were people who wore delays, price rises, defects and breakdowns almost as badges of honour, personal investments in a more sustainable future.

The repellent Musk uses these people up and casts them aside when they are no longer useful, repeatedly behaving in ways that would drop the jaws of human resources (“People and Culture”) professionals. If they have worked at Tesla for at least five years, they will probably have their stock options. A highlight from Vance’s biography: when Musk’s long-serving executive assistant, who worked across all his interests and “gave up her life for Musk for more than a decade,” proposed she should be paid at the same level as other senior executives, Musk suggested she take a two-week vacation. He would do her job himself and decide whether she was still required. She wasn’t, and was given twelve months’ severance pay. “Twelve years is a good run for any job. She’ll do a great job for someone,” Musk told Vance.

Is this just Silicon Valley? America? Capitalism? Or Musk himself?

Higgins stays clear of the amateur psychology, deferring to the detail in Ashlee Vance’s biography. It describes Musk’s tough childhood in a violent place, apartheid South Africa, vicious bullying at school, and prodigious capacity for absorbing, understanding and recalling detail. When their parents separated, Elon and younger brother and sister Kimbal and Tosca lived with their mother; after two years, Elon decided to live with his father Errol, an “ultra-present and very intense” man, according to Kimbal. “There were fun moments,” Elon told Vance. “He is an odd duck… He’s good at making life miserable.”

Vance struggled to get anyone on the record criticising Errol and Erroll himself responded to his request for an interview with an impeccable email praising all his children. “Elon was a very independent and focused child at home with me.” Perhaps when your son is the world’s richest man and is making a fair fist of leading the global auto industry away from fossil fuels you don’t think you have much to apologise for.

Musk the magnet has drawn exceptionally smart, hard-working people to his enterprises to be part of a vision he pitches as gigantic and good. Tesla/SolarCity is saving humanity and the earth by shifting vehicles to electric power and electricity generation to solar. SpaceX is insurance in case it doesn’t work, the chance for human beings to survive somewhere else, most likely on a second planet, Mars. The first part, the power play, is widely supported. The second, making humans a multiplanetary species, is much more contentious. Whatever your view, it adds up to a serious industrial, political and cultural project and Musk pursues it with greater tenacity and purpose than many governments whose job it is to think this big.

Successful companies often claim a central mission, holding clear and steady across the years, a North Star that the whole enterprise steers towards — think “customer-centric” at Amazon, “organising the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” at Google. The mission disciplines decisions about how and where to grow. But it always iterates with new opportunities, expanding, contracting, clarifying. When Google outgrew its founding mission, it gave birth to a parent company, Alphabet, with a larger one, to make “the world around you” universally accessible and useful. Netflix completely transformed itself from a physical distributor of other people’s movies and TV shows to a digital distributor of its own.

The Tesla Motors that Elon Musk largely funded in 2003 (investing $6.35 million of the $6.5 million startup round) was building an electric sports car, a “Roadster.” It captivated early buyers with the same things sports cars have always oozed, acceleration and good looks. For some, electric power was just a novel way to improve performance on a familiar parameter. Less than two decades later, having acquired SolarCity, Tesla has dropped “Motors” from its name and says its mission, from the start, was “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” The product line-up now includes three batteries designed for home, commercial and utility-scale installations and a rooftop solar energy system, as well as the cars.

The electric vehicle part of the plan was laid out in “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan,” Musk’s “laughably simple” three-step business plan: build an expensive sports car to attract attention (the Roadster); then build a luxury sedan to compete against German luxury vehicles (which became the Model S, released in 2012); then build a car for the people (the Model 3, on sale since 2017). Along the way, it added two SUVs, the Model X and the compact Model Y.

Simple in conception, Higgins explains how extraordinarily difficult it was in practice to design, build and sell these different electric vehicles, how much else Tesla has changed about the auto business, and how electric vehicles became part of a larger energy transformation project. Several observations stand out.

First, while Tesla is sometimes perceived as a lone rebel in the automotive landscape, it has crafted some crucial partnerships that enabled it to get products to market more quickly, or at greater scale and lower cost, than would have been possible if it had tried to do everything itself. This was not easy when the company was another Silicon Valley startup with big plans; Musk’s gift was to convince powerful incumbents it was not just another Silicon Valley startup.

The Roadster was a partnership with Lotus and used the Elise chassis (the marriage was far from perfect). The early batteries were produced by Sanyo and then Panasonic, the latter joining Tesla in a partnership to create a huge battery manufacturing facility in Nevada known as the Gigafactory. Daimler Benz bought parts from Tesla and invested in the company. Tesla bought (and extensively remodelled) its automotive factory in Fremont California from Toyota, which used it from 1984–2009 in a partnership with General Motors, after GM had occupied the site from 1962.

That said, Tesla’s preparedness to build parts and products itself, to bring in-house activities that have been increasingly dispersed across global manufacturing chains, is remarkable. The book is full of examples where the company imagined it could rely on experienced suppliers to design and manufacture parts it needed but was frustrated by their quality and/or cost and eventually chose to build rather than buy. The Gigafactory is the best example: this partnership to massively scale up battery production was designed to give Tesla more control of its own destiny as it pursued ambitious targets for vehicle and solar production.

Third, Tesla’s success in producing things, especially motor cars, has mattered in the United States. In the internet age, American capitalism triumphed in Silicon Valley but collapsed in Detroit. As Tesla was battling to sell its first vehicles and finance its future during the global financial crisis, America’s car companies were going to the wall. (Tesla came close itself.) Many of the great tech successes of recent decades — Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Netflix — sell experiences, not tangible products. Apple sells devices but they are largely produced overseas, a stellar example of the globally dispersed production model. America did not make things anymore, many complained. Tesla does, and the very things that once supplied America with corporate and cultural iconography — Henry Ford, the Chrysler Building, General Motors. Now, there are Stars and Stripes decals on SpaceX’s rockets.

Fourth, Power Play shows how the Musk-led Tesla has changed more about cars than the way they are powered, often against immense opposition. Electric power itself changed more than the carbon footprint of vehicles: a watermelon-sized electric motor, fewer moving parts and a battery pack located under the passenger compartment opened up more space for occupants and luggage. Tesla also changed the way motor cars were sold — direct to customers rather than through franchised dealer networks. (Australian ex-Ford boss Jack Nasser, consulted as part of venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins’s early due diligence on Tesla, warned about direct selling, regarding his own attempt to fight the franchise dealers as one of his “biggest mistakes.”) Tesla changed the way cars are advertised (theirs are not). Along with many others, it hopes to change the way they are all driven (they won’t be).

Companies come and go around the Bay Area: Silicon Valley does not have a problem with failure. “Since organisational death, in and of itself, is not perceived as a finite expression of failure, entrepreneurs are able to entertain what would normally be considered ‘outlandish’ risks,” write Homa Bahrami and Stuart Evans in a chapter on high technology entrepreneurship in Understanding Silicon Valley. Elon Musk takes outlandish risks but he does have a problem with failure. “My mentality is that of a samurai,” he told a venture capitalist (quoted by Vance). “I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

Musk came to Tesla already a successful tech entrepreneur, having sold the company he founded with his brother Kimbal, Zip2, to Compaq in 1999. He then received around $250 million (before taxes) from his share of PayPal when eBay bought it in 2002. Musk had been CEO at both enterprises, carrying heavy bruises from PayPal, where he was replaced by Peter Thiel in a clandestine manoeuvre undertaken while Musk was on his way to honeymoon at the Sydney Olympics. Ashlee Vance found much acknowledgement of Musk’s contribution at PayPal, where he hired a lot of the top talent, as he had done at Zip2, created a number of the company’s most successful business ideas and served as CEO during a period of rapid expansion from sixty to several hundred employees.

“I’ve just never seen anything like his ability to take pain…,” Tesla and SpaceX investor and Musk friend, Antonio Gracias, told Vance. “Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray. Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational… The harder it gets, the better he gets.” Musk says he would like to die on Mars. “Just not on impact. Ideally I’d like to go for a visit, come back for a while, and then go there when I’m like seventy or something and then just stay there.”

Business historians and management theorists are trained to look at many factors to explain the growth and evolution of enterprises, to be wary of the biographer’s temptation to personalise it all, to give too much credit to leaders, especially leaders as media-thrilling as Elon Musk. It isn’t hard to forecast a fall ahead for the Tesla and SpaceX leader, or even imagine the likely reasons. The Tesla bears and their shortselling shadows do it every day. But right now, Elon Musk has cast a spell across global business and investment. By the time you read this, it may have broken. If not, watch it closely, for it is an extraordinary thing.

One last thing: Tim Higgins says he gave Elon Musk “numerous opportunities” to respond to the material presented in the book. Musk made no specific comments, but said “Most, but not all, of what you read in this book is nonsense.” •

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He doesn’t want to smooth over conflicts. “The only thing worse than having toxic arguments is not having arguments at all.” And he doesn’t just want people to reach agreement through compromise. He wants “productive disagreements,” the kind that “neither reinforce nor eradicate a difference, but make something new out of it.” Humans cannot aspire only to “put our differences aside,” they must put them to work.

Such work is tough. Productive disagreement, Leslie thinks, is “not a philosophy so much as a discipline, and a skill.” To help, Conflicted offers ten Rules of Productive Argument and a “toolbox” of pithy cues that add up to “a universal grammar of productive disagreement, available for any of us to apply to our lives.” Learn what is in the box and open it “when you next embark on a difficult conversation.”

Conflicted starts by making the case for conflict. It can bring us closer, make us smarter and inspire us. The strongest relationships and workplaces don’t skirt conflict: heat can bring light. Human intelligence is interactive, and disagreements enable individuals and groups to learn from each other and to “think harder about why we believe what we believe.” Artists rebel against prevailing tastes, entrepreneurs against established business models, political leaders against old injustices.

To find out how to disagree well, Leslie talked with people who make their living out of conflict. He found “remarkable similarities” between the challenges faced by professional hostage negotiators, police interviewers, therapists, mediators and diplomats, and those dealt with every day by the tyros of conflict in families, friendships and offices (where the politics is “passive aggression at scale”). The professionals are “masters of the conversation beneath the conversation,” experts at “retrieving something valuable from the most unpromising of circumstances.”

Leslie gives his ten Rules of Productive Argument a chapter each: first, connect; let go of the rope; give face; check your weirdness; get curious; make wrong strong; disrupt the script; share constraints; only get mad on purpose (as Tony Blair is supposed to have said). The final, golden, rule, the one to which all the others are subordinate, is “be real” — that is, “make an honest human connection.”

The first and the last rules draw from the same well: that is, the quality of the relationship where the conflict occurs. “Better relationships lead to better disagreements,” Leslie says. The experts are especially good at this, nudging the substance of a disagreement down the road while they mould a relationship. In a crisis, they may not have much time. Even if they are talking a stranger down from a ledge or administering first aid after an accident, they still don’t omit the first step. “It just means you need to work fast.”

Along the way, Leslie illuminates the argument and the rules with cases. Southwest Airlines in the United States built its competitive advantage by managing a specific kind of internal conflict that bedevilled airlines. Deep-seated differences over status and perceived competence among pilots, cabin crew, baggage handlers and other ground staff produced endemic disagreement that slowed aircraft turnaround times. Fixing it, and keeping it fixed, increased profits because planes spent less time on the ground and more in the air moving paying customers to their destinations.

The Wright Brothers, apparently, were “bare-knuckle debaters,” trained by their father to argue after dinner “as vigorously as possible without being disrespectful.” Wilbur thought Orville “a good scrapper.” Himself? “After I get hold of a truth I hate to lose it again, and I like to sift all the truth out before I give up on an error.”

Nelson Mandela, “a genius of facework,” famously “gave face” to so many who oppressed him and other black South Africans. Leslie describes him answering the door and personally serving tea, with milk and sugar, to Constand Viljoen, “apartheid’s last best hope,” in September 1993.

In February 1993 the FBI negotiators at Mount Carmel, near Waco, Texas, brought a worldview that seemed as weird to the Branch Davidians as the Davidians’ appeared to the FBI. “They [the FBI] did everything by the book,” says Leslie. “But the book turned out to be missing a crucial chapter.” Military hardware was less terrifying to the Davidians than God’s judgement. The transcripts of “negotiation” provide excruciating evidence of mutual weirdness, unchecked, though they can also be seen as an extreme version of most human interactions. Every individual is a “micro-culture,” says Leslie; we are all “a little odd.”

“Letting go of the rope” means resisting the “righting reflex,” the urge to tell someone who is sounding a bit rattled to “calm down,” or a person who is worried by apparent trivia that “there is nothing to worry about.” In the Covid era, which hadn’t begun when Leslie’s text was finalised, it might mean resisting the impulse to tell vaccine-hesitants they are being delusional if they ask any questions about vaccines that have not received final approvals from food and drug administrations.

Leslie is a persuasive advocate for his position, and for his rules and tools, though he worries it is all too reasonable, the whole book “so… polite.” He is “not one of life’s natural warriors; even mild confrontation can make me itch with discomfort.” He knows marginalised people are sick of being told they need to be reasonable, that they need to listen to their oppressors and not just speak loudly and insistently themselves. Mandela had the muscle of international support to add to Viljoen’s tea along with the milk and sugar.

Some people really are impossible to engage with, Leslie acknowledges, but he thinks “we have a persistent, habitual tendency to overestimate the size of this group. Especially when we haven’t had much sleep.” He likes politeness, civility, ground rules for engagement, because he thinks they generally help people to disagree productively. Civility is “the minimum standard of behaviour necessary to encourage your opponent to talk back.”

It is the talking back he is after, not the civility itself. That returns him to the quality of the relationship that underpins the disagreement. “Ultimately all rules are a crutch, or a guide rail, that we can dispense with if the relationship is strong enough. We should be civil with those we don’t know, and aim to know them well enough that we can be uncivil.” •

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Amazon and Netflix are giants of the online economy. Both launched in the 1990s and survived the Tech Wreck of the early 2000s. Amazon is now an uber-giant, one of five US firms with a market capitalisation of more than US$1 trillion at the time of writing; Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google and Facebook are the others. At around US$240 billion, Netflix is much smaller, though still among the largest twenty-five US companies.

For the authors of these books, innovation and invention are the markers of the two enterprises and the era they inhabit. “In the industrial era, the goal was to minimise variation,” says Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Today, in the information age, in creative companies, “maximising variation is more essential.” “Creativity, speed and agility” rather than “error prevention and replicability” are the goals for “many companies and… many teams.”

Yet the authors also attribute the two companies’ success to the steadiness and clarity of their central missions: Amazon’s belief that the long-term interests of shareholders coincide with the interests of customers, its obsession with customers rather than competitors, its “willingness to think long-term,” its “eagerness to invent” and its pride in “operational excellence.” Netflix too is “highly aligned,” concentrated on what Hastings calls “Our North Star,” “building a company that is able to adapt quickly as unforeseen opportunities arise and business conditions change.”

Pursuing these steady visions over more than two decades, Amazon and Netflix have radically changed what they do. An online bookstore became “The Everything Store,” as journalist Brad Stone titled his first book about Amazon. (His second, Amazon Unbound, was published earlier this year.) It started manufacturing and selling its own products, hosting other sellers, and selling services it built for itself to external parties. Amazon Web Services is now a behemoth in its own right. Netflix began as a DVD rental company that licensed other companies’ movies and TV shows, before moving into online streaming and producing its own Netflix Originals.

These were not mere pivots, they were deeply transforming, changing fundamentally the staff skills, the organisational competencies and the business partners needed for success. At the same time, both enterprises moved beyond the United States, seeking online customers, dealing with regulatory and political challenges, sometimes establishing distant operations and employing local people. Globalising the businesses massively increased their size and complexity. It also expanded the potential audience for books like these that try to explain the secret sauces.

Both books bring some outside perspective to what are essentially insider accounts. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr had long careers at Amazon before co-founding a business where they “coach executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon.” They are writing, in part, for potential clients.

No Rules Rules is about the company Reed Hastings co-founded, and is co-written by him and Erin Meyer — actually, it is a kind of dialogue constructed by alternating, individually written sections. Meyer is an “American living in Paris” who has worked with Netflix and conducted a lot of interviews with staff for this book. A professor at INSEAD Business School’s Fontainebleau campus, she explores “how the world’s most successful managers navigate the complexities of cultural differences in a global environment.” Hastings, one suspects, wants this book to help attract talented staff to the fluid, personally rewarding organisation it portrays.

“Working Backwards” is the title of Bryar and Carr’s business as well as their book. It refers to the Amazon creed: don’t create a product and then try to sell it; start with the customer experience then work backwards to the design and marketing. No Rules Rules is a stretch, for Hasting and Meyer’s book is as much about the rules Netflix does have, and how they are enforced, as those it has let go.

The pictures that eventually emerge are the obverse of the ones painted by two of the companies’ best-known incidents, both involving PowerPoint. Netflix’s organisational culture began attracting attention because of the massive, 127-slide Netflix Culture Deck, first shared outside the organisation in 2009. Amazon memorably banned PowerPoint for internal presentations in 2004 after CEO Jeff Bezos and co-author Colin Bryar read Edward Tufte’s essay condemning the “cognitive style” of that ubiquitous presentation software. Complex, interconnected discussions were not well served by the relentless linearity of bullet points. In PowerPoint’s place came the “six-pager,” a short narrative format still used to “describe, review or propose just about any type of idea, process or business” at Amazon. Everyone has to write them and read them.

Working Backwards, though, exalts the universal application of procedures. No Rules Rules celebrates their elimination. The approaches have more in common than it seems, but they are undoubtedly distinctive mindsets to bring to the task of innovation and invention.

Exalting procedure, Bryar and Carr explain the “Bar Raiser” hiring process, “single-threaded teams” as an organising principle, and the PR/FAQ (Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions) process that Amazon uses for new product development. The PR/FAQ embodies the idea of “working backwards.” What would you say when the time came to launch this new product? What questions would customers ask and how would you answer them?

They also set out Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles — among them: “Leaders are owners… Leaders are right a lot… Leaders are never done learning… Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly and treat others respectfully… Leaders do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion… Leaders rise to the occasion and never settle.”

The most striking apparent contrast with Netflix comes from Amazon’s Deep Dive Leadership Principle: “Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are sceptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.” Bryar and Carr add: “At many companies, when the senior leadership meets, they tend to focus more on big-picture, high-level strategy issues than on execution. At Amazon, it’s the opposite. Amazon leaders toil over the execution details.”

In this, founding CEO Jeff Bezos looms large. Bezos recently stepped down as CEO, his place taken by former head of Amazon Web Services, Andrew Jassy, though he remains executive chairman and Amazon’s largest shareholder. He was clearly a “nanomanager,” Hastings and Meyer’s term for the mythological CEOs who are said to be “so involved in the details of the business that their product or service becomes amazing.” Working Backwards is dense with references to Jeff: Jeff’s ideas, Jeff’s comments at meetings, Jeff’s early-morning emails after “walking the store,” Jeff’s unhappiness about this or delight about that.

Celebrating the elimination of rules, Hastings says, “We don’t emulate these top-down models, because we believe we are fastest and most innovative when employees throughout the company make and own decisions.” He is proud of the comment Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg made after shadowing him for a day: “You didn’t make one decision!” The idea is “to lead by context, not control.” The image of the organisational structure is a tree rather than a pyramid. The CEO sits “all the way down at the roots”; the decision-makers are “informed captains up at the top branches.”

An example: CEO Hastings, “at the roots,” sets the overall strategy for Netflix to make international expansion its number one priority. Ted Sarandos, chief content officer and now co-CEO, “at the trunk,” encourages his teams to take big risks with large potential wins or lessons-from-failure in those new territories: “We need to become an international learning machine.” Out on a “big branch,” vice-president of original animation, Melissa Cobb, decides the foray into children’s programming should mean a child watching Netflix in a Bangkok high-rise should not get the typical “global” mix of either local or US characters, but “a variety of TV and movie friends from around the world.” On a mid-sized branch, the director of the team acquiring preschool content, Dominique Bazay, decides Netflix’s animation needs to be high-quality, high enough “to be a hit in anime-obsessed Japan.” The manager of content acquisition in Mumbai, “on a small branch,” “in a small conference room in Mumbai,” commissions Mighty Little Bheem, spending a lot of money on a genre that has few precedents in India.

It is rarely difficult to poke fun at management books — at the language, the inconsistencies, the conviction that none of this has ever been done before, the confident assumption that lessons from one stellar organisation are applicable to all others.

Here, Bryar and Carr refer often to the virtues of “being Amazonian.” This is what happens when you exhibit one or more of the fourteen leadership principles. When things go well, it is because people are “being Amazonian,” sometimes without even realising it. When something goes wrong, invariably, someone, somewhere, was insufficiently Amazonian.

Netflix preaches candour and transparency about data inside the company, but has pioneered a radical degree of opacity about its own viewing numbers by comparison with the historical standards set by cinemas and television broadcasters. The company asserts its inclusivity but insists on “no jerks” — the kind of No Rules Rule that probably seems fair and obvious to incumbent non-jerks but which, one suspects, may hide unwritten sub-rules that mystify the excluded. There are no detailed rules about travel and expenses, but 10 per cent of claims are audited and if people are found to have infringed the one, overarching rule — “act in Netflix’s best interests” — well, “fire them and speak about the abuse openly.”

Innovation, of course, did not begin with the internet; Amazon did not invent customer-centric product development; leaders and organisations have been grappling forever with the balance between centralised “command and control” and decentralised autonomy. The people who laid the first Atlantic cable a century and a half ago, or launched the first aviation services, risked not just financial ruin but levels of personal danger some way beyond the life experience of Silicon Valley engineers running A/B tests of discounted shipping options.

Even working backwards seems to have had many parents. Just returned to Apple as an adviser in 1997, Steve Jobs told the Worldwide Developer Conference in 1997, “One of the things I’ve always found is you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”

But there are two full litres of Kool-Aid here in these two books and you don’t have to drink it all to find much of it fascinating. Erin Meyer first thought the Netflix Culture Deck was “hypermasculine, excessively confrontational, and downright aggressive — perhaps a reflection of the kind of company you might expect to be constructed by an engineer with a somewhat mechanistic, rationalist view of human nature.” She accepted the invitation to take a closer look because what could not be denied was the scale of Netflix’s success. It’s “beyond unusual. It’s incredible. Clearly, something singular is happening.” Beyond unusual, yes, but perhaps not singular, because Amazon could say the same, at least about its growth.

Both pairs of authors obviously believe the recipes they reveal might be usefully applied to other organisations and situations, but they acknowledge limits, even in their own. They talk about failures, like Amazon’s 2014–15 Fire Phone, as well as successes. Hastings admits some people will take advantage of the absence of rules. Netflix staff probably fly business class more often than is really needed to “serve Netflix’s best interests” by arriving fresher for meetings. But “even if your employees spend a little more when you give them freedom, the cost is still less than having a workplace where they can’t fly… If you limit their choices, you’ll lose out on the speed and flexibility that comes from a low-rule environment.” The biggest risk for Netflix “isn’t making a mistake or losing consistency; it’s failing to attract top talent, to invent new products, or to change direction quickly when the environment shifts.”

No Rules Rules concludes with a frank acknowledgement of the continuing relevance of the “rules with process” model for some organisations and activities (even parts of Netflix itself), and a set of questions to ask in order to select the right approach. “If you’re leading an emergency room, testing airplanes, managing a coal mine, or delivering just-in-time medication to senior citizens,” “rules with process is the way to go.” Erin Meyer has worked with a few old economy stalwarts that might qualify, like ExxonMobil, Michelin and Johnson & Johnson, as well as with financial institutions like BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank, whose stumbles during the global financial crisis showed how difficult it is to draw neat boundaries around the innovative, fail-fast parts of many organisations and the mission-critical operations where mistakes matter.

The large omission from both books is any real sense of the relationship between these two huge and influential organisations and the wider world. This may seem an unreasonable demand for books of this kind. But there is a clue at the start of the movie awarded Best Film at this year’s Academy Awards, Nomadland: those opening scenes of the Amazon “fulfilment centre” in the snow, juxtaposing warm, high-tech efficiency inside with the human desolation outside. We do need to insist on large questions being posed about “America,” its Tech Boom and its patchwork prosperity, the “sort of affluent dysfunction” that Janan Ganesh described recently in the Financial Times.

Bryar and Carr mention this at the outset: “Some take issue with Amazon’s impact on the business world and even on our society as a whole.” Although “obviously important, both because they affect the lives of people and communities and because, increasingly, failure to address them can have a serious reputational and financial impact on a company,” these issues are “beyond the scope of what we can cover in-depth in this book.” Relentless about the detail of so many aspects of its products, Amazon has been playing catch-up on matters as big as the living and working conditions of its people and the environmental footprint of its activities. The Working Backwards authors footnote Jeff Bezos’s April 2020 letter to shareholders, which “did address Amazon’s impact on multiple fronts.”

The Netflix that Hastings and Meyer portray is a remarkable island of “stunning colleagues,” candour and flexibility. It aspires to be a professional sports team rather than a family. People stay as long as they are the best available for their roles and are moved on as soon as they are not.

Early in No Rules Rules, Hastings tells the story of Netflix’s survival through the Tech Wreck — the dot-com crash — a “road to Damascus experience” that founded “much that has led to Netflix’s success.” The company had to let forty of its 120 staff go. It was gruelling but the company prospered. Business grew and the smaller, now more densely talented team worked longer hours and got the job done. “Talented people,” says Hastings, “make one another more effective.” “Talent density” became a Netflix lodestar.

I found myself wanting to know more about those forty people, good people apparently, just not good enough: “A few were exceptionally gifted and high performing but also complainers or pessimists.” Maybe they found other roles elsewhere for which they were better suited. They are no longer on Netflix’s balance sheet but they are probably still on the United States’. If we are to fully grasp the impact of these tech giants on the whole world, not just their own, we need to understand more than the winners. •

The post Winners take all appeared first on Inside Story.

In the distant past, the job of communications department bureaucrats was sometimes less about coming up with innovative policy ideas and more about steaming open correspondence from media moguls before it reached the prime minister’s office. That way the public service at least got an early warning of the likely agenda.

In previous lives, Fletcher wrote and received that kind of correspondence himself. Having worked as a lawyer, corporate strategist, ministerial chief of staff, and corporate and regulatory affairs adviser and consultant, he knows all the games so well that he has little need to play them.

The shift in approach has also been motivated by a changed balance of power in Australian media and communications. The 1980s and 90s were dominated by two big voices, commercial TV and metropolitan newspapers. Telcos were there too, but on media policy they provided a distant chorus, not big solos. Now they are noisier. Add in rising new powers — the overseas-based technology and streaming giants — and governments are faced with too many vocalists to audition individually. You send out the score and let them all sing.

They all matter to media policy and politicians now. TV remains popular with older viewers, and the nightly news is still watched by a lot of voters. Mobile network operators pay big money for radiofrequency spectrum once used by broadcasters. Streaming services attract huge numbers of subscribers and the bulk of viewing time in some demographics. Google, Facebook and Amazon, by some measures, rule not just media and communications but also the world.

Arriving in the portfolio in May last year, Fletcher quickly called a halt to a process of reforming radiofrequency spectrum law that had gone on a long time without much progress. He then restarted it on a new track. Legislation is expected to make it through parliament before the end of the year.

The ACCC was already investigating the impact of online search engines, social media and digital content aggregators on competition in the media and advertising markets. Responding to its report in December last year, Fletcher and other ministers announced a “staged process to reform media regulation.” One of the first steps was to request a paper canvassing options for future regulation of local content on TV. It was released in April, amid growing broadcaster resentment about obligations they faced but their streaming video competitors did not.

In late September, Fletcher responded by announcing that current Australian and children’s content quotas for commercial TV would be replaced by a more flexible, points-based quota system, and pledging additional funding for Screen Australia and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. In the green paper, he tackles the underlying problem of the long-term sustainability of the free-to-air industry in a world where internet streaming of TV is growing dominant.

The Covid-19 pandemic initially boosted free-to-air TV viewing but smashed advertising revenues, which fell around 15 per cent in 2019–20, increasing the already intense pressure on broadcasters’ costs. While TV audiences are rapidly moving online, the industry is stuck with the high, fixed cost of making five TV networks available to every household in Australia. Transmitters are needed at over 400 sites to do this, as is the Viewer Access Satellite TV service, or VAST, which gets signals to the more than 200,000 households beyond the reach of the terrestrial sites.

Pursuing audiences online brings further costs for broadcasters. Their streamed and on-demand services get to TV sets and other devices because broadcasters, like other video providers, pay to upload their programs to networks of distributed servers known as content delivery networks, or CDNs. Unlike the fixed costs of broadcasting, CDN costs vary with the number of simultaneous users.

Internet streaming also comes with its own gatekeepers. Australian TV networks need the ABC iView, SBS On Demand, 7plus, 9Now and 10Play apps to be “discoverable” in a crowded online landscape where they are important but hardly dominant players. Their aggregate online audiences are smaller than either of the market leaders, Netflix and YouTube, who buy colourful buttons on most TV remote controls. Apple TV+ comes pre-installed on Apple devices as well as on many smart TVs manufactured by Samsung, LG, Sony and others. “Chromecast with Google TV” is the search giant’s latest crack at conquering home entertainment. Amazon lures subscribers to Amazon Prime through premium shipping deals.

To compete with these and other global video giants, local networks must create and maintain a version of their network apps customised for every app marketplace, including every brand of TV receiver. TV manufacturers expect local broadcasters to pay for a conspicuous place, or sometimes any place at all, on the start-up menus of their “smart” TVs. Samsung has started competing with them on their own patch, launching a TV streaming service available free to all owners and purchasers of late-model Samsung smart TVs, carrying thirty channels (in Australia, that is — in the United States the figure is one hundred) including Bloomberg TV+ and Fuel TV.

The Covid recession has made the issue of broadcast TV’s high, fixed transmission costs a whole lot more pressing. This is the backdrop to Fletcher’s green paper. Governments have shown themselves prepared to spend on an extraordinary scale this year but the growing deficits have sharpened the search for savings elsewhere.

The green paper suggests that if enough TV broadcasters are interested in squeezing down to a smaller number of channels, thereby vacating some spectrum, the federal government might be willing to lighten their tax burden and tip an unspecified share of the spectrum auction proceeds their way. This is where the range of possible moves starts to get very complicated.

Broadcast television uses spectrum in the UHF and VHF bands (ultra and very high frequency) to deliver signals to aerials on roofs and inside homes. In Australia, TV spectrum is divided into five blocks, each containing six channels 7 MHz wide. One block of channels is used at every transmission site: for example, the main Sydney transmitters (feeding the tall towers on the Lower North Shore) use Block A on the chart below, the infill transmitters at Kings Cross use Block B and those at Gosford use Block D.

Each of those blocks can be reused at other places across the country, provided they are sufficiently far apart. So Block A, for example, is also used for the main stations in Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne. Transmitters at each location carry the five networks (Seven, Nine, Ten, ABC and SBS) or their non-metropolitan franchisees (such as WIN, Prime and Southern Cross Austereo). The sixth channel in each block is mostly vacant.

Australian mobile network operators want the government to encourage TV out of this band. The federal government is keen to help for two reasons. First, it funds two of the five broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, and therefore pays their TV transmission bills. These might be reduced under some scenarios.

Australia’s TV bands: The top bar shows spectrum used before digital switchover. The middle bar shows the five blocks currently used. The bottom bar represents the North American 600 MHz “second digital dividend.”

Second, it receives the revenue when vacated spectrum is sold. Between 2001 and 2017, switching TV broadcasters from analogue to digital transmission netted over $3 billion from selling the vacated “digital dividend” spectrum to the big mobile operators who now use it mainly for 4G services. Australia’s digital dividend comprised the UHF frequencies 694–806 MHz, colloquially known as the 700 MHz band. Recovering some of the spectrum still used in the 600 MHz band would represent a second digital dividend. There won’t be as much of it as the first one, but large sums are still likely to be offered.

How to pack the TV services currently carried across five blocks of frequencies into the spectrum currently occupied by only three of those blocks is a great challenge with political and social, as well as technical, dimensions.

If mobile operators are going to get the 600 MHz band spectrum they want, at least some TV services are going to have to move — somewhere, somehow, and sometime soon. We have been looking at this issue and recently explored five options in an article in the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy. The minister’s green paper implicitly looks at the first two: a “minimalist model” involving an upgrade to the existing transmission system; and a full replacement of the current transmission standard with a new, specialised broadcast platform, most likely “DVB-T2” (the enhanced version of the DVB-T system that Australia currently uses).

Each of these would improve the efficiency of transmission, although conversion to DVB-T2 would be much the bigger deal — more efficient, but also a lot more expensive. Industry has been talking about DVB-T2, even conducting a couple of trials, for years now, but it has never been clear where the money would come from.

We also considered more radical options: shifting broadcast TV entirely to online or satellite delivery, and some form of hybrid solution that combines elements of them all. We concluded that the last of these, a hybrid, is the most likely outcome.

A new or upgraded transmission standard would allow broadcasters to transmit more TV “channels” or better-quality images — HDTV instead of SD, 4K instead of HDTV, or a combination of the two. But the primary impetus for change today is not to deliver more or better TV. It is financial: to reduce the costs of transmission and enable a future change in use of the 600 MHz spectrum. That would require TV broadcasters to consolidate their capacity and cooperate to a degree that has not previously been mandated, although they have sometimes chosen to do it. This would not only change the transmission standard but also overthrow one of the historical pillars of the Australian TV industry: the ability of each licensed broadcaster to operate, or direct the operation of, its own transmitters. Radio broadcasters have already cooperated for digital radio, but TV? TV is different.

Fletcher’s green paper proposes offering commercial TV broadcasters a one-off, irrevocable chance to elect to stay with their existing licences or move to new ones. New licence holders would enjoy an immediate and permanent holiday from spectrum taxes and be subject to slightly reduced content obligations. (Commercial TV operators have been paying aggregate taxes of around $41 million per year for access to their TV channels, although these were temporarily waived this year as a Covid-19 industry support measure.)

In return, the government may require them to consolidate their services onto a single TV channel with one or more other TV networks. (This is known as “multiplex sharing,” after the device that consolidates multiple streams of TV for transmission.) The government would do so if at least two of the three commercial networks in each area elected to move to new licences. Instead of using three TV channels in each area, commercial TV would use two, or perhaps even one, with participating broadcasters entering into channel-sharing arrangements.

If enough commercial broadcasters so chose, the ABC and SBS would also be directed to move to a single, shared multiplex. Together, these consolidations would generate the necessary reduction from five multiplexes — and spectrum blocks — to the magic number, three, that would allow a US-style 600 MHz second digital dividend.

But the move to three multiplexes would almost certainly require a reduction in the current suite of free-to-air TV channels. By how much? The green paper proposes that broadcasters switch to the “new” digital compression standard (MPEG-4) that they are already using for some services, which is roughly two-thirds more efficient than the existing compression standard (MPEG-2), which has been used since digital TV was launched. The actual benefit yielded may be smaller, as broadcasters are already inserting MPEG-4 content.

So far, the upgraded compression standard has been used mainly to add services like Seven’s Racing.com and carry the HD versions of each broadcaster’s primary channel. Broadcasters have been transmitting increasing amounts of content in MPEG-4 for several years now, but full conversion has been delayed by concerns that some older TV sets won’t be compatible. But with MPEG-4 standard in most new TVs for so long, very few viewers are likely to notice the change.

For government, the current proposal would provide a very fast track to a massive spectrum sale while cutting the cost of ABC and SBS transmission. The high uptake of MPEG-4-ready TVs might suggest few viewers would face blank screens, though we’d need to make sure their TVs deal smoothly with a multiplex-sharing scenario that wasn’t on the cards when the receiver standards were written. ABC and SBS, at least, would need to cut back on the suite of channels they offer. This ground was tilled exhaustively in 2015, when previous minister Malcolm Turnbull first proposed multiplex consolidation for the two broadcasters.

If no deal is struck this time, then industry, government and viewers will still be facing the range of future options that are the subject of our article. While the green paper is right that the sustainability of local TV is in play, from a viewer standpoint the transmission cost issue is also fundamentally about inclusion — how can Australia most affordably make available a comprehensive and appropriate range of local TV services to the millions of viewers, and voters, in the vast, expensive-to-serve areas outside capital cities?

Some people, especially the many who now watch little or no broadcast television, will wonder why we are even thinking about such a complex shuffle. Isn’t this why we built a National Broadband Network that is now virtually complete? The NBN shares something significant with the broadcasting system — it’s designed to offer services to every home or business in Australia — so why not get broadcast TV out of over-the-air transmission altogether, and reallocate all its spectrum at an end-of-season, last-days-must-close, digital-dividend sale?

Shifting all broadcast TV services online would be a big, bold strike, integrating broadcasters decisively into the distribution platform that is already carrying the video streaming and sharing services and apps that are drawing such big audiences. It is not exactly the same as shifting Australian TV from wireless to a fixed-line network, the old “Negroponte Switch,” because for around 8 per cent of premises NBN is either a fixed wireless or a satellite network. Nor is the NBN the only way users access broadcast TV now that mobile broadband in Australia is so fast and cheap and all networks stream their services live. Indeed, some commentators are already suggesting that TV broadcasters’ real transmission future lies with 5G wireless.

The awkward paradox for broadcasters is that the medium viewers are turning to for more and more of their video needs is not a ready, near-term replacement for broadcast TV. With people working and entertaining themselves at home, Covid-19 lockdowns provided a test run for a big increase in online video consumption. Peak downstream network throughput on NBN’s main wholesale broadband service increased by 44 per cent between February and the last week of November during the Evening Busy Hours (8pm to midnight) and more than a quarter in Peak Business Hours.

There was some help: NBN temporarily reduced network access prices for broadband service providers, and “over-the-top” video streaming and conferencing services lowered their bit-rates. The government later announced investment to upgrade the network. How successfully an even bigger traffic shift might be handled in the future, and what it would cost broadband service providers and therefore their customers, is heavily dependent on what people will watch and when, and on future NBN access prices.

Broadcast TV — seemingly a declining asset as viewing preferences have atomised – has the great advantage of being able to absorb, seamlessly and without extra cost, those moments when everyone chooses to turn on the television. Australian governments will remember well Optus’s network meltdown when it tried to exercise its exclusive rights to transmit the 2018 FIFA World Cup finals to Australians via online streaming, a fiasco from which it was rescued by the SBS’s broadcast TV service.

These occasions can be unpredictable. British prime minister Boris Johnston’s messages to the nation in March and May 2020 were Britain’s most-watched broadcasts since the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. His 10 May broadcast about the easing of lockdowns drew an astounding 90 per cent viewing share to the seven channels that carried it. At such times, politicians don’t want viewers relying on networks that melt.

Arguably the biggest transformation embodied in a complete shift to online delivery would be the loss of broadcast television’s free-to-air accessibility. A service that is enduringly popular with older, potentially vulnerable consumers would no longer be effectively free at the point of consumption, but would depend on paying for a fixed or mobile broadband subscription. It seems unlikely that anything less than 100 per cent network availability and take-up would be politically palatable as a replacement for terrestrial TV, especially when, as Telstra’s annual Australian Digital Inclusion Index highlights, the gaps between digitally included and excluded Australians are still “substantial and widening for some groups.” During the pandemic, the Index’s authors found that older people, families without adequate internet access, and vulnerable Australians have been “especially isolated.”

The other candidate for a larger role in TV’s future is direct-to-home, or DTH, satellite delivery. This has considerable technical and economic attractions and may seem conceptually straightforward because 200,000+ households already receive TV this way from the VAST service. In practice, it would be extremely contentious with viewers and hence politicians.

While satellite DTH plays a much bigger role in TV distribution in New Zealand and many other countries, it would be costly for the many households that don’t already have a satellite dish for Foxtel (if the same satellites were used) or for all viewers (if satellites other than Foxtel’s were used). It would also require the VAST service to be re-engineered and expanded to incorporate all TV networks and accommodate the separate programming and advertising break-outs they currently deliver to discrete local service areas.

But satellite has an advantage that may ensure it remains a part of the TV transmission solution — it can serve vast, sparsely settled areas cheaply. Experiences in the very few overseas markets where terrestrial TV is shutting down suggests satellite may one day provide the final safety net.

Television in Australia has been a lot more than “broadcasting” for a long time. It is now a sprawling, overlapping amalgam of the national and commercial broadcast services that founded the medium, the subscription broadcast and narrowcast services that joined it 40 years later, and the many types of online video that are received over a variety of fixed and mobile networks. It is a hybrid. We should not be surprised if it resists efforts to put it back into a single box, the kind of “black box fallacy” that American media scholar Henry Jenkins warned about in his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide:

Sooner or later, the argument goes, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go)… Part of what makes the black box concept a fallacy is that it reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels.

Seeking to answer the questions posed in the government’s green paper, it will be important not just to solve today’s pressing problems but to try to set up for what we might want to do tomorrow or, at least, to avoid unnecessarily constraining the options.

There is much more to the green paper than just a proposal to harvest the extra efficiency of a new compression standard to repurpose some valuable spectrum. The offer to broadcasters is an opening gambit; the paper issues an invitation for any better ideas about TV’s future. It acknowledges the public policy heavy lifting done by TV in telling Australian stories and ensuring the wide availability of local news.

To help secure a more sustainable future for the local industry, it proposes that the largest Subscription Video on Demand and Ad-based Video on Demand services would be required to spend a proportion of Australian revenue on local content, and would be subject to obligations to make that content discoverable. This brings more singers to the media policy choir, including production industry unions, guilds and employer associations, and representatives of people living in non-metropolitan areas.

What happens from here? First, submissions and discussion. Then government decisions and legislation, and debate in parliament, especially the Senate. Then, if something like the green paper scheme goes ahead, TV broadcasters, market by market, will elect to take one option or another. In his current life, Paul Fletcher knows all about elections. •

Research for this story and the article it refers to was supported by the Australian Research Council through ARC DP 150100887, “Spectrum After Scarcity.”

The post Television on the line appeared first on Inside Story.

This is a story that has been waiting to be written. I devoured it quickly, though when I found myself trying to imagine pitching it as a research project, say, to an academic funding agency, I worried it might come up short. International? Australians tend to think New Zealand is not-quite-overseas. Innovative? The country seems close and familiar. Impact? What’s the “key takeaway” here? Australians need to look, closer and longer, at something they think they know already. This is a quiet conclusion from a wise observer about an exceptional place.

Mercifully, Tingle steers away from clichés of the trans-Tasman genre. There are no lame Aussie jokes about accents, agriculture or the All Blacks. No one punches above their weight. New Zealand is neither a leftist nirvana — the best remaining global venue to see out the apocalypse — nor an overrated global bit player led by a PM more popular with overseas feature writers than her own people, as some on the right claim.

The United States is sometimes described as God’s gift to researchers. Fifty states, all taking different approaches to social and economic problems and pushing out a rich flow of data about what works and doesn’t work in subtly different circumstances. Tingle says New Zealand could have played that role for Australia, “an experiment, a point of comparison… occurring across the Tasman all these years, if we just chose to look.” The essay becomes “a political and policy nerd’s Cook’s Tour,” an effort to understand why the two countries so often “start in very similar places and finish in completely different ones.”

Situated in the Pacific and colonised by the British? Tick for New Zealand, tick for Australia. Indigenous peoples appallingly mistreated and still suffering significant disadvantage? Tick, tick. The colonisers entered into a treaty with those Indigenous people? Tick, cross. Indigenous language and cultural rituals genuinely integrated into symbols and practices of politics and nationhood? Tick, cross. A sense of economic security “upended” by Britain’s entry into the European Common Market in the 1970s, requiring “whole new ways to make a living”? Tick, tick. A left-leaning government in the 1980s overturning the historical dependence on industry protection and state capitalism, opening markets to the world, and re-orienting business towards exports? Tick, tick.

This narrative continues into 2020, when the two countries responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in intriguingly similar and different ways. It’s an absorbing tale of comparative history. New Zealanders tend to know it better than Australians, partly because around 15 per cent of them live here.

I first visited New Zealand in 1980 to run in its annual track and field athletics series. It was no backwater. This was John Walker’s last summer as reigning Montreal Olympic 1500 metre champion. A crowd of 25,000 turned up to the meet at his home track in Auckland to see him, along with New Zealand’s other Olympic medallists, Rod Dixon and Dick Quax, and the internationals who came to race them. Sixteen thousand fans were at the Christchurch stadium, where Walker had arrived on the world stage six years earlier, running faster than the old world record in an epic final at the Commonwealth Games, but falling just short of the gold medal won by front-running Tanzanian Filbert Bayi.

One of the mid-week meets was held on the magnificent old grass track at Cooks Gardens in Whanganui. Here, an earlier New Zealand superstar, triple Olympic gold medallist Peter Snell, had broken Australian Herb Elliott’s world record for the mile in 1962. Snell’s coach, Arthur Lydiard, was later crowned “All Time Best Running Coach” by the US Runners World. Auckland’s Waitākere Ranges, where Lydiard’s athletes built the strength and endurance that set up their northern hemisphere racing seasons, were cathedrals of the sport for the obsessive types who participated in it.

But it was New Zealand. Much later, Jacinda Ardern joked to American night-time host Stephen Colbert, “It’s New Zealand, we all know each other.” A former colleague of mine who worked there once told me, “It’s New Zealand, you ring cabinet ministers and they ring you back.” That summer in 1980, I was warming up in Wellington for a race I was lucky to get a start in, when John Walker jogged up to my shoulder. He was the biggest track star on the planet but he spoke to me, if only to say what every Aucklander says when they arrive in Wellington: “Fuckin’ windy, isn’t it?”

I travelled there again in the early 1990s, one of many visiting overseas wonks curious about the extraordinary policy revolution that had taken place under the governments of Labour prime minister David Lange and finance minister Roger Douglas. After operating state monopolies in broadcasting and telecommunications for decades like so many European countries, New Zealand had leapfrogged the gradual steps that Australia and others were contemplating by opening their broadcasting and telecommunications markets and privatising Telecom New Zealand almost overnight.

Most interestingly, a new broadcast funding agency was created that soon rebranded itself New Zealand on Air. It was what mainstream economic policy purists dreamed of, a public agency with a bucket of money to pursue the policy objectives that governments everywhere set for broadcasting, and generally tried to achieve through an opaque mix of state ownership, laws, regulation, taxation and spending. Along with the restructured TVNZ, New Zealand on Air was already having a big impact on New Zealand’s screens and industry, supporting the first local nightly soap opera, Shortland Street, and stimulating independent production like Channel 4 had done in Britain a decade earlier.

The “deregulatory machismo” that Tingle describes was apparent in New Zealand’s decision not just to open its markets and use purist policy models, but also to make “commitments” in international trade agreements that it would never do anything else. Of particular significance were quotas requiring minimum amounts of local programming to be shown on television. Australia had these, New Zealand did not. When signing up to the agreements that became the responsibility of the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, Australia made sure it could retain and adapt such measures in the future. New Zealand signed them away forever.

Australia’s own deregulatory machismos — who revered their Kiwi counterparts — overhauled broadcasting legislation in 1992, requiring the new Australian Broadcasting Authority to “perform its functions in a manner consistent with Australia’s obligations under any… agreement between Australia and a foreign country.” As the minister’s second reading speech made clear (though the legislation did not), that included Australia’s trade agreement with New Zealand, and especially a document with the catchy title of the Trade in Services Protocol to the Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement, or ANZCERTA, which entered into force in 1989.

In that document, Australia had not preserved its local-program-quota-making capacity vis-à-vis New Zealand. When the new regulator determined its first “Australian Content Standard,” New Zealanders argued it should treat New Zealand programs as favourably as Australian ones. Because it did not, and no political solution was forthcoming, a group crossed the Tasman to commence a legal action in Australia’s Federal Court. The new standard, they said, was inconsistent with the regulator’s legislative obligation to act in accordance with Australia’s international agreements, including ANZCERTA.

The New Zealand group called themselves Project Blue Sky. Australian production industry unions and guilds formed a body called Project True Blue to resist them. The Australians saw it as breathtaking opportunism. Go home and do the hard yards to convince New Zealand politicians to give you quotas of your own! The New Zealanders emphasised a wider goal, the creation of what we might now call a trans-Tasman bubble, a shared space for audiovisual production where the two countries made and watched each other’s TV shows.

The Federal Court agreed with the New Zealanders. On appeal, the High Court agreed with them both. The regulator had to remake its program standard. Ever since, Australian commercial broadcasters have been able to count New Zealand shows towards their local content quotas.

They have made extensive use of this in the expensive drama genres, though much less across their whole schedules. According to ACMA figures, Nine Network stations earned more than half of their Australian adult drama points in 2019 from New Zealand series like Westside, Straight Forward and The Brokenwood Mysteries. Seven earned just under a fifth and Ten just under a tenth. But less than 0.1 per cent of total transmission hours on the primary channels Seven, Nine and Ten were occupied by New Zealand programs in 2019, and no more than 2 per cent on the networks’ other channels. The Seven Network, for example, screens New Zealand fishing shows like Big Angry Fish and Fishy Business on 7mate.

As all this regulatory brawling was happening, a young filmmaker born in Wellington but living in Australia was making movies. Jane Campion directed Two Friends for the ABC, shot Sweetie in Sydney, and directed a three-episode bio-drama about New Zealand writer Janet Frame that had its world premiere in a single session at the Sydney Film Festival. She then won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Academy Award for The Piano, shot in New Zealand. More recently, the first series of Campion’s co-produced, co-directed and co-written miniseries Top of the Lake was set on the South Island, the second in Sydney.

This kind of Tasman-hopping career and sensibility, once unusual, has become commonplace. It used to be surprising when a government screen agency in either country appointed a citizen from the other as its chief executive. Over the past two decades it has become almost mandatory. Campion’s work was among the first to reveal the increasingly porous nature of the personal, social and cultural borders between the two countries. The Covid-19 pandemic has continued this now well-established historical dualism, exploiting the geographic reality of physical borders to serve short-term epidemiological ends, while raising the possibility of a Tasman travel bubble to stimulate longer-term economic revival in two countries that depend heavily on tourism.

The High Road traverses the many “sliding doors” moments in the trans-Tasman relationship, beginning with New Zealand’s decision to remain a nation in an empire rather than a state of the new Australian Commonwealth at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both nations sent military forces to the first world war, fighting alongside each other as “Anzacs” at Gallipoli and then building discrete national legends from the common catastrophe.

For decades, they sheltered with the same great and powerful friend, first Britain, then the United States under the postwar ANZUS alliance. Foreign policy stances have diverged in recent decades, especially since the French sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985. “We never heard a peep out of those people who we were allegedly in a Western alliance with,” David Lange said a decade later. Now, relationships with China are providing fresh terrain for divergence between two countries that aspire to independent multilateralism but have radically different resource endowments and industrial strengths.

Perhaps the most fruitful areas of policy comparison at present, and where Tingle’s title nods, are electoral systems and the treatment of Indigenous people. The “mixed member proportional” system, or MMP, introduced in New Zealand in the 1990s, is widely credited with pushing the country’s political parties nearer to the ideological centre, turning down the heat of political discourse because of the need to operate in coalitions — at least until Ardern’s Labour Party became the first administration to win a majority in its own right at this year’s election. Yet MMP is also criticised for tempering the capacity and desire for large-scale change, precisely the thing that became part of unicameral New Zealand’s global brand in the late 1980s.

For Indigenous people, Tingle finds “an extraordinary relevance in how the Treaty of Waitangi has developed in the last half-century to the debate we are now having in Australia about Indigenous recognition and a Voice to parliament. And to a debate we are not having about truth-telling and reconciliation.” While New Zealand has been building bipartisan support for real changes based on the legal framework of the Treaty of Waitangi, Australia has been retreating from the possibilities presented by the Mabo and Wik High Court decisions in the 1990s. Offered the gracious language, opportunity and machinery of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Australia, so far, has “comprehensively stuffed it.”

This is not a plea to adopt someone else’s template, and one that doesn’t work perfectly even in its place of origin. To give one example, again from the media field, a fine recent essay by Zita Joyce explores the tension between the Treaty of Waitangi and the system of property rights in radiofrequency spectrum pioneered by New Zealand in the 1980s. She finds that “the relative scale of gains [for Māori] has significantly declined” over the now thirty-year history of Waitangi claims in the area, although they “remain the only substantial Indigenous challenge to a settler state’s right to assert control over spectrum” anywhere in the world.

The High Road may overstate the case about how little attention Australians have paid to New Zealand experience. Tingle herself acknowledges that “what has gone on across the Tasman has had a continuing deep influence on the conservative economic agenda in Australia.” In each of the fields mentioned here — electoral systems, relationships between Indigenous people and settler-colonial political systems, film and media policy — Australian specialists have paid a good deal of attention to New Zealand. Cooperation has been a reality for years in many other areas, too. The result has been administrative efficiency with horrendous acronyms: ANZIC (the industry classification used by our statistical agencies), FSANZ (a food standards agency), AS/NZS (industry standards published jointly by Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand, which sometimes break down, leaving us both with “de-jointed standards”).

But outside these many communities of specialist expertise, across the wider landscape of political discussion and historical understanding, Tingle’s argument seems absolutely persuasive. Ardern and the pandemic may have altered that landscape, at least for the time being. A Quarterly Essay is its own evidence of that. The bubble, this time, might be more than a temporary fillip to kickstart accommodation bookings in Cairns and the Coromandel. They are the neighbours, for goodness sake. We really should get to know them better. • 

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Yet the chief executive of one of the world’s most successful creative enterprises is virtually a one-company man. Robert Iger joined ABC television in the United States as a studio supervisor in 1974. About a decade later, ABC was bought by Capital Cities Communications. Ten years after that, the Walt Disney Company acquired ABC/Cap Cities. One of Iger’s bosses and mentors at Cap Cities, Tom Murphy, told him, “Pal, if you play your cards right, one day you will run that company.” He was right. In 2005, the Disney board chose fifty-four-year-old Iger as just the sixth chief executive of the company founded by Walt Disney in 1923. He is still in charge, with a contract that will keep him there for another two years.

The first part of The Ride of a Lifetime, “Learning,” is about Iger’s path to the top of Disney. He rose via ABC’s Wide World of Sports and ABC Entertainment, where he commissioned shows like the original Twin Peaks and NYPD Blue that helped ABC to overtake NBC’s prime-time dominance with viewers aged between eighteen and forty-nine.

The second part, “Leading,” covers Iger’s remarkable period at the top of Disney. Four of these seven chapters are about the big acquisitions that transformed the company. Disney+, the streaming video service launched in the United States on 12 November and in Australia a week later, is a major threat to the first-mover Netflix thanks to Disney’s expanded archive, sequel and merchandising rights that came with takeovers of Pixar (2006), Marvel Entertainment (2009), Lucasfilm (2012) and 21st Century Fox (2019).

Each of these four companies was controlled by an idiosyncratic visionary who cared about more than the price. Steve Jobs started out with many more “cons” than “pros” about selling Pixar to Disney, but thought “a few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons.” Before he died, five years after the sale, Jobs thought they had “saved two companies.” Disney was re-energised and Pixar had flourished in ways it never would have without the older, larger studio.

Jobs joined the Disney board, and Marvel’s Ike Perlmutter said a call from the Apple co-founder was crucial in persuading him to do the deal with Iger and Disney: “He said you were true to your word.” Perlmutter “hated Hollywood and didn’t care about the films themselves,” says Iger, but he did love controlling Marvel’s wildly successful studio.

George Lucas was always going to struggle to let go of the Star Wars franchise he founded, and was disappointed with the first Disney-produced sequel. Iger had been immovable on this aspect of the deal. Where Pixar’s creative principals were brought inside and put in charge of Disney Animation, Lucas would have to surrender creative control of “perhaps the greatest mythology of our time.”

Murdoch had spent his life building an empire that many imagined would be passed on to his children. He realised even 21st Century Fox didn’t have the scale to compete with the emerging giants of digital, online video. He liked the strength of Disney’s stock price, and he thought it would get the necessary regulatory approvals faster and do a better job of merging the businesses. (He was apparently keen, as well, to find out if Democrat-supporting Iger would be running for president in 2020!)

One of the things Iger brought to these acquisitions was his own early experience with taken-over media companies. Employees at ABC, one of the Big Three US TV networks, were stunned to be acquired by the much smaller Cap Cities in the 1980s. The “homespun” Tom Murphy and Dan Burke turned out to be “no-nonsense businesspeople who focused on the work… had zero interest in the glitz… and sensed which way the winds were blowing” in the media business.

The sale of ABC/Cap Cities to Disney a decade later came as another huge shock to many, though not to Iger. Disney made clear it wanted him to stay and run its new media division once Murphy and Burke were gone. Paradoxically, Iger found the aggressive Hollywood studio “centralised and process-driven,” in contrast to the decentralised, accountable culture that Murphy and Burke fostered. As chief executive of Disney, Iger would later dismantle the central strategy team he thought was sucking too much responsibility from individual business units.

Eventually serving as second-in-command at Disney for several years before chief executive Michael Eisner was effectively forced out in 2005, Iger needed a “narrative” to convince the board he was the right person to lead the company out of the crisis. With a political spinner, he tested out the priorities he was thinking of pitching. Reaching the fifth or sixth one, he received a blunt response: “You only get three.”

Iger settled on high-quality content, technology and global scale. He has been selling those messages ever since. All the Big Four acquisitions offered content; Pixar especially had technological expertise; Fox brought scale. The highlight of it all, so far, is Shanghai Disney Resort — “authentically Disney and distinctively Chinese” — opened in 2016, which Iger has been involved in since selecting the site in 1998.

The neat-sounding ascent to the corporate stratosphere has had disruptions. Twice, it called for moves from New York to Los Angeles that didn’t suit Iger’s marriages to women with their own big East Coast media jobs. The first, to an executive producer of news at WNBC who never liked LA, broke down. She moved back to New York with their two children and Iger spent a “terrible year” visiting. The next promotion took him back to New York, where his engagement to Good Morning America’s weekend anchor, Willow Bay, happened around the time of the Disney/Cap Cities takeover. She was “unequivocally supportive” of Iger’s move back to Los Angeles to run Disney’s media division and “trusted that she and I could figure out whatever we needed to figure out.” They are still together: Bay later became a senior editor for Huffington Post and was appointed dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 2017.

As the negotiations between Disney and News/Fox were beginning, another change “more profound than the mega-technology changes” was under way. This “transformative social change” came from serious allegations about sexually predatory behaviour, equal opportunity and equal pay for women in Hollywood and elsewhere. According to Iger, it “became the catalyst for long overdue action.” For Disney, this included one of Pixar’s legendary principals, John Lasseter, who took a six-month sabbatical in 2017 and did not have his contract renewed at the end of 2018. It was Iger’s “most difficult and complex personnel decision.” Disney’s board, chaired by Iger, now comprises five men and four women. Its fourteen-member executive leadership team has three women — the chief financial officer and the heads of communications and human resources.

Lessons are what the subtitle of the book promises, and Disney’s CEO offers many. Some are familiar — “Innovate or die” — and some are specific to the enterprise — “When animation soars, Disney roars.”

Most are a good deal less formulaic. Long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem. Value ability more than experience. Ask the questions you need to ask and do the work to learn what you need as quickly as you can. From Dan Burke: Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil (small projects that don’t give much back). Communicate to your team that you share their stress, not that you need them to deliver to alleviate yours.

After fourteen years at the top of Disney, Bob Iger has some lessons for himself. “It’s not good to have power for too long. You don’t realise the way your voice seems to boom louder than every other voice in the room.” His predecessor Michael Eisner was untouchable for a decade after rescuing Disney from its post-Walt funk, but stumbled in the second decade of his long reign.

Iger wanted to walk away in June 2019, forty-five years after starting at ABC. The Murdoch deal required him to stay on. He has understood for a while that his teams are planning a future that will “happen without me” and is wary of “a kind of wistfulness creeping in.”

He has been a surprising superhero, a one-company adventurer, a guy from sports who rose to the top of a dream factory, a New York suit whose movies dominate the US box office, a merger king whose safe hands clasped the messy media legacies of ageing mavericks.

There is always a sequel. Disney+ is a massive investment in a highly competitive market. The rivals are giants from other sectors — Amazon Prime, Google/YouTube, Apple, AT&T — not just fellow imagineers in the Hollywood hills. Disney is a company that attracts a special level of scrutiny. Bob Iger needs the story to continue. •

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The walk finished at 24 Russell Square, where the publisher Faber & Faber had its offices in Orwell’s time. Established in 1929, the firm was immediately notable for the fact that its founding director and editor was T.S. Eliot, whose 1922 poem The Waste Land came to be considered a founding work of literary modernism. The firm quickly became a leader, publishing emerging poets, playwrights and novelists like W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Siegfried Sassoon, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

George Orwell, though, was never published by Faber. That was the reason we were at 24 Russell Square. “TSE” rejected Down and Out in Paris and London in 1932: “decidedly too short… and too loosely constructed.” Then, in July 1944, he turned down the manuscript for Animal Farm in one of publishing’s most famous rejection letters.

“We agree it is a distinguished piece of writing,” wrote Eliot. “The fable is very skilfully handled… the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane — and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver. On the other hand, we have no conviction… that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”

This was just over a month after D-Day. There was a war to be won and Britain’s allies included the target of Orwell’s “fairy story,” the Soviet Union. Eliot was “very sorry, because whoever publishes this, will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.”

Animal Farm was eventually published by Secker & Warburg in Britain and Harcourt, Brace in the United States in 1946. By then the war was over but a new one had begun, a cold war, where the Soviet Union occupied the other side of an Iron Curtain. Orwell’s future work turned out to be 1984, published in 1949 shortly before he died from tuberculosis. TSE was right: Secker & Warburg and Harcourt, Brace got that one too.

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story is written by a grandson of Geoffrey Faber, the firm’s founder. Toby Faber, a former managing director of the firm and still a director, has curated and edited an archive of extracts from letters, internal memos, board minutes, diary entries, promotional materials, and newspaper and magazine articles, covering the period from the firm’s founding until 1990. He annotates many of the extracts to provide context and explain details. Chapters are organised chronologically and each is introduced with an overview of the main incidents and trends in the period. Together with an introduction and afterword, it adds up to an absorbing account of the creation, evolution, near death and survival of an important enterprise in what some would now call the “creative industries.”

At the heart of that enterprise are the authors who wrote the manuscripts, the staff who accepted some and rejected many, and the books Faber & Faber published. Readers looking for delicious publishing industry gossip will find a feast. Within a month of starting work as a junior editor in 1953, Charles Monteith pulled a few manuscripts off the slush pile to occupy a train journey to Oxford. He thought more of one titled Strangers from Within than the reader who had already annotated it with “Absurd and uninteresting fantasy… Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.” The author, William Golding, submitted a revised version of this, his first novel, with a new title, A Cry of Children. Faber published it in 1954 as Lord of the Flies. About thirty years later, Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Monteith was not so impressed by Ted Hughes’s first book of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, even though it had won a prize in the United States. “The quality seems to me very uneven… [H]e might perhaps have a letter of encouragement.” T.S. Eliot was more enthusiastic: “I’m inclined to think we ought to take this man now. Let’s discuss him.” Faber made an offer, Hughes accepted it, and they published him for the rest of his life. Artful correspondence followed about work from Hughes’s wife, Sylvia Plath: her early poems and initially pseudonymous novel The Bell Jar went to Heinemann; Faber published her posthumous collection Ariel and, later, a paperback edition of The Bell Jar, licensed from Heinemann.

The archives of a publisher whose authors won four Nobel prizes in the 1990s alone (Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Wislawa Szymborska, Günter Grass) and another four since (Harold Pinter, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Kazuo Ishiguro) hold many such stories of wooing, signing, editing and sometimes rejecting or losing famous authors. The signings often express the power imbalance between awestruck young authors and a prestigious publishing house; the losses show creators pressing the value of their work, increasingly via the agents that unsettled the dominance of haughty publishers. Spencer Curtis Brown thought books by his author C.P. Snow should be selling 35,000–45,000 copies “and I am sure that you believe that too and that you will be full of exciting and enthusiastic ideas towards that end.” Snow moved to Macmillan.

Alongside the Nobel and Booker prize winners, Faber published a lot of books that did not have such high literary aspirations. Asked to spell out the kinds of books she liked and those she didn’t, the editor of the gardening and farming list, Eileen Brooksbank, wrote in 1976, “I can’t help remembering that on many an occasion when I have asked the travellers what is selling they simply reply ‘the usual things, bridge books, cookery and gardening.’ So we must try to keep them supplied.” Commenting on an internal memo criticising the humorous NOT 1982 calendar that sold massively, Toby Faber observes that “many Faber employees never quite understood that the firm could only publish great literature if it also made a profit.”

In different hands, the “untold story” of Faber & Faber might have given less space to the business side. As a former managing director and a member of the family that still controls half the publisher’s shares, Toby Faber reveals a great deal about the enduringly private Faber & Faber. He includes a table of sales, pre-tax profits and gross dividends paid each year, showing the big swings between struggle and fortune. He also shows sales revenues predicted by “Dr Morley’s Parabolic Prediction or Futurity Revealed,” a formula one of the early directors derived from the pattern of sales between 1926 and 1931. By the late 1930s it was wildly out, but the figures in the late 1980s were eerily close to Morley’s ancient model.

Like the founder of any start-up, Geoffrey Faber had to work out what his business would do, where it would get the money to do it, and who would do the work and where. Initially, it wasn’t even his business. He had published two volumes of poetry and had a little experience in publishing with Oxford University Press before the first world war, enough to encourage the inheritors of a business called the Scientific Press to appoint him chairman and managing director in 1924.

The new owners wanted to diversify away from medical titles. Someone suggested Faber talk to T.S. Eliot, who was working at Lloyds Bank and editing the literary magazine The Criterion as well as writing his own poetry. Eliot, of course, was not yet the Nobel Prize winner he would become in 1948, but The Waste Land was already famous and Faber was told he was “the best and most learned [critic] of his generation and is respected (and a little feared) by the young.”

Faber bought into the business through a complicated family transaction — a loan from the “relatively large” trust estate left by his father’s cousin — that needed both the widow’s and Faber’s mother’s approval. The partners in the business then fell out, separating their interests by selling the profitable Nursing Mirror for a sum that enabled Faber to pay back his loan from the estate and emerge as the sole owner of a new company that acquired the marginal books business. Choosing “Faber & Faber Limited” from four possible names, he inspired ageless speculation and jokes — the Russell Square twins, Fabber & Fabber, Fabberdum and Fabberdee — about the second Faber.

The business of becoming what Toby Faber calls “the literary publisher… for most of the period since it was founded” needed various forms of cross-subsidy from the start. For most of the three decades he was in charge, Geoffrey Faber also drew a salary as an “estates bursar” at All Souls College in Oxford. Among the college’s investments during this time was a country property in Sussex that was leased to Faber, who spent weekends there with his wife Enid.

Most spectacularly, Faber & Faber earned immense profits from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, which turned T.S. Eliot’s collection of children’s verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, into a blockbuster musical theatre show. In the financial year to March 1986, net revenue from Cats was just over £1 million while pre-tax profit for the company as a whole was £246,000, implying the rest of the business lost around £750,000.

In the especially difficult 1970s, a similar role was played by John Seymour’s The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency and its sequel. It sold over a million copies in different formats, “riding a wave generated by the TV sitcom The Good Life.” The money was real, but the book was “essentially conceived and produced by [book packager] Dorling Kindersley.” Faber & Faber was “very lucky” that Seymour insisted it should be the publisher.

On the other hand, once established, the books business could cross-subsidise new businesses. A music publishing arm was created in the 1960s, initially for Benjamin Britten’s works. He was delighted to bring his music to “such a splendid publisher,” and Geoffrey Faber’s wife Enid wrote that “frankly I would sooner lose my money over this, than over something duller.” It turned out to be a very handy business indeed, which T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie (nee Fletcher) insisted should handle the music rights for Cats.

At several points, Toby Faber describes the sometimes excruciating male-ness of the enterprise and the industry — in evidence in the remarkable photo, reproduced above, of Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender at a Faber party in 1960, which Sylvia Plath described in a letter to her mother: “Ted looked very much at home among the great.”

But huge roles at the company were played by women. Geoffrey’s wife Enid was deeply involved in the business: she “largely ran” the Faber stand at the first Sunday Times Book Exhibition in 1933, which later became a national book fair at Earl’s Court. Perhaps she was the other Faber? The cover blurb for Derek Llewellyn’s 1971 Faber bestseller Everywoman: A Gynaecological Guide for Life, calls it “the most compassionate, pleasing, authoritative and informative treatise on the business of being a woman that I have so far seen,” reproducing the verdict of Dr Donald Gould in the New Statesman. In 1989, as part of a restructure to preserve the company’s independence, it was Valerie Eliot who set up a trust to acquire the other half of Faber & Faber, alongside and equal to the Faber family interests.

Toby Faber identifies luck, a publishing philosophy “focused on excellence and the long term,” good editorial taste, regular editorial renewal, and the “crucial business decision” to publish both hardbacks and paperbacks as major factors that helped the business founded by his grandfather to survive not just to 1990, when this book ends, but to the present.

In July, Faber & Faber announced that it will publish twenty-seven-year-old Australian author Gabriel Bergmoser’s “full-blooded” debut. The title has not been settled — it will be Sunburnt Country or The Hunted — but it will be “a short, sharp shock of a novel” and the manuscript has been optioned for a movie by “a major film company in LA.” It feels some way from the mid 1930s, when the hot front-list competitors were The Faber Book of Modern Verse, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse edited by W.B. Yeats, and I.M. Parsons’s The Progress of Poetry.

Yet Toby Faber’s rich account of the history of “the literary publisher” also reminds us that talk of literature’s demise is always in fashion. In 1965, when Charles Monteith was unenthusiastic about a novel by Barbara Pym, Philip Larkin lamented:

Personally… I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today… I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so-called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them. •

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One of Fletcher’s predecessors in the portfolio, Malcolm Turnbull, announced the review of Australia’s spectrum policy and management framework way back in May 2014. In 2015, a departmental report found there were “substantial deficiencies” with Australia’s twenty-year-old regime, which was described as “slow, rigid and administratively cumbersome.” Two years later, an exposure draft of a new Radiocommunications Bill was released.

Then things more or less ground to a halt. A major reform process, in an area of government policy usually notable for a high level of political bipartisanship, was apparently stuck in limbo. Does that matter? And what is wrong with the current laws anyway?

Radiofrequency spectrum is sometimes called a “key enabler” of the digital economy — the medium that enables everything to connect with everything else. And the emergence of machine-to-machine connectivity and the Internet of Things, or IoT, means that it is only going to get more important. These developments are often conflated with 5G wireless broadband — a PR coup for the traditional telecommunications industry given that the IoT is already evolving apace using other (terrestrial and satellite) technologies. That’s not to deny the importance of 5G: mobile carriers and governments worldwide are getting behind 5G in a spirit of “if you build it, they will come,” promising eye-watering bandwidth, low latency and the ability to focus “beams” of broadband connectivity at moving as well as fixed objects, even if applications that will fully exploit its unique features are still scarce.

Australia needs an effective and trusted “town planning” regime for our radiofrequency spectrum if we are to maximise its overall public benefit. How spectrum is planned and licensed will determine how soon and how cheaply we can enjoy the benefits of new technologies like 5G. A well-run regime should be as open as possible to opportunities in key overseas markets, and give spectrum users the confidence and incentive to invest in those technologies locally. At the same time, it needs to respect the huge diversity of legacy spectrum uses. Some of these, such as scientific research and public safety, can’t be reduced to a dollar value or expected to compete for spectrum in an open market.

On these criteria, Australia’s current regime is not generally considered to be broken. To quote Minister Fletcher again, “I think it’s important to start from a premise that in the broad, we’ve got a system that has served us reasonably well.”

Far-sighted reforms in the 1990s ensured we benefited early, and continue to benefit, from two emerging licensing models that have since become standard worldwide. The most durable and flexible was “class licensing,” which allows whole classes of transmitters or receivers to be authorised at a single stroke. Chances are you are surrounded by class-licensed devices right now — whether it’s the wi-fi in the device you are reading this on, the set-top box on your television or the car keys in your pocket. And it’s not just for little things. In a world of ever-smarter technologies, class licensing is emerging as a way to authorise any device that doesn’t need the interference protection conferred by costly individual licences.

The second 1990s reform was “spectrum licensing.” These licences grant secure, long-term, fully tradeable property rights over large blocks of spectrum, with highly flexible conditions of use. In January, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA, completed an auction of spectrum licences at 3.6 GHz that raised over $834 million, almost all of it from mobile carriers wanting spectrum for 5G services. While this licence type has not become as ubiquitous as reformers originally hoped, the widespread and timely clearance and licensing of key bands has made a large but hidden contribution to Australia’s highly competitive mobile broadband market.

Meanwhile, the more traditional “apparatus licences,” still in use for many spectrum applications, remain very useful for accommodating innovation. They are easier to create, allocate and vary than spectrum licences and can take many more forms. Typically more customised and affordable than spectrum licences, they often authorise a particular service and no more, allowing different uses to share a single band. Apparatus licences support weather radars, satellite earth stations, broadcasting transmitters, police radios and much else besides.

Yet there was and is an excellent case for reviewing spectrum management in Australia, and it can be boiled down to this: spectrum legislation was substantially written in the 1990s, and while it has served us well, good spectrum management is only going to grow more important and challenging. It makes economic sense to review the law and make sure it is optimised for the next twenty years.

If that’s the case for review, then it’s worth trying to identify exactly what is wrong with the elderly Radiocommunications Act 1992. Is this a reno or a knock-down job?

Persistent criticisms of Australia’s spectrum management regime include: too little certainty for existing licensees; slow, clunky and inflexible processes; unwarranted special treatment for broadcasters; and alleged bias towards maximising revenues from auctioning spectrum licences. To this, the regulator would probably add that some of its own regulatory powers and functions no longer reflect changing supply chains and ways of doing business.

The most persistent complaint from industry is uncertainty. High-value spectrum licences confer strong property rights, but the law provides no assurance about what becomes of the spectrum after the licence term expires.

The architects of the 1990s legislation expected that licences would be re-auctioned unless there were compelling grounds to the contrary. The major mobile carriers — pointing to their huge subscriber bases that depend on ongoing services — would prefer to keep the spectrum in perpetuity. With the 700 MHz spectrum licences alone selling for $3.5 billion, the stakes are high. The last Labor government tackled this through a drawn-out “public interest” process that extracted top dollar from the mobile carriers to roll over a number of their existing licences without the uncertainty of going to auction. The present government is not bound to follow this path and the whole issue can be expected to flare up again quite soon, as a new set of licences approach their expiry dates.

For holders of cheaper, customised apparatus licences, the fear is that spectrum licence-conversion processes will commence at short notice and price them out of their current bands, without fair compensation, as mobile broadband services colonise more and more spectrum bands internationally. This is an issue that tends to unite non-telecommunications spectrum users, as current law confers fewer rights and shorter terms on apparatus licences than on spectrum licences.

While it is questionable how much this uncertainty has actually reduced investment in radiocommunications, redesigned laws could, for example, allow for clarification of end-of-term arrangements for future spectrum licensees and give licence holders longer guaranteed access to their channels, where appropriate.

To the extent they hold any water, other industry complaints — that the system is biased towards mobile telecommunications and that spectrum is too expensive — don’t require legislative solutions.

From the perspective of a government keen to withdraw the minister into a policy and strategic role and leave day-to-day administration to the regulator, the chief irritant has been the incredibly clunky process for “reallocating” or “converting” blocks of spectrum to fully tradeable spectrum licences. Designed when spectrum licences were new and scary, it requires either a price-based allocation (typically an auction) or the “conversion” of an existing apparatus licence that happens to cover the same part of the spectrum — but only after a lengthy ping-pong game of formal ACMA recommendations and ministerial declarations. Political pressure, particularly from carriers, for more spectrum to feed soaring demand for wireless data has led to an unhealthy focus on how to speed up the bureaucratic ping-pong game, risking the rushed development of technically complex and legally sensitive instruments and the pre-emption of public consultation processes.

Current legal processes could undoubtedly be simplified and the respective roles of the minister and the spectrum and competition regulators better distinguished.

Another criticism of current law is the exceptional treatment of free-to-air broadcasting. Here, the law has evolved separately because of the unique role of broadcasting in a democracy. To safeguard them from political pressure from governments, broadcasters’ licences are in effect perpetual and regulated more at arm’s length from the minister. They are not tradeable the way other licences are, and resuming and reallocating the bands broadcasters use is much more complex and difficult than for other frequencies.

Ending these special arrangements was a key recommendation of the department’s 2015 review paper. It proposed “normalisation” of broadcaster spectrum access arrangements, subject to a guarantee of ongoing access to spectrum. The government has since tackled one major anomaly, by changing the way commercial broadcasters are taxed. They used to pay a special tax on their gross earnings as broadcasters, set to reflect the value that came from limits on the number of licences in any market. Now they pay a smaller annual tax on their apparatus licences, intended to reflect the value of the spectrum.

From the regulator’s perspective, online trading has revolutionised modern equipment supply chains, leaving ACMA’s powers and remedies behind in some areas. Its compliance and enforcement powers are overly reliant on criminal offences and might benefit from more civil remedies and better information-gathering powers.

So — should we renovate what we have, or knock it down and start again? The 2015 departmental report recommended replacing the current legislative framework. The centrepiece of the new Radiocommunications Bill released in May 2017 was a single licensing system to replace spectrum and apparatus licences. Class licences were also to be replaced, but by something similar: in effect, class licences by another name. The exposure draft was also incomplete. Future arrangements for free-to-air broadcasters were still under development, as were vital details about how transition might take place.

Passing a whole new act to replace the existing three licence types with two, more flexible new licence types would be an extremely expensive way to free the government and ACMA to fix some genuine shortcomings with the current regime. Replacing all apparatus and spectrum licences is expected to take five years from passage of the new law. The job would be huge even if no serious reforms were attempted in parallel. Most of the tens of thousands of affected licence holders would receive no clear pay-off, and the qualified support for the new legislation from industry to date — mainly from the mobile carriers — may evaporate altogether if the regulator were forced to redirect significant resources away from its day-to-day work. This includes ACMA’s ambitious agenda of band re-planning to support 5G wireless broadband and other new technologies.

After more than twenty years, Australia’s once-visionary spectrum-regulation arrangements are showing their age. With the increasing importance of wireless communications, updating them should yield long-term benefits. Almost from its outset, however, the spectrum review has focused on just one option: that of knocking everything down and starting again. How much of the policy pay-off from an entirely new licensing system could be achieved, more quickly and cheaply, by modifying rather than abolishing the three existing licence categories? By opening the door to these kinds of questions, this latest pause in the process may not spell the end of valuable reform, but actually make it more likely. •

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It’s true that Elwell gets much of a long chapter in Hugh Aitken’s fine history of early twentieth-century American wireless because of his role in a “revolution in the art of radio.” But it has taken Ian Sanders and Graeme Bartram to do what Elwell himself couldn’t manage through all those autobiographical fragments in the Stanford archives — piece together and publish a comprehensive account of the work and life of this important Australian link to the early days of Silicon Valley.

About a decade after Leland Stanford Junior University opened its doors in the 1890s, the Australian-born Elwell began a BA in electrical engineering. Stanford, as Sanders and Bartram write, was set up to teach “the traditional liberal arts and the technology and engineering that were… changing America.” Its four-year electrical engineering course and related work program quickly acquired a reputation that reached young Elwell in Sydney via an American working at the Ultimo Powerhouse. On a lecture tour of Australia the year Elwell graduated, Stanford’s founding president, David Starr Jordan, mentioned this “most brilliant Australian student” to the Brisbane Telegraph.

“It cannot have been unusual in Australia in 1902 for a young man with a technical bent to want to study electrical engineering,” writes Aitken. “What was distinctive about Elwell was his bullheaded determination that, with no financial support from his family, with the slimmest of cash resources of his own, and with no assurance whatever that his previous education would gain him admission, he was going to study electrical engineering in America, and not just any university, but at Stanford in particular. And it must have been this determination, this confidence that the thing could and would be done, that gave him the aid and encouragement of people on whom he had no claim except friendship.”

Elwell was born in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond in 1884. There is no official record of the death of his birth father, an American from Rochester, New York. Cyril took the surname of his mother Clothilda’s second husband, an English journalist who became the Sydney Morning Herald’s principal state political reporter. After Thomas Elwell died of kidney disease on Cyril’s eleventh birthday, Clothilda married the owner of Sydney’s Grosvenor Hotel. Aitken suggests that Elwell “became accustomed to abrupt change, and perhaps learned not to commit himself too completely to any given state of affairs.”

Living at the hotel with his family, he learned about electricity from a German engineer who maintained the electrical systems: at the time, being “lighted throughout with Electric Light and Gas” was luxury. In 1900, after finishing school at nearby Fort Street High, he travelled in Europe with his family for six months. They visited the Universal Exhibition in Paris, where one of the hit attractions was Valdemar Poulsen’s “telegraphone,” a recently patented magnetic wire recorder the Danish inventor had used to record the voice of the Austrian emperor.

Back in Australia, Elwell did a course in physics at Sydney Tech then started an apprenticeship with the Electrical Section of the NSW Railways, where he worked upgrading the Ultimo Powerhouse to supply electricity to Sydney’s trams. Deciding he wanted to study electrical engineering at the university he had heard about from the visiting American, Elwell worked his passage to San Francisco then studied further to pass the entrance exam.

He remained a “big current” man through his studies at Stanford, undertaking a final-year project on the design of high-current transformers for electrical smelting furnaces and then landing a job with a Californian steel company. He was not especially interested in the “small currents” of telephone and telegraph engineering when one of his Stanford professors recommended him to the Oakland bankers backing a local wireless telephone start-up.

Elwell responded as he would many more times in his career: he took a big risk, made something remarkable happen, got an even better idea, fell out with people he really needed to get on with, and moved on to something else.

Early “spark” wireless transmitters generated intermittent electrical emissions that worked well enough for the dots and dashes of telegraph signalling. Elwell was one of the pioneers of a new method, “continuous waves.” Working for the start-up in San Francisco, he made enough progress with spark apparatus to persuade the Oakland Tribune that the wireless telephone was “assured of success.” But he convinced himself of the opposite: that intelligible sounds could not be transmitted over long distances without continuous electromagnetic waves.

Different inventors developed three ways to generate these waves. One, patented by the Dane Valdemar Poulsen, was the “arc.” Poulsen used this technology to communicate by telephone across a distance of 270 kilometres in 1907. Elwell bought US rights to the “Poulsen arc,” demonstrated the equipment in San Francisco, and set up a company with himself as president and chief engineer and David Starr Jordan, the Stanford president, as a founding investor. Stations opened in Stockton and Sacramento in 1910. A third, at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, became a giant landmark for local shipping. Elwell developed the equipment, including a better receiver. Other stations followed in cities like Seattle and Portland on the west coast, Kansas City and Chicago in the east, and, in 1912, Honolulu.

Despite its impressive technical achievements, the company struggled to make money. It was recapitalised and renamed, twice. In the process, Elwell lost control of it. From 1911, the person with that revered Silicon Valley moniker, the founder, was an ordinary director and only a small shareholder in what was now the Federal Telegraph Company.

Technological translator: Cyril Elwell (fifth from the left) at a Federal Telegraph Company reunion in Palo Alto in 1956. Lee de Forest is third from the left. History San José

Wireless telephony was the goal, but continuous waves also had important benefits for wireless telegraphy. They could be tuned to particular frequencies and they didn’t dissipate electrical power to the same extent as spark transmissions. When Elwell travelled to Washington in 1912 to try to sell Federal Telegraph’s technology, the US navy already had equipment that could feed into an antenna twice the power that Elwell’s could. But when a test was set up to communicate across America with San Francisco, observers were stunned to find Federal Telegraph’s Honolulu station listening in as well. This “unheard of” distance provided big possibilities for US military command.

Federal got a contract for a station in the Panama Canal Zone in 1913. It went into service two years later. Others followed in the Philippines, Pearl Harbor, San Diego, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, New York, Annapolis and Lafayette, France. By the end of the first world war, the US navy’s oceanic communication system was the world’s best and Washington, DC could communicate with ships anywhere in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Atlantic.

By then, though, Cyril Elwell was long gone from the company that supplied all the transmitters. Sanders and Bartram say he disagreed with the level of expenditure needed to extend the company’s network to Japan and China. Other directors were given an ultimatum: they could have the engineer and founder, or they could have the financier who now controlled the company. They picked the financier. One of Elwell’s own hires, Leonard Fuller, took over the engineering and went on to design what Aitken calls “the third and greatest generation of arc transmitters.”

Based in London from May 1913 and Paris from 1916 to 1920, Elwell worked as “a kind of freelance engineer” for anyone who paid, among them the Royal Navy (which used the Poulsen arc system on all its vessels by the end of the war), the British Post Office, the governments of France and Italy, and the company holding the Poulsen patents for the British Empire. A major coup was the selection of Elwell–Poulsen’s system ahead of Marconi’s and other competitors’ for two large stations near Oxford and Cairo in the early 1920s, the first steps in Britain’s long-delayed Imperial Wireless Chain. Marconi’s new shortwave “beam” system dominated later British stations, and valves overtook arcs as the technology of choice for generating continuous waves.

Building a big, Californian-style home in Surrey in the 1920s, Elwell became something of a “local celebrity,” write Sanders and Bartram. He was an early investor in the Mullard Radio Valve Company (eventually bought by Philips) and claimed to have made a lot of money from it, though Sanders and Bartram say “the scope of [his] involvement following its formation in 1920 is unclear.” He established a company, C.F. Elwell Limited, hoping to profit from the boom in radio broadcasting in the 1920s, but the enterprise was not a success, and he “all but erased the episode from his later recollections of history.” The second part of this handsome, expanded edition is filled with pictures and descriptions of the “Aristophone,” “Statophone” and other receivers that C.F. Elwell Limited manufactured in Britain.

Elwell also set up a company to manufacture and market “talking pictures” equipment, licensing American Lee de Forest’s Phonofilms system for Britain and its overseas territories in 1923. The company was liquidated in 1929 as better technologies developed by bigger corporations came to dominate the retooling of cinemas for “talkies.”

De Forest and Elwell had history. Elwell gave de Forest a job in 1911 at Federal Telegraph. There, in the laboratory and factory on the corner of Emerson Street and Channing Avenue in Palo Alto, as the commemorative plaque now reads, “with two assistants, Lee de Forest, inventor of the three-element radio vacuum tube, devised in 1911–13 the first vacuum tube [valve] amplifier and oscillator.” Amplification of tiny signals was a crucial advance that made long-distance telephony, broadcasting, talking pictures and much else possible, hence the further tribute that “worldwide developments based on research conducted here led to modern radio communication, television and the electronics age.” Elwell’s role was to have founded the company where de Forest and his assistants did this work. He was never happy with the credit de Forest got, especially his later self-styling as the “father of radio.”

Elwell married twice. Two of the four children he had with his first wife, Ethel, died very young, one at six weeks, the other just before his fourth birthday. Ethel died in 1927, aged thirty-seven. Two years later, Elwell married Helen Hubbard, the resident piano player at British Talking Pictures, where he was working as an adviser. They had a daughter in 1932.

By the 1930s, Sanders and Bartram say, Elwell’s technical skills had “lost their edge.” He was commissioned to design and construct transmitters for the BBC, and some stations for the early-warning radar system constructed along the English coast before and during the war. In 1940, he took his family to live in the United States. From 1947, he consulted to the young Hewlett-Packard, another Silicon Valley start-up founded by Stanford graduates, where he was remembered as “extravagantly garrulous,” a ready source of “tales of de Forest’s perfidy.”

For contemporary entrepreneurs dreaming of founding disruptive enterprises, “Cy” Elwell’s story is cautionary. These biographers conclude he was “visionary” — about continuous wireless waves, talking pictures and television — but “not a particularly deep-thinking theorist.” He was a “highly competent, practical implementer of engineering concepts” with “little tolerance for those who questioned his technical judgement.” Efficient, cold even, in dealing with engineering challenges, he could be emotional in personal interactions and boardrooms.

Success in what came to be called Silicon Valley always needed more than big ideas, certainty and self-confidence. Elwell was “torn between the need to act alone — where he had the best chance to receive credit for what he saw as his exceptional technical foresight — and the need for funding which could only come from large, established enterprises.”

Hugh Aitken calls Elwell a “technological translator,” someone who “worked at the interface between the laboratory and the marketplace.” With continuous waves, he “engineered a shift from the world of purely technical criteria… to a world where market considerations played a major role,” but paid heavily for it. “As control shifted from the individual innovator to the corporate institution, as technical development became increasingly a function of market performance, stresses appeared that in the end made joint action impossible.” •

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Evans chose it, the “dubious pleasures, and certain horrors” of a career not just inside the political tent but deep inside. He was a member of all four Hawke and both Keating cabinets from 1983 to 1996; a member of the Australian parliament for twenty-one years, mainly as senator for Victoria and briefly as member for Holt; a member of a major political party, Labor, and of its dominant Labor Unity faction. That latter allegiance was chosen early, ahead of “a more obvious political home,” Labor’s Participants group, which counted future ministerial colleagues John Button and Michael Duffy, and Victorian premier John Cain among its members.

At a time of widespread frustration with formal political processes, Incorrigible Optimist is a timely read from one of the only two politicians who served as ministers through the entire Hawke–Keating era. This period is now often referred to, as in this book, as the “Australian gold standard” for government. Evans attributes the reputation to four qualities: “a clear philosophy, sense of policy direction and narrative” maintained over the whole thirteen years; “a decent governing process”; a modus operandi based on “argument rather than authority”; and finally, a commitment to listening and consulting widely.

Times have changed, and in the final chapter Evans examines the economic, security and cultural anxieties that are putting liberal democracy under strain, and the new kinds of listening, thinking and acting that are needed to get it working again.

This is a big life. As well as Evans’s parliamentary period, the book traverses his earlier years as a student, academic lawyer and barrister, and his post-parliamentary career, mainly heading the International Crisis Group, an NGO based in Brussels, from 2000 to 2009, and as chancellor of the Australian National University since 2010.

Like any record of a long, public career, the scale and range of activity — just how much a person who chooses this kind of life sees and does — is extraordinary. The book is organised more or less chronologically, but the chapters have thematic titles that allow relevant events to be brought forward or back. So early chapters on justice and race, the terrain of law and human rights, include the 1965 South African Springbok tour as well as the 1992 Mabo decision and subsequent legislation; a late chapter on education starts with Evans’s schooldays and ends at ANU, contemplating the future of tertiary education and providing tips about how to run a contemporary university.

It is a topsy-turvy life, perhaps like many, where things that were supposed to be highlights turn out to be lowlights, and triumphs show up in unanticipated places. Evans made well-publicised blunders in his dream ministerial role, attorney-general in the first Hawke government, and got moved to the resources and energy portfolio. The two years he spent in the most senior position he ever achieved in the party, as deputy leader to Kim Beazley from 1996 to 1998, were “overwhelmingly… his least successful in federal parliament” according to biographer Keith Scott; the same period as shadow treasurer was dulled by what Evans admits was his own “less than totally consuming passion for the subject matter.”

The highlight, “absolutely the most moving and exhilarating moment of my twenty-one-years parliamentary career,” came in the chamber he joined as second prize, the Senate. Factional politics in Victoria would not serve up a winnable seat in the House of Representatives until late in Evans’s career, but as leader of the government in the Senate in December 1993, he spent almost all of the fifty-two-hour, four-day committee stage of debate on the Native Title Bill on his feet dealing with 237 amendments to the Bill’s 238 clauses, and needing to garner support from nine out of the ten minor-party and independent senators. It was a remarkable feat of legal and political skill and of physical stamina for which Evans gives his bureaucratic advisers generous acknowledgement.

The “most exciting and productive” period, though, was even better than might have been dreamt. From 1988 to 1996, Evans served as Australia’s foreign minister, during a time when the Berlin Wall came down, apartheid ended in South Africa, a “new course for peace” was charted in Indochina and so much else happened to transform the world. “International relations became… my consuming passion, and… has remained so ever since.”

Incorrigible Optimist is subtitled a “political memoir,” telegraphing the absence of personal detail. We learn that Evans was “newly married” when he spent two years studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford from 1968 to 1970; the book is dedicated to his wife, their two children and “the next generation,” but they are not part of this telling. There is nothing of the affair that earned Evans a song of his own in Keating! The Musical.

We got more of Evans himself in Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary­, published three years ago. It was written from the inside, on the run, and had a less conventional purpose as a political memoir. Covering two years from late 1984, it was a time when the senator was down, having blown a shot at attorney-general. Not too far down, of course; being a minister of the Crown is not too bad a gig, and overseeing a crucial sector of the national economy as resources and energy minister, still with a seat at the cabinet table, is not too bad at all. But it felt down, and the diary was a way of dealing with the moment.

Once Evans was back up, showing he could do and even enjoy the resources job, then serving as transport and communications minister and as foreign minister, the diary stopped. These better times have earned the more formal accounting of the whole career that makes up Incorrigible Optimist. He explains what was done and why. He is reflective, offering lots of lessons learned, but not deeply personal.

Many chapters begin with an anecdote from the six months Evans spent backpacking from Australia to Oxford in 1968, through Vietnam at the height of the war, Cambodia, India, Afghanistan and other countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. This journey provided motivations for the life ahead as well as a portfolio of physical, political and cultural sites and personal connections that Evans returned to many times.

Evans wants this book to encourage new generations to take up the task of politics, including through the major parties. He thinks it is “important not to understate the extent to which Australia and its major political parties have successfully weathered multiple political crises and periods of dysfunctionality over the past century.” He is especially worried about some specific challenges — the established tools of diplomacy do not work with non-state actors, and he has “abandoned the unequal struggle” for a serious Australian bill of rights. But he says he remains “on balance, optimistic” about most major domestic and international topics addressed in the book.

One striking feature of the book is the male-ness of the worlds described. The judges, the mining company executives, the media bosses, the senior public servants, the endless cast of diplomats and foreign ministers, prime ministers and presidents… almost all men. The last Keating cabinet, like the first of Hawke’s — one woman. It provides much more than a clue as to why this “dangerous trade” might be “best avoided by normally sane and sensitive souls.”

On the basis of Evans’s own career, is his “incorrigible optimism” evidence-based? He has been the most skilful and versatile of political technicians, an artist both of big pictures and microscopic details. “His mind craves structures,” one observer noted, but also, clearly, it feasts on the words and impressions behind laws and treaties and memoranda of understanding, and on the relationships between nations and people that, in complicated ways, go on to change lives. Choosing a life deep inside the tent of mainstream politics, Evans almost always celebrates “cool rational argument” and “clear-eyed realism” ahead of anything else, but one senses in this book’s silences some more corrigible, human hopes. ●

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So what is 5G, why might we need it, and why is it suddenly dominating the telecommunications policy agenda in Australia? Communications minister Mitch Fifield told a conference in Sydney in late July that 5G would be “a truly revolutionary event, an inflection point not just for the telecommunications sector but for the whole Australian economy.” Chris Althaus, long-time CEO of the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association, which represents Telstra, Optus and Vodafone, talked of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “a fundamental change in the nature of the mobile experience.”

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims agreed that “we are at another turning point.” As a participant in communications policy for nearly thirty years, Sims has seen a few turning points: the introduction of the first cellular mobile services in 1987, the transition from monopoly to competition in the 1990s, Telstra’s staged privatisation from the mid 1990s, major auctions of radiofrequency spectrum especially for 3G services in 2001, and the creation of the National Broadband Network after 2009. The ACCC has been a central player in the NBN debate and implementation, attracting both praise and criticism for its endorsement of the whole plan and for detailed decisions about the NBN’s technical architecture and the prices retail service providers pay to use it.

Old telecommunications equipment gets turned over, but familiar issues live on in the debates about 5G: the roles of fixed and mobile communications in the overall telecommunications market; the strength and sustainability of competition; the power and vulnerability of the original incumbent, Telstra; how governments allocate spectrum resources for uncertain new wireless services; and the progress of the fixed-line NBN.

No one is quite sure what 5G is yet because international technical standards are not expected to be finalised until next year. The goals are dazzling: 1000 times increase in mobile data volumes, ten to one hundred times increase in peak data rates and the number of connected devices, ten times the battery life for low-power devices, and five times lower “latency” (response times, or “end-to-end transmission delays”), all while using energy and spectrum much more efficiently.

These technical aims cater to three main kinds of use. The most obvious are the mobile broadband networks that are already so popular with smartphone and tablet users. Mobile operators, service providers and device manufacturers want to be able to offer much faster speeds and more data. Specific applications — such as consistent high-speed broadband on fast-moving trains — matter a lot to customers in some parts of the world but at the moment are technically difficult to deliver.

Second, 5G will connect machines. Existing 3G and 4G mobile networks have been built mainly to serve human customers operating handheld devices. Initially, they made voice calls, then they exchanged data among themselves or with machines. Increasingly, these networks are connecting self-operating machines — meters in energy networks; sensors monitoring rainfall, pollution, pollen and noise levels or the performance and wear-and-tear of components in manufactured products; surveillance cameras and back-to-base security systems; signalling in vehicles and transport networks. These machines regularly exchange “bursty” amounts of data, tiny or large, intermittently or on-demand. 5G aims to make these kinds of devices much cheaper to supply and maintain, and therefore more pervasive. This expanding universe of machines communicating and trading data with other machines is dubbed the Internet of Things, “massive machine-type communications,” or sometimes the Internet of Everything.

Third, ultra-reliable and low-latency communications make it possible to do new things over communications networks, or for many people to do things that could previously only be done by specialists over expensive, bespoke networks. Automated traffic control and driving, public safety, and health-monitoring applications are some of the things that require ultra-reliable networks. Low latency can make it possible to simulate the experience of human touch, essential for remote surgery, or playing music together in sync from distant locations.

Together, these goals and potential uses will require many more devices transmitting and receiving wireless signals and much more radiofrequency spectrum. Some of this spectrum is likely to be made available within frequency bands already used for communication. This will require some existing users to shift to other frequencies.

The big, largely new demand is for “millimetre wave,” or mmW, frequencies, which lie in the Extremely High Frequency band. Little human use is currently made of this band. Signals can carry large amounts of data, but they don’t travel far without significant propagation losses and they can’t get around obstacles. A new version of wi-fi uses frequencies in this band, which makes it good for fast data transfers, but only within a single room, not a whole apartment, house or office.

Last year, the spectrum regulator in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, was persuaded of the possibility of “a new and radically more capable generation of wireless mobile service” that could be deployed by 2020 using these frequencies. This decision followed trials funded by an unusual coalition of the US army and Samsung. These “appeared to demonstrate that non-line-of-sight services can be provided in the mmW bands by capturing reflections of signals that would otherwise be blocked by intervening obstructions.” In its “Spectrum Frontiers” proceeding, the FCC authorised various forms of exclusive, shared and unlicensed use of spectrum in and just below the mmW bands, declaring it had “created a runway for US companies to launch the technologies that will harness 5G’s fibre-fast capabilities.”

But there is a problem. According to William Webb, “the vision of 5G as currently promulgated by major players is a myth.” Webb, a former executive at Motorola and director at the UK spectrum regulator Ofcom, is now CEO of Weightless SIG, the standards body developing a new global machine-to-machine technology. His view is that the 5G vision is an “ill-defined utopia,” “so badly flawed it is highly unlikely to be widely implemented.”

Webb lays out his case in a short book, The 5G Myth. As currently envisaged, he argues, 5G is not required, not achievable and not economical. A fifth wireless generation is only being developed, he says, “because there have been four prior successful generations.” They have arrived roughly every decade since the early 1980s, and each has delivered, even more roughly, about a tenfold increase in data rates.

New generations responded to specific shortcomings in the previous generation. Most recently, mobile operators caught out by the “iPhone moment” needed 4G to deal with the surge in mobile data consumption that followed the 2007 launch of Apple’s device. The iPhone and other smartphones that followed it made mobile internet and video use a reality but stretched 3G networks supposedly purpose-built for just that moment.

Webb thinks it is wrong to assume the demand for mobile data will keep increasing along its historical trajectory. He is not sure what consumers are going to need now that they are already watching lots of video on their mobile devices. He thinks the Internet of Things will be important but “very unlikely to materially add to data traffic volumes.” Latency, too, is important, but he believes it will be difficult for 5G to do better on this score than 4G, especially because latency in other parts of telecommunications networks will remain and dominate.

Surveying the engineering approaches available to deliver the ambitious technical goals for 5G, Webb sees some potential gains but thinks they will be “hard won.” Moving to the economics of deployment, he thinks that, without a new “killer application,” it will be difficult to extract from consumers already well-served by 4G the extra revenue needed to earn a return on investments in 5G. Mobile operators were highly profitable in the 2G era; today, they are not. “This is a moribund industry in increasing need of change.”

Webb is not pessimistic about the possibilities of a “huge array of new applications” using mobile networks. He just thinks they “can all be achieved today with the technology and networks already at our disposal.” Very fast speeds are being delivered now to customers on 4G networks, and speed and capacity improvements will occur anyway as operators move more customers onto them from 3G networks. As they do this, they will also “re-farm” spectrum from older networks to the newer, more efficient ones, deploy additional spectrum that governments around the world are making available, and offload more traffic to wi-fi networks.

By focusing on higher speeds and the ability to deliver substantially improved data capabilities to people already well-served by 4G, Webb worries that 5G “may not be targeting the right areas.” He thinks there is a better, more socially and economically important goal. He calls it “consistent connectivity” or “broadband everywhere.” It requires lower-cost solutions, whereas the mainstream proposals for 5G “all appear higher cost.”

Back in April 2009, Kevin Rudd’s Labor government announced a plan to deliver a different kind of “consistent connectivity.” The “fibre-to-the-premises” National Broadband Network was going to bring download speeds of 100 megabits per second to 90 per cent of Australian homes and workplaces by wholly replacing with optical fibre the copper lines that connected telephone exchanges to most Australian households and business premises. It would take eight years. Had the plan been implemented on time, it would be done by now.

Of course, it wasn’t and it’s not. The government changed, the plan changed, and the NBN is still a long way from finished. Depending on whom you speak to, it is also not working very well. A parliamentary committee is currently touring the country listening to the evidence. It is hearing from people and businesses who have the NBN and are happy with it, others who have it and are disappointed with its performance and price, and those who do not have the NBN yet and are frustrated about how long they are having to wait. Many Australian households don’t have a fixed-line service at all any more, and others don’t know or care about the NBN. If they switch to it at all, it will probably only be if and when there is no alternative.

In and around the industry, there is a lively argument about how badly the NBN is not working, who is to blame and what to do. Rusted-on critics, always convinced it was just a Big Labor initiative that would cost too much and take too long, feel vindicated. Critics of Labor’s fibre-to-the-premises NBN who liked the Coalition’s fibre-to-the-node model point out that the network is now half-built, with thousands of premises connected each week. Some customers are complaining but most are not, and network performance will get better as services in each area are fully migrated to the NBN and transmission power is increased.

Supporters of Labor’s all-fibre NBN, in despair at the compromising of the original vision, are experiencing schadenfreude as the Coalition’s NBN struggles. Lukewarm supporters of the original vision, attracted to the bold idea but worried about the details, are unsurprised by the broad nature of some of the problems encountered — the cost, the persistence of the originally proposed monopoly, the complexity and blame game for consumers dealing with separate service and network providers, and the same lack of priority for the worst-served areas.

Retail service providers who hailed the original plan for taxpayers to fund an NBN now rail at the cost of using it. The state-owned NBN Co, charged with building a network that reaches every Australian and earning a modest return on the investment, thinks that “over competitive” retail service providers are indulging in “a temporary ‘land grab.’” They are not buying the level of wholesale capacity from NBN Co that they need to satisfy their retail customers’ expectations, and then blaming the NBN for the disappointing service.

The ACCC has stepped in to formally monitor broadband performance; the Australian Communications and Media Authority will now try to get to the bottom of it all by conducting research and collecting data “to ensure customers have a positive experience on the NBN.”

Whether it was Labor’s plan, the Coalition’s changes to the plan, the NBN’s implementation, or retail service providers’ over-promising really doesn’t matter now. Most commentators seem to think the access pricing model will need to be further tweaked. Even if it is, the government has an NBN on its books that is worth a lot less than it is costing. Some government is going to have to acknowledge that. Will it be left to a future Labor administration to take the hit for starting it all? Or will it be the Coalition, which changed the plan and is into a second term, and therefore owns the problem now?

While this fixed-line debate treads water, mobile communications marches on. The same OECD data that shows Australia stuck below the middle of fixed broadband rankings finds it surpassed only by Finland and Japan in mobile broadband penetration. According to tech company Akamai, in the first quarter of 2017 Australians got faster average access speeds on mobile networks (15.7 megabits per second) than they did on fixed networks (11.1 megabits per second).

The architects of Labor’s all-fibre NBN insisted wireless would be complementary, not a substitute for the NBN. It was always a claim based on the raw speed and capacity of fibre rather than the price that typical households and businesses might be prepared to pay for it. A small but politically significant proportion of customers was only ever going to get fixed wireless or satellite connections even from Labor’s original NBN. When the NBN was announced in 2009, wireless was already the fastest-growing broadband access technology.

Most importantly, because retail fixed-line service providers would have had to use the NBN under the original monopoly model, those who controlled mobile networks were always likely to shift even more of their attention to them. That is exactly what has happened. Mobile retail prices have come down, data limits have increased and some mobile plans have got closer to being effective substitutes for light fixed-line users. The three incumbent mobile operators have all announced big plans to make the investment in their 4G networks and in other parts of their networks that will set them up for 5G’s heavier data loads and more densely deployed transmission infrastructure. Another operator has acquired spectrum for a fourth mobile network.

It was a thought experiment in 2010. It is reality in 2017, though not a simple reality in which mobile vanquishes fixed, because most customers will probably still use both — indeed “fixed–mobile convergence” has been a staple topic for industry conferences for years. Wireless doesn’t need to be the only thing; it just needs to be a Big Thing.

5G plays perfectly to this moment. The technology is expected to be capable of delivering much, including the higher-speed broadband and increased data, that the NBN was supposed to bring. The vision for services beyond better retail broadband — the Internet of Things and ultra-reliable, low-latency services — is the kind of big promise that galvanises governments to do the things the visionaries want from them.

Thomas Winslow Hazlett doesn’t have much time for wireless visions. Or at least he doesn’t have much time for visions articulated by governments and regulators about what radiofrequency spectrum should be used for. In his new book, The Political Spectrum, he talks a little about 5G and is interested in what it might be, but he thinks the best approach is for governments and regulators simply to make as much spectrum available as possible, to as many people as possible, to do as many things as possible, then get out of the way. The “right” visions for 5G and everything else will be decided by customers.

Hazlett’s contemporary vision comes out of his analysis of history. The Political Spectrum tracks “the tumultuous liberation of wireless technology from Herbert Hoover to the smartphone” in the United States. Essentially, it is a journey from bureaucratic control to markets. The journey is far from complete, but Hazlett cheers it all the way.

The book brings together the author’s lifetime of passion for the technology, law and economics of wireless and his longstanding hostility to the ways that government agencies, especially the FCC, have managed radiofrequency spectrum. A disciple of Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase, who started to question the global fashion for governments to micromanage spectrum in the 1950s, Hazlett doesn’t think markets are perfect, just that they work better than any other way of managing spectrum.

“The wireless entrepreneur searches for those [options] that work best,” he says, “comparing input costs… with output price… and so calculates profit. That is her quest. It is also her risk, motivating her to seek and exploit every little efficiency.”

Hazlett writes:

Spectrum is a key variable in the efficiency equation, yet the [government] Spectrum Store keeps dreadfully short hours and stocks laughably sparse inventories. In a different world, the marketplace would allow entrepreneurs to sample frequencies, gauge their performance, and see their prices. Airwaves used one way would be available to accommodate more pressing needs. With competing entrepreneurs seeking to buy low and sell high, underutilized bands would turn into busier and more productive frequencies. But the task is subtle, incorporating guesses as to future consumer behavior, technology trends, and evolving market rivalry. These baffle the best of experts.

According to this story, the experts inside governments and spectrum regulators guess wrong, entrepreneurs are thwarted, and consumers pay through higher prices, less innovation, and delays in the delivery of new services. In the past, those delays have affected FM radio and cellular mobile phones. In the future, who knows what may be denied.

But over time, Hazlett thinks, regulators did get better. From the 1990s, by “embracing their ignorance” and handing out spectrum without defining what it had to be used for, regulators delegated decisions to “entrepreneurs possessing superior incentives, information, and the financial wherewithal to innovate.” The steps were incremental but they added up to “deep policy reform” that “ignited the ‘wireless explosion.’” “Relatively liberal licenses” inspired “massive investments in networks” and “huge gains in consumer welfare.”

The contrasting experiences from this ancient and recent history bring Hazlett to three crucial policy prescriptions that are directly relevant to debates about 5G. First, he thinks governments should continue to allocate access to particular spectrum bands via these kinds of liberal licences. They should be awarded either to primary licensees, or to “overlay” licensees who would enter into commercial agreements with the primary licensees enabling them to operate at times or in places or ways that the primary licensee can live with.

Hazlett has not been converted to the “counter-revolution” of so-called unlicensed spectrum, where regulators allow anyone to operate equipment in designated bands provided they obey certain rules set by the regulator, such as low-power operation. This is how wi-fi works. While acknowledging the vital role that unlicensed spectrum has played, Hazlett thinks that “the system defect is that regulators are making the fundamental spectrum use choices.” This becomes especially costly when better uses for the unlicensed bands emerge. “Without effective owners, the market cannot coordinate new and better arrangements,” Hazlett argues. “Many unlicensed bands, with their widely dispersed, nonexclusive use rights, have thwarted an efficient migration to advanced services.”

Second, he thinks regulators should get much busier making more spectrum available. Underutilised bands, particularly those occupied by spectrum-guzzling government users, should be cleared or shared. “Spectrum,” he argues, “is a force multiplier, but needlessly withheld spectrum is a party killer… The point is not that more mobile spectrum is the answer to all wireless policy questions. It is that there is no good reason to keep airwaves locked up in government inventory.”

Third, Hazlett wants the politics taken out of spectrum, preferring “markets over ideology.”

What should Australians do? Get a 5G vision? And if so, which one?

The recent record of government visions for communications in Australia is mixed. High-speed fixed-line broadband inspired massive public intervention, massive political conflict, but so far only modest improvements in service via the NBN. The Australian Digital Inclusion Index for 2017 shows steady improvement in access since 2014 but a decline in affordability (the cost of data has fallen but people are spending more money on services) and stubborn gaps between the online experiences of people based on income, age, education and geography. This is a very old story. The NBN was going to make Tasmania “the most connected place on the planet” by 2013; it was still the worst-performing state or territory in 2016–17, according to the Index.

Another long-term vision was the government-mandated switchover from analogue to digital TV, conducted in Australia from 2001 to 2013. Despite vigorously contested and shifting ideas about the purpose of the whole project from its beginnings in the mid 1990s, this large spectrum “re-farming” project achieved its goals. TV was transformed, valuable spectrum was liberated for other purposes, and the total, inflation-adjusted financial return to the federal budget eventually exceeded even the generous public expenditure on new transmission infrastructure, public information campaigns and consumer subsidies. Perhaps we could have done even better, allowing a wider range of new services, making the switch faster, recovering more spectrum, but that would have brought extra costs too.

A further, related case study comes from the longer history of spectrum allocation for TV broadcasting. This reminds us how spectrum innovators become spectrum incumbents who can be very hard to shift. We are still living with the consequences of effectively giving TV broadcasters perpetual licences to use large amounts of spectrum decades before the switch to digital. Had we changed that approach as part of the switch, and awarded digital licences only for fifteen-year terms, as for mobile phone and broadband spectrum, the spectrum regulator would have had a recent opportunity to reconsider the best use of all that TV spectrum. Instead, governments have been making ad hoc adjustments to the amounts broadcasters pay for their continuing licences and the obligations that attach to them.

Governments and spectrum regulators do not necessarily need A vision for 5G but they do need views — they have some already — about the direction change. They are being asked to do things that have real costs, like clearing existing users from bands that might be reallocated, setting limits on the amount of spectrum that can be acquired by a single operator, and changing the processes for approving new wireless facilities so it is easier to build them and harder for local councils and residents to object.

Governments and regulators with public missions may be well-placed — though not always perfectly placed — to consider the full range of issues that affect all Australians, especially the range and distribution of non-economic as well as economic benefits. These are the things that show up in the Digital Inclusion Index and the voting patterns of excluded Australians.

Whatever assurances are given about the complementarity of 5G wireless and fixed-line NBN services, this new vision is partly a product of the problems with the last one. That is, 5G in Australia is attractive to mobile operators precisely because of the capacity it may offer to work around the NBN. It will be truly remarkable if the 5G vision that comes to dominate Australian telecommunications rushes past the persistent equity issues highlighted in the Digital Inclusion Index, repeating the high-cost, bigger/faster rhetoric of the NBN, rather than its aspiration to “connect all Australians.”

When it is time to draw the lessons from the NBN, this may be one of them: in our laudable ambition to spend whatever it took to lead the world in broadband, we chose a high-cost solution that would not solve all the problems and take too long to address some of those it did. That meant it could not garner the steady, multi-party, multi-year political support needed to get a multi-parliamentary-term project finished. An increasingly toxic political environment turbo-charged the challenges.

The mainstream 5G vision — sizzling with imaginative Internet of Things applications but troublingly dependent on retail broadband to turn a buck — looks just a little like those early NBN promises. Setting our sights on the stars for a new generation of communications technology, we should not overlook some familiar challenges at our feet. •

The post 5G’s new frontier appeared first on Inside Story.

Nicholas Jennings, in an extract from Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound, says Mitchell saw Dylan and Cohen as “her only real ‘pace-runners’ when it came to song-writing.” “Leonard’s economical, he never wastes a word,” she said in 1970. “I can go through Leonard’s work and it’s just like silk. Dylan is coarse and beautiful in a rougher way. I love that in him. I think I’m a belated fan.”

Until Dylan’s 1965 song “Positively 4th Street,” Mitchell thought he was “a Woody Guthrie clone… You know, I was always in debate in the coffee houses, ‘Oh, what’s the fuss over?’ you know; ‘he’s just second-generation Woody and it’s kind of silly, he’s a middle class kid, you know, he’s not riding the box cars.’ But then his stuff started to really come from his own blood, you know?”

Hearing “Positively 4th Street,” Mitchell thought, “Oh my God, we can write about anything now. It was just, ‘You gotta lotta nerve / To say you are my friend…’ Just that one line, ‘Whoa, what an opener!‘ So that changed my direction, and after that my songs got real ‘He said/she said,’ kind of like playlets and soliloquies.” About thirty years later, before heading to Tokyo to play with Mitchell, Dylan called. “I forgot how to sing,” he told her, “but I remember now, I remember now. The trouble is they want me to do all those Bob Dylan songs – and they’re so heavy.”

Mitchell met Cohen at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, not long before they both released their first albums. A love affair “lasted for part of the summer as their paths crisscrossed on the festival circuit,” according to Jennings. On her second album, Clouds, Mitchell sang of a man she met “on a midway at a fair last year”: “And you stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear… You looked so grand wearing wings / Do you tape them to your shoulders just to sing?”

Occasionally Mitchell acknowledged real-world subjects – the Marcie in “Marcie” “is a real girl, she lives in London… But I’m the girl in all these songs.” Mostly, she warns off autobiographical associations. “I resent the ‘Who is it about?’ fixing it in time, ‘It’s about that over there…’ No it isn’t, it’s a mirror – and it reflects you if you take the time to look as you pass it by… If it’s overly explained, you rob the people whose lives it brushes up against of their own interpretation and their own experience.”

Born Roberta Joan Anderson in the early 1940s in Alberta, Canada, and having grown up in Saskatoon, Mitchell spent a year at art school in Calgary, had a child whom she placed with foster parents – “My child’s a stranger. I bore her but I could not raise her.” (“Chinese Café/Unchained Melody”) – began writing songs, married a folk singer from Detroit called Chuck Mitchell after a courtship of thirty-six hours, and started touring with him.

The marriage didn’t last – “I can’t go back there anymore. You know my keys won’t fit the door” (“I Had a King”) – but the young Canadian, now Joni Mitchell, got noticed on the folk circuit, especially once better-known artists like Judy Collins and Buffy Sainte-Marie started recording covers of her songs.

As she moved first to New York’s Chelsea and then to Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon, the songs and the albums flowed. “Joni Mitchell has arrived in America,” a Rolling Stone writer declared in May 1969. She didn’t get to the Woodstock festival outside New York later that year but wrote its anthem – “We are stardust, we are golden… And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

The series of albums that followed in the early-to-mid 1970s – Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira – are the “consensus masterworks” of Mitchell’s career. Blue, created from “total pain” (Susan Whitall in the Houston Press), was “the best album ever to help you rationalise utter romantic defeat” (Michael Gross in Swank). “Well there’s so many sinking now you gotta keep thinking you can make it through these waves.”

Her rhythms and melodies got more complex, crafted to the agility, range and purity of her own voice. Amateur fans of simpler-sounding 60s hits like “Both Sides Now” and “The Circle Game” wore out the vinyl of these new classics but struggled even to tune their six-strings like Mitchell’s, much less play her chords. Fewer artists covered Mitchell’s material. The only person who could sing a Joni Mitchell song now was Joni Mitchell. “She has forged a form of personal expression that is beyond imitation,” wrote Michael Watts, reviewing The Hissing of Summer Lawns in Melody Maker.

Unlike Melody Maker, Rolling Stone declared The Hissing of Summer Lawns “the worst album of 1975.” Twenty years on, Susan Whitall remembered it as a puzzlingly brutal assessment “in a year that saw the release of two by Kansas.” But criticism of the 1978 jazz album made with Charles Mingus was more widespread. Sandy Robertson’s review in this collection is a benchmark of savagery: “I find no illuminations on this record – it’s merely pleasant,” its co-creator “the little white girl in awe of the big black man.”

In 1982, Mitchell married bassist Larry Klein, who played on the album she released that year, Wild Things Run Fast. “Caught in the middle, Carol, we’re middle class. We’re middle aged” (“Chinese Café/Unchained Melody”). It was, at times, almost comfortable, optimistic: “All around the town, good hearts are goin’ under / Love bandits con and plunder / Let nobody put asunder this solid love” (“Solid Love”).

Twelve years later, they separated, moving to different houses the day before they went into the studio to start recording the album that became Turbulent Indigo. “It was tense for a few weeks,” said Mitchell. “For the most part it was a wonderful growth experience, I think, for both of us. Klein would say the friction created a pearl.” The Recording Academy agreed. From a shortlist including albums by Madonna, Annie Lennox, Mariah Carey and The Eagles, Mitchell and Klein won the Grammy for Best Pop Album of the year.

Joni Mitchell had been threatening to “quit this crazy scene” for almost as long as she had been in it: “I wish I had a river I could skate away on” (“River”). For Susan Whitall, the Grammy for Turbulent Indigo was “as if… the music business was saying ‘Sorry Joni, for revering Sting for using polyphonic harmonies when you were rejected for the same thing just a few years earlier. Sorry, sorry, sorry.’”

“I want to be strong, / I want to laugh along,” Joni Mitchell could write, “I want to belong to the living by the light.” But within a few lines, “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling / Lookin’ for the key to set me free” (“All I Want”).

Barney Hoskyns wants this anthology to give the reader “most of what you could ever want to know about Joni Mitchell,” including his own interview with her in 1994. It’s a fine selection and a perfect format for a book about a long career in a bruising business. Mitchell complains that critics “hold you in your decade – you are supposed to stay neatly in your decade and then die.”

Reading what they actually wrote, decade by decade, in different kinds of publications, gets the reader into the times better than many late-career retrospectives. There are contemporary reviews of most of the albums and of large and small shows, as well as “snapshots of her complex, often spiky personality” and “some of the most open and thoughtful interviews Mitchell has ever given.”

Hoskyns feels “privileged to have met this genius of North American music, this Canadian prairie maid turned folk poetess turned canyon confessor turned jazzbo hybridiser… a towering troubadour and sometimes reckless daughter of America’s folk-rock revolution.”

Over the last few years, I have heard a stellar line-up of young Canadian, Scots and Australian singer-songwriters each play a Joni Mitchell song in a Ladies of the Canyon show at a big festival; Diana Krall coax “A Case of You” from a cold night in the Yarra Valley; a support act light up a little venue in Northcote’s High Street with an all-Joni set. Mitchell’s music was in their blood “like holy wine”; her decades are not done yet. •

The post Making it through the waves appeared first on Inside Story.

These are the main answers the “Western intellectual tradition” has offered to the question “Why should speech be free?” Garton Ash, a winner of the George Orwell Prize who currently holds positions at Oxford and Stanford universities, comes from that tradition and believes in it. He wants his big, ambitious book, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, to be an argument that draws from the Western tradition and starts a conversation with speakers from other places and approaches.

“A more universal universalism” is what he is after. All the people of the world are becoming neighbours, “but nowhere is it written… that we will be good neighbours. That requires a transcultural effort of reason and imagination. Central to this endeavour is free speech.”

Rejecting McLuhan’s “global village” as an inadequate description of, and prescription for, the online world, Garton Ash sees instead a “mixed-up, connected world-as-city” that he calls “cosmopolis.” McLuhan’s was an “extraordinary, seer-like insight” but villages are “small, usually homogeneous and conformist places” where tolerance is not a hallmark. Human beings need more than that.

The ten principles elaborated in the book are Garton Ash’s shot at a set of rules to govern and guide speech in the world-as-city. These “distilled formulations of a modern liberal position on free speech, intended for cosmopolis,” draw on existing templates such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

According to his project website, the principles have been “thrashed out in discussions with free speech experts, lawyers, political theorists, theologians, philosophers, activists and journalists from across the world,” and “revised in hours of detailed work with current Oxford graduate students, including native speakers of all the thirteen major languages in which the site’s editorial content appears.” Short, clear principles, comprehensible in all these languages, were the goal.

The principles tweak and supplement familiar elements of free speech. Each gets a one-word shorthand: Lifeblood, Violence, Knowledge, Journalism, Diversity, Religion, Privacy, Secrecy, Icebergs, and Courage. Lifeblood expands to the overarching principle, “Human beings must be free and able to express themselves and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas…” Violence becomes “We neither make threats of violence nor accept violent intimidation…” Knowledge becomes “We allow no taboos…” In turn, “We require uncensored, diverse, trustworthy media…,” “We express ourselves openly and with robust civility about all kinds of human difference…,” “We respect the believer but not necessarily the content of the belief…,” “We must be able to protect our privacy and to counter slurs on our reputations but not prevent scrutiny that is in the public interest…”

The last three principles are more novel. Secrecy, Garton Ash argues, is not always an enemy but it does need to be tested. It “is a condition for the survival of free speech that any limits to free speech… must be open to public challenge.” This is especially significant because international agreements typically allow governments to maintain laws and other measures to protect, for example, “national security,” as well as “public order” and “public morals.” Even “free trade” agreements that otherwise preach openness and liberal exchange of goods and services do this.

The controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement allows parties to apply measures they consider “necessary for… the protection of [their] own essential security interests.” The World Trade Organization’s services agreement does not prevent “the adoption or enforcement… of measures necessary to protect public morals or to maintain public order,” although the public order exception can only be invoked “where a genuine and sufficiently serious threat is posed to one of the fundamental interests of society.”

By Icebergs, Garton Ash means the hardware and software that sit below the waterline of the internet and other contemporary communications tools, the vast and often invisible complex where crucial terms of control, access and preference are set. This is what needs to be defended against “illegitimate encroachments by both public and private powers.”

Courage may be implicit in the acceptance of obligations under existing free speech templates, especially by professional information-gatherers like journalists, but Garton Ash is unusual in elevating it to a principle of its own. “We decide for ourselves and face the consequences,” his tenth principle states. “[T]he truly sovereign state will build its own sovereignty on that of each and every citizen,” he explains, acknowledging that there are countries where people who stand up for free speech “against the armed and booted orthodoxy of their time” will have to “make harder decisions, and face graver consequences, than most of us in the West ever will.”

The second and longest part of the book, where the ten principles are discussed, provides an excellent compendium of many of the free speech flashpoints of recent times: the publication and republication of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed as a terrorist; WikiLeaks; the “Right to be Forgotten”; the now central role of social media and search titans like Facebook, Google and Twitter in permitting and censoring words and images. The book’s discussions about offensive and hate speech are directly relevant to state and federal laws about vilification and discrimination in Australia.

To practise the ten principles, Garton Ash prefers relying on “underlying principles or norms” rather than laws: “We should limit free speech as little as possible by law and executive action of governments or corporations but do correspondingly more to develop shared norms and practices that enable us to make best use of this essential freedom.” He gives three reasons. First, in the cosmopolis, the influence of individual law-making entities – countries or corporations – is reduced, though still significant. The engine of the world-as-city, the internet, originated in the United States, and the unique reach and character of American “word power” still means that “what they do inside the United States has an impact far beyond the country’s borders, even when that is not their intention.”

Second, law focuses on extremities, the line that distinguishes prohibited from acceptable (though perhaps repugnant) speech. Individuals, groups and societies ask for more nuanced regulation than this. We “self-regulate our freedom of speech a thousand times a day,” says Garton Ash, according to “countless registers of frankness, politeness, irony, deference, joking and powerplay.” In practice, “religious, social and cultural norms can be more compelling than the letter of the law.”

Third, norms are generally better than laws because they allow speakers to find things out for themselves. “We will never learn how to sail if the state will not allow us to take the boat out. To discover and set limits for ourselves is what responsible adults do.”

Free Speech is a “post-Gutenberg” project, published as a physical book but also as an ebook in which the reader can click through to three deeper levels. These link to secondary sources, primary sources and “further exploration.” The project website also explains the ongoing nature of the conversation Garton Ash and his team are hosting: “We cannot emphasise too strongly that this is just a first attempt at drafting some rules-of-thumb for what we should or should not be free to express, and in what manner we may choose to express it, in a world where everybody is becoming neighbours with everybody else.”

“It is not that there may not be global universal values,” wrote Immanuel Wallerstein, in a passage Garton Ash cites with approval. “It is that we are far from yet knowing what these values are. Global universal values are not given to us; they are created by us. The human enterprise of creating such values is the great moral enterprise of humanity.” •

The post Speaking freely appeared first on Inside Story.

In a single week in October, US networks CBS and HBO both announced online-only subscription video services. CBS All Access launched immediately, allowing viewers to watch the network live online and individual programs on demand. HBO Now would let customers subscribe to a standalone HBO service without paying for a multichannel cable or satellite TV package. The New York Times declared a “new era of à la carte television [had] arrived – seemingly all at once.” This was “a watershed moment for web-delivered television,” a move by two titans who earned “billions of dollars in profits from the traditional system” that signalled “how rapidly the balance of power is shifting in the television landscape.”

In Australia, the TV market was very different, but online subscription video services seemed to be arriving “all at once” as well. Subscription TV operator Foxtel launched the Presto online movie service in March 2014, halved its price in August, brought in Seven West Media as a partner in December, and added TV programs to it in January 2015. Free-to-air TV rival Nine Entertainment joined with Fairfax Media in August 2014 to announce the online video service Stan, and launched it on Australia Day. Global operator Netflix ended the rumours in November, confirming it would start a service in Australia. On 24 March 2015, it did.

It was the last of these that seemed most significant. Like the arrival of TV itself in 1956, two decades after services began in Britain and Germany, Netflix would arrive in Australia fully formed, a successful global service with massive brand recognition. In the past, new TV services had been introduced to Australians mainly by local media incumbents. The first TV services were provided by the major newspaper publishers and the national radio broadcaster, the ABC. When commercial TV services in country areas were “equalised” in the late 1980s, it was the metropolitan networks that provided the new channels. Subscription TV was pioneered by a new entrant, Australis, in the mid 1990s, but soon consolidated into a venture controlled by media and telecommunications incumbents. Digital TV was put in the hands of the established TV networks in the 2000s.

The online era had made it much easier for services to be “born global.” YouTube, the giant of online video, was a globally accessible start-up, expanding from the ground up in Australia and elsewhere. Its brand and service were young but already well established when it was acquired by a powerful international company, Google.

In November 2014, Netflix was no start-up. It had more than fifty million streaming customers in the United States and overseas. These already included Australian-based customers for its US service, a reality that clearly helped galvanise local responses. The company’s first program commissions, House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, were well known as Netflix shows even when they were carried on other services in territories where Netflix was not yet officially available. This time, offering the next generation of TV services, Australia’s incumbents would be the start-ups trying to create awareness for new brands in their own backyards. The outsider, Netflix, was already at home.

And yet we had been hearing for a long time that television was finished. Twenty-five years ago, in Life After Television, George Gilder declared: “TV was a superb technology for its time… But now its time is over.” Since then, the medium has had at least two Golden Ages, according to some commentators. Introducing his decades-long study of American television, Tube of Plenty, also published in 1990, Erik Barnouw wrote: “Not for one moment … has the subject sat still for its portrait." In May 2015, Tim Wu wrote: “Over-estimating change in the television industry is a rookie mistake.”

Maybe change is just the norm for television? This year, 2015, might be special, but no more special than many other years before it – a big year certainly, but just one more chapter in the long history of a resilient, adaptable medium, a period that seemed overwhelming only in the fog of the present?

Twenty questions, twenty-five viewpoints

We decided to ask some people who should know. If television was changing so fundamentally, what might it look like in a year’s time, in a few years’ time and, say, a decade hence? We came up with twenty questions and put them to twenty-five people.

We wanted to hear what they thought might change and what might endure. We also wanted to find out how they had experienced and interpreted the recent past. What trends had surprised them? What had delighted them?

Settling them was hard, because different people would have different areas of specialised knowledge. But deciding which twenty-five people to interview was much harder. It couldn’t just be people working in what we have come to call “television.” There had to be people who worked in TV only some of the time, as well as people from other sectors that are supplementing, transforming, overtaking, bypassing or reinventing television. Even those right in the middle of the TV business shouldn’t necessarily have always worked there; they should include some recent arrivals and departures who knew the industry well but were not of it.

Our twenty-five interviewees include:

• six people who work for or represent Australian commercial and public free-to-air broadcasters;

• one each from a subscription TV (Foxtel) and IPTV (Fetch TV) operator, plus one from an international organisation, the BBC, that runs free-to-air services in its home country but now serves Australian audiences mainly through subscription channels;

• four from, or recently from, production companies that make programs for television and other media (Hoodlum Entertainment, ITV Studios Australia, Shine Group, Australian Children’s Television Foundation);

• three from the telecommunications and IT sector (Telstra, Broadcast Australia, Intel);

• two from online and social media companies (Yahoo!7, Twitter);

• one each from advertising (AOL Platforms), audience measurement (OzTAM) and a government funding agency (South Australian Film Corporation);

• a screenwriter, a media entrepreneur, a media strategy and measurement consultant, and a digital strategist and author.

Two of our interviewees are based overseas and one had recently returned, but most are based in Australia. This primary focus on small-screen media in Australia is not meant to be parochial, simply to acknowledge that TV has always been distinctive to its own part of the world. But TV has also, always, been a very international thing – American shows on commercial channels, British programs on the ABC, foreign language movies on SBS, international sport and news on Foxtel, videos from anywhere on YouTube. It is becoming more so – and so a lot of the questions and answers have an international flavour.

All interviewees were asked to give personal views, not necessarily those of their organisations. Most were interviewed face-to-face and were given the opportunity to check transcripts; a small number responded by email. A few chose not to answer particular questions that they thought were beyond their expertise or where they felt it was inappropriate for them to answer from their current positions.

Recent trends and highlights

We began by asking our twenty-five interviewees what had most surprised them about recent trends in television and video. Several said the resilience of linear free-to-air and subscription television, the rise and durability of reality formats, the strength of scripted drama and the increased attention paid to its screenwriters. One was struck by the opposite: the speed of the recent decline in audience numbers for regular free-to-air TV programs. Many mentioned the rapid growth of other platforms and devices – SVOD (subscription video on demand), OTT (over-the-top) services, tablets – and new forms of content on YouTube and other “non-traditional” outlets; one was surprised that a really strong “number 2” to YouTube had not yet emerged. One mentioned a rapid recent shift from the DVD format to online delivery of video programming to organisation-wide servers in schools.

Asked about their most interesting or satisfying recent personal experience with TV or video, many cited favourite shows, movies, websites or other content: Breaking Bad, Broad City, House of Cards, Jane the Virgin, Orphan Black, True Detective; two strikingly different Scarlett Johansson movies, Under the Skin and Lucy; the comic instructional site HowToBasic; a bunch of student films of exceptional storytelling and production quality. Others remarked on the new ways and times they are able to watch content, the launch of new services like Stan, the globalisation of event series like Game of Thrones and The Fall or services like Netflix, the rise of Netflix competitors like Amazon Prime, and a potentially game-changing transaction – advertising giant GroupM’s October 2014 “preferred partner” deal with YouTube.

Influencers, technologies, challenges

Unsurprisingly, many people mentioned the new streaming video or SVOD services launched in Australia – Netflix, Presto, Stan – when asked for the organisations or individuals that would have “a significant influence on the TV/video business in the next year.” Several thought these would consolidate, most likely into two: “Netflix and probably one other… [which] will be a great competitor because it will eventually have Seven, Nine, Ten, ABC, SBS, Foxtel all in one,” forecast Overture Management’s Ben Liebmann. Many also mentioned well-established incumbents of various kinds: telcos Telstra, Optus and the National Broadband Network – “The real future of TV will be decided by the telcos, not the traditional TV broadcasters,” said Fetch TV’s Scott Lorson – as well as the commercial free-to-air networks, the ABC and Foxtel. Others identified younger players: YouTube, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon Prime Studios and Minecraft creators Mojang.

Several interviewees resisted nominating a particular person who would have “a significant influence on the TV/video business in the next year.” Those prepared to chance their arm suggested Miranda Dear and Darren Dale of Blackfella Films, the makers of Redfern Now; Australian Football League chief executive Gillon McLachlan; ex-News Limited and Foxtel boss Kim Williams; Ynon Kreiz, the chief executive of Maker Studios; former Pixar animation director Saschka Unseld; Fox Networks Group CEO Peter Rice, who some think is being groomed to take over News Corporation from Rupert Murdoch; and “someone awesome at Alibaba or the Huayi Brothers in China.” Several mentioned communications minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Australian government, and one the ACCC: “They’re going to have at least a part of the future of our business in the palm of their hand,” said Seven West Media chief executive Tim Worner.

Technology trends that would be particularly significant in TV and video in the next few years? Mobile, mobile, mobile, smartphone, tablet… and the application of broadband to TV. Digital media consultant Gai Le Roy thought price as well as raw capability would make a big difference to mobile video consumption: “If mobile data packages change in Australia [which they did soon after we interviewed her] the consumption of, particularly out-of-home, video, phones, tablets etc, will completely take off.”

On the application of broadband to television, several people mentioned the impact of faster broadband speeds, especially delivered by Australia’s NBN, as well as HbbTV and applications like Apple TV and Google Chromecast that enable users to throw content from a device to a connected TV. “At some stage the free-to-air broadcasters are going to have to move to simultaneous streaming of their signals,” said Freeview’s Kim Dalton. “At the moment I’ve got to have a television with an aerial. That already feels on the edge of being old-fashioned to me.” Mitch Waters of AOL Platforms was interested in whether the young video streaming services would be able to stay subscription-focused rather than ad-focused, “or whether some of them would start adopting a hybrid model similar to Hulu in the US or Spotify here.”

Some thought the main technology trends would lie in user interfaces and experiences – changes in the discovery side of TV (Arul Baskaran, Yahoo!7); enabling shared experience (Tony Broderick, Twitter); personalisation (Richard Finlayson, ABC TV); immersive viewing (Courtney Gibson, Nine); “mixed reality” or digitally built worlds (Tawny Schlieski, Intel); interoperability of consumer devices (Rebekah Horne, Ten Network).

Our twenty-five interviewees were prominent people in positions to help shape the future but we wanted to know what they worry about. Many responded quickly and instinctively: cashflow, attracting and keeping great people, the small size of the local market and Australia’s place in the global market, where the next hit show might come from, how to convince telco people of the value of content, how to keep reminding public stakeholders of the value of a public broadcaster. Freeview’s Kim Dalton and Offspring co-creator and head writer Debra Oswald shared the Australian Children’s Television Foundation’s Jenny Buckland’s sentiment: “I know the audience is there but I have no idea how the high-quality drama programs we know they want are going to be funded.”

Evolving businesses: relationships, rules and business models

Most interviewees agreed that producers and distributors of content would work more closely together in the future: they would “become one,” or continue to consolidate under common ownership, or expand into each other’s terrain – producers by trying to go direct-to-consumer, distributors and TV networks by trying to own more of their content. But pursuing those opportunities would necessarily strain existing approaches to making and controlling content. Producers would have new places and ways to sell, but buyers might want more from them. Networks might want more territories and rights; consumers might want fewer constraints on the timing of releases and the ways they use and share digital content.

Models for owning and accessing content would need to be reimagined for the digital age, said Intel’s Tawny Schlieski: “How do the people who invest time and money in the creation of content get rewarded?”

For broadcast networks, these changes are profound. They “have to alter their business model,” said company director Deanne Weir. “Their businesses cannot sustain themselves in the same way and they’re all recognising that. This is not about some little addition to what Nine is doing, or what Seven is doing.” Ten’s Rebekah Horne agreed: “Ultimately you’ve got to be able to change the business model. You’ve got to be able to almost rewrite the rules across your own organisation, across how you interact with producers, what rights you want, how much you’re willing to pay.”

The changes are also significant for producers. Ben Liebmann said, “For producers, there’s a history with broadcasters. The new platforms don’t have that history, so there are new rules and paradigms. They are being driven by data, not by relationship. A potential shift in the ownership and control of rights has the power to fundamentally shift the production sector very quickly and to disrupt companies that have been built on creating and owning intellectual property that can be scaled, repeated, and rolled out internationally. The large production companies werenÆt built on the model of creating a piece of intellectual property and handing it over to somebody else.”

Interviewees agreed that windows, holdbacks and territorial rights trading would change, but they disagreed on how. Hoodlum’s Nathan Mayfield thought rights windows would be “obsolete.” The BBC’s Jon Penn said “being able to regulate content availability and pricing by market” would continue to be critical for makers of high-quality content. “A world where everything is available to everybody all over the world at the lowest price isn’t going to work for us and ultimately not for the consumer.”

Evolving audiences: control, content discovery and curation

Considering the evolution of audiences in the future, interviewees were asked if they thought that, as they aged, “millennials” would turn into their parents. Most agreed with OzTAM’s Doug Peiffer – “Life stage always impacts media usage” – but also with Intel’s Tawny Schlieski – that content-on-demand, not-time-bound, on-the-go, “ubiquitously accessible” were “new normals” that were here to stay. Foxtel’s Ross Crowley thought that as millennials form households and families, they “will move to big screens and shared viewing experiences, although more likely to fit around their own schedules.”

What role would social media play? “Peer-curated content will be the main source of an individual’s entertainment fix,” said Hoodlum’s Nathan Mayfield. Does that mean social media platforms will get more involved in creating and distributing long-form content? Telstra’s Ian Davis thought Facebook, for example, would “undoubtedly” find a way to play “more of a role,” but he didn’t expect it to become an “actual distributor.” Fetch TV’s Scott Lorson agreed: “Online audience does not translate to success in monetising long-form content.” The ABC’s Richard Finlayson drew an analogy with Amazon: “They started out as a place to buy books online, now they are suddenly able to sell anything and everything, including entertainment. Why wouldn’t Facebook do that?”

Shapes of things to come

Thinking forward to 2025, we asked our interviewees what aspects of the business they were most confident about. Telstra’s Ian Davis was “as positive as I can be of the significant rise of ‘what-I-want, where-I-want, when-I-want‘ consumption of television content.” Scott Lorson from Fetch TV still expected viewing behaviours to be strongly concentrated, like smartphone apps and online bookmarks: “people regularly explore, but core usage is very concentrated.” “The TV experience will be closer to an app experience than to the old projection, theatrical, scheduled sort of experience that TV took from cinema,” said Arul Baskaran from Yahoo!7. Former SBS managing director Malcolm Long thought “the thing that will endure is the big screen.”

Everyone agreed scripted drama would continue to be a big part of the business but the ways it is delivered and viewed would change and formats would evolve. “The hi-fi (expensive, professional, quality) and the lo-fi (amateur, shared) will endure,” said Nine’s Courtney Gibson. “The arse will fall out of the middle. It’s really the amateurs who pose the greatest threat to the professionals in our industry.” “TV won’t look like it looks today,” said AOL Platforms’ Mitch Waters, “but my opinion is it will still be there, and it will still be quite prominent. What will change – and I think we’re starting to see it – is the way TV is measured and how the data is used. We’ll see a big shake-up in that.”

Would the United States still be the dominant global screen culture in a decade? Yes, said many, but US content would change and, according to Nathan Mayfield, “the players will be different.” “US productions are more globally aware now than they were ten years ago,” said Arnold Worldwide’s Joshua Green, and the rise of strong African-American, Latin and Hispanic and LGBTQ audiences was already “driving demand for programming that not only looks different, but which comes from somewhere else.” No, said the BBC’s Jon Penn: “I think Asia’s probably the place to watch when it comes to dominant screen culture.” “The definition of domination will be reviewed,” said the SA Film Corporation’s Annabelle Sheehan.

What role would Australian programming be playing in a decade? “Australian content will be everywhere,” said Gai Le Roy. Taken as a whole, Australian audiovisual material “is braver, more interesting, and more compelling than the bulk of material produced in the US,” said Joshua Green. “It exports well, though mostly as formats and talent into the US.”

“Television” 2025

Finally, we asked our interviewees if, in 2025, there would there still be something we call “television.” “Yes – but I don’t know what it will be called!” said Fetch TV’s Scott Lorson. “Yes. But no,” said Hoodlum’s Nathan Mayfield. “The screen will serve multiple purposes. It will be meaningful as well as a utility.” Gai Le Roy thought, “That word ‘television‘ seems to be quite resilient. It seems to be winning.” Ten’s Russel Howcroft said, “It will still be called television, just like the phone is still called the phone, despite the fact that it’s got nothing to do with the phone.”

“Yes, of course there will be television,” said Nine Network’s Courtney Gibson. “There will continue to be large flat-screen televisions in every home; our watches, phones and iPads are TV screens, and there will be television content online. There will be more TVs and TV content than ever.” Freeview’s Kim Dalton agreed: “Absolutely. Isn’t television just getting better and better?” “Accepting there will be many platforms for delivery,” said Malcolm Long, “I think television will be around forever.”

ITV Australia’s Anita Jacoby was less sure: “I don’t know, I really don’t know, but there will always be content.” “TV for me is episodic content in our home,” said Intel’s Tawny Schlieski. “It’s a unique form that breaks away from the plays and movies that preceded it. It provides us with characters and continuity that we want to invite into our intimate spaces over and over again. That isn’t going anywhere.”

Joshua Green thought, “Television has trodden the edge of significant revolution its entire life. It has never been static. I think it’s got at least another decade in it.” “Consumers will still call it TV, but whether people in our industry will view it that way, I’m not sure,” said AOL Platforms’s Mitch Waters. “As a device and as a medium,” said Yahoo!7’s Arul Baskaran, “I think television as we know it is going to disappear.”

Offspring co-creator and head writer Debra Oswald wanted answers too: “What do you think is going to happen? Seriously what’s your best guess? I’m keen to know because I have to plan my career.” •

This is an extract from Television 2025: Rethinking Small-Screen Media in Australia – 20 Questions, 25 Viewpoints. The full report is available here.

The post TV streams into the future appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s one of the longest-running arguments in Australian television.

For a few years in the early 1970s, Crawford Productions in Melbourne was making a separate weekly police drama series for each of Australia’s three commercial TV networks: Homicide for Seven, Division 4 for Nine, Matlock Police for what we now call Ten.

Then, in a few months between January and August 1975, all three shows were cancelled. Some remember it as a coordinated campaign to cut the pioneer of Australian TV drama, Hector Crawford, and his company down to size. Others scoff at the idea that the three commercial TV networks – enterprises that will do absolutely anything to beat each other every night, every week, every year – would kill good shows to serve some wider, common purpose.

Homicide, first broadcast on Channel 7 in Melbourne in October 1964, was a breakthrough for Crawfords and Australian television. It was the first local show to make it to number one – the most watched TV program in the land. It beat everything from everywhere: American sitcoms and dramas, Hollywood movies, British comedies.

Nine won the ratings overall but two programs on Seven “really got up our noses,” according to Nigel Dick, sales manager and later general manager of GTV 9 in Melbourne in the 1960s: Disneyland on Sunday night and Homicide on Tuesday night.

“We tried everything, but nothing worked,” says Dick. When the Christian evangelist Billy Graham came to Australia in 1968, his tour organisers asked Nine if they would be interested in a live broadcast of Graham’s “crusade” at Randwick Racecourse. Nine told them to schedule it at 7.30 on a Tuesday night and they’d be delighted.

The organisers agreed. Billy Graham on Nine went straight up against Homicide on Seven. “In those days, the ratings came out a few weeks later, and you had to wait,” says Dick. In the meantime, Nine got hundreds of letters thanking them for the wonderful event – social media 1960s style – and sniffed a win at last. When the ratings finally came out, Billy Graham’s crusade had done slightly worse than Nine’s normal Tuesday night program. The weekly murder over on Seven was unbeatable.

Nine had already decided it too needed a crime drama from Crawfords. First, it got Hunter in 1967, then in 1969, Division 4, starring Gerard Kennedy as the detective Frank Banner. Kennedy had won a Logie for best new talent in Hunter and as the star of Division 4 made frequent walks up ballroom stairs to receive best actor awards and two Gold Logies for most popular entertainer.

The third commercial network, Channel 0 in Melbourne and Ten in Sydney, wanted a crime show from Crawfords as well. The company resisted, wanting greater diversity in its production slate, but eventually came up with Matlock Police. Starting on Channel 0 early in 1971, the program was set in the fictional Victorian country town of Matlock, where the community, the crimes and the style of policing were unlike those in Homicide and Division 4.

Crawfords now had three hits on its hands. In 1973, Homicide, Matlock Police and Division 4 were the second-, third- and fourth-top-rating programs in the country’s biggest and most important TV market, Sydney.

Then 1975 came. In January, Nine announced that Division 4 would cease production later in the year. Ten followed, announcing the end of Matlock Police in July. Finally Seven, in August, declared that after more than a decade on air, production of Homicide would cease at the end of the year.

Crawfords had tried to talk one of these networks out of commissioning yet another police drama just a few years before. Now it was left with no cop shows at all. At the once-frantic studios on the old Carlton and United Breweries site in Abbotsford, Australia’s drama pioneer felt itself a victim of bigger forces.

Norman Yemm (left), Gary Day and Bud Tingwell working together in Homicide from 1973.
Mark Wilson/ The Age

Would commercial television networks kill successful shows?

Since the earliest days of television, Hector Crawford had been a loud and persistent advocate for government action to support the production and broadcast of Australian programs. That put him into conflict with his own customers, the commercial TV broadcasters. Then in the early and mid 1970s, a number of well-known Crawfords actors were prominent in “TV: Make It Australian,” a public campaign to increase the levels of Australian programs on television. The election of a Labor government in 1972 created a more receptive political environment, although Labor’s media policy activism, especially its enthusiasm for new services, was loathed by most commercial media operators.

Crawford had laid out his case in a booklet, Commercial Television in Australia, published in 1959, three years after television began. Television could “make a vital contribution to the development of a specifically Australian consciousness and sense of national identity,” he wrote. But Australian screens were flooded with overseas programs, mainly from the United States. Shows made for up to $135,000 an hour were being sold in Australia for a fraction of their production cost. Australian producers, especially of scripted dramas, could not possibly compete. Their audiences were being deprived of the local programming that Crawford argued the people and the politicians had expected from the young medium.

The booklet “caused a bit of a tick-up,” Crawford later told media historian Albert Moran. In 1960, the postmaster-general directed that at least 40 per cent of commercial TV stations’ transmission time be Australian programs (soon increased to 45 per cent), including at least one hour per week between 7 and 9.30 pm (later increased to two hours), although the regulator did little to enforce the new rules.

Three years later, a Senate select committee investigated Australian TV productions. Crawford told it that the lack of good Australian television drama would “inevitably lead to an absence of self-knowledge which is the foundation of a country’s national pride.” Asked if he might have to rely a great deal more on Australian material in the future, Channel Nine’s Frank Packer (Kerry’s father, James’s grandfather) said, “You could be right, and probably the quality of programs will deteriorate, or you might be forced to reduce the number of hours you are on the air.”

The committee’s recommendations included a quota and subsidy scheme for TV drama. They were ignored by the Menzies government. After John Gorton became prime minister in early 1968, however, his Coalition administration established and funded several organisations to assist film and TV production and education. Then, after Whitlam’s election, a complex new points system for Australian content was introduced. It was strongly criticised by the industry, although it simply recognised current production levels, according to commercial TV historian Nick Herd. Two legislative attempts to clarify the broadcasting regulator’s powers were blocked in the Senate: Channel Nine executive Len Mauger said the proposed law would amount to “absolute control” of commercial broadcasters by government.

As Australian television approached the end of its second decade, Crawford’s policy advocacy was having some success, though it was always partial and heavily contested. The more striking success of his company – a family business run with his sister Dorothy Crawford and her son Ian Crawford – was to show that Australians would watch Australian shows.

Bob Campbell, who went on to run the Seven Network and co-found the production company Screentime, was working at Melbourne’s Channel 0 in the early 1970s. He says Crawford was “a skilled political practitioner but, even more so, a skilled deliverer of things that were commercially successful.” At the start, TV stations had been apprehensive about his campaign for locally made shows, especially TV stations run by newspaper groups. “But their apprehension turned as it quickly became clear that what Crawford had lobbied for, and was now delivering, was in their economic interest.”

Commercial stations bought more local drama. In 1965 and 1966, according to Nick Herd, each station devoted an annual average of twenty-nine hours to Australian drama. That grew to around 200 hours from 1966 to 1972 and 250 hours in 1973 and 1974.

Economics could bite as well as feed. Australia’s long postwar boom ended in 1973, when the international oil crisis and other factors drove up inflation and interest rates. Because its main source of revenue, advertising, is highly sensitive to overall economic activity, commercial television felt the 1974 recession quickly. The industry was also in the middle of a significant increase in its costs caused by the introduction of colour TV in 1975. Correctly anticipating that TV audiences with colour sets would lose interest in black-and-white broadcasts, stations started making and buying programs in colour before transmission started. Eventually, colour proved a boon to commercial TV revenues, accentuating its power and value as an advertising medium, but the extra costs of new equipment and more demanding production quality were felt first.

At the same time, Crawfords and its police shows were getting competition from new sources and cheaper types of programming. The sexy soap opera Number 96 started on the 0/Ten network in 1972. It was the top-rating program in both Sydney and Melbourne the following year. Number 96 was produced by a new independent company run by Don Cash and Bill Harmon. In 1974, another independent, the quiz and game show producer Reg Grundy, got a drama commission from the Seven Network, for a serial, The Class of 74. It was the fifth-top-rating program in Sydney in its first year. Crawfords showed they could join as well as beat the competition, by selling a raunchy soap of its own, The Box, to 0/Ten, also in 1974. Scheduled straight after Number 96, it rewarded 0/Ten by rating among the top five programs in Sydney and Melbourne.

Crawfords’ police shows were still strong but no longer dominant. From 1966 to 1970, Homicide episodes averaged a rating of 41 in Melbourne, according to the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal’s 1980 Television in Australia: Its History Through the Ratings. That means 41 per cent of all homes with television – around two in every five – were tuned to the program. Peaks for individual episodes ranged between 47 and 52 each year. By the second half of 1974, the average was down to 25. Division 4 averaged 40 in its first year, 1969; in 1974, it averaged 24. Matlock Police had never reached the heights of the other two shows, but in 1974 it performed similarly in Melbourne: an average rating of 24.

Today, in a much more fragmented media environment, programs that achieved those 1974 figures would be huge successes (television now measures its audiences mainly in numbers of people rather than in percentages of available homes). But at the time they were not huge, and certainly not as stratospheric as they had been a few years before. There was also a failure of sorts – Ryan, commissioned by Seven in 1973, was not renewed for a second season.

Nine’s owner Frank Packer died in 1974. Perhaps he had been half-right. Australians might want to watch Australian shows some of the time, but after the initial “shock of recognition” they still loved their imports. Apart from Number 96, The Box and The Class of 74, the top shows in Sydney and Melbourne in 1974 included The Benny Hill Show and The Dick Emery Show, The Six Million Dollar Man and that old stalwart, Disneyland.

When Gerard Kennedy wanted to leave Division 4, there was a “big tussle” with Channel Nine, according to Nigel Dick, who left Nine in 1972 and joined the board of Crawford Productions in 1974. That was the same year Frank Packer’s son Kerry took charge of the network. “They didn’t want to go on, and Hector, with the help of Len Mauger, finally got Kerry to agree to go on for thirteen episodes without Gerard Kennedy to allow Hector to prove the point that Gerard wasn’t absolutely vital.” Soon after, Gerard Kennedy appeared in another Crawfords show, The Box, on a rival network. “Kerry was furious,” says Dick. “How can you, Hector, allow Gerard Kennedy, who I made in my program, to appear in The Box?” So in January 1975, Packer cancelled Division 4.

About a month later, Labor’s national conference was held at Terrigal on the NSW Central Coast. Actors and others lobbied for tougher rules about Australian content on television. Media coverage of the conference was dominated by speculation about a relationship between deputy prime minister Jim Cairns and a member of his staff, Junie Morosi, and by poolside images of politicians and trade unionists that could have been outtakes from Number 96 and The Box.

The lobbying worked. Labor’s new policy platform required commercial television stations “to increase the percentage of Australian first release material with the ultimate objective of a level of at least 75 per cent.” It also contained other elements certain to inflame commercial media proprietors. Labor would “continue to investigate the social desirability and the technical feasibility of the rapid introduction of domestic satellite and cable broadcasting and television systems”; it would “initiate further study into the feasibility of fostering the establishment of a newspaper, independent of both government and existing private interests, conducted by those who produce it”; and it would “investigate all avenues with a view to eliminating any monopolistic and restrictive practices involved in existing relationships between film distributors and exhibitors.”

Before the year was out, before any of this could move from party aspiration to government action, Whitlam’s government lost office – first dismissed by governor-general Sir John Kerr, then defeated in an election. But before that happened Crawfords had lost its other two police shows. Matlock had only been renewed by 0/Ten for twenty-six episodes in 1975 (these days it is hard to get thirteen), Michael Pate left the show late in 1974 and rumours of its end were strong. According to the website Classic Australian TV, the network announced the cancellation in April, but the program got a brief reprieve when the Melbourne and Adelaide stations wanted to go on. Without the Sydney station’s money, though, it wasn’t possible. In July, the network announced that production would end in September, and it did, although stockpiled episodes continued on air into 1976.

Over at Homicide, Channel Seven cancelled eight scripts released for production in May 1975, according to script editor Paul Davies. In an article, “Killing Homicide,” for Metro magazine, he writes: “This was an unprecedented intrusion into a show’s executive independence… It was unheard of for Channel Seven to actually read a release draft of any Homicide script, let alone cancel eight in a row!” The show had been going for eleven years – “positively geriatric for any television series” – but Davies says it had kept reinventing itself through changes to the core cast and constant technological upgrading.

Channel Seven wanted “good, clean, plain old family-oriented detective work,” writes Davies, “where the principal cast – the ‘gang of four’ – were the major focus and the audience could never be allowed to get ahead of them by discovering what the crims were up to first.” What Homicide was delivering by the mid 1970s were episodes involving a vicious homophobic attack, abortion, mental illness, paedophilia, murders resulting from alcohol-fuelled aggression, and a corrupt government bureaucracy’s redevelopment of a street taken on by a group of residents that included communists. Davies says Hector Crawford’s 18 June 1975 all-staff memo announcing the replacement of the show’s producer effectively meant “running up the surrender flag.” Two months later, Seven dropped the axe.

“Is eleven years long enough for a series to be on air?” asks Davies. “Probably. Were there too many cop shows on Australian television at the time? Undoubtedly. Was there a cultural conspiracy to stifle local content by bringing down its principal flag-bearer? Who knows? Only one thing is certain: in mid 1975 there was a decision made to terminate Australia’s first really successful drama series at a moment when it had become a fascinating experiment in expressive filmmaking.”

If there is a smoking gun from Crawfords’ 1975 crisis somewhere, I haven’t found it. So does that mean there was no conspiracy?

If, by conspiracy, you mean that the bosses of three commercial TV networks got together in a room and agreed to cancel their Crawfords police shows, one by one, aiming to cut the pioneer of Australian TV drama down to size, I don’t think there was a conspiracy. The three shows, I think, were cancelled by their three networks primarily for reasons that were specific to each – what was happening with key cast members, what the shows were costing and would cost in the future, which programs advertisers wanted to be associated with, where fickle audiences were going at a time of great social change, and how program budgets could be best allocated across a limited number of shows to attract them.

But were those individual decisions taken in a charged political and industrial environment, at a time that meant they sent clear, collective signals to Crawfords, its competitors and the government about where real power in Australian television – and in Australia – lay? Absolutely. And were they taken by commercial TV operators who had come to like Australian drama but didn’t want governments forcing them to show it? Of course. By broadcasters who wanted competition among independent producers for good ideas and lower costs, and the tougher the better? Clearly. In an industry where Australian programs always had to prove themselves against high-budget overseas shows available to Australian broadcasters for a fraction of the cost of equivalent local programs? Certainly.

Crawfords’ titanic achievement was to show commercial networks they needed Australian drama and how to make it. Initially, that meant Crawfords itself was the maker. But over time, the networks didn’t need Crawfords quite as much as Crawfords needed them. Success on the scale achieved by Crawfords in the late 1960s and early 70s invites imitation, competition, escalating internal demands and complexity. The company managed some of that: 0/Ten kept buying The Box through the 1975 crisis; Nine commissioned The Sullivans the following year; Seven started Cop Shop in 1977.

Some of Crawfords’ key people went on to make some of the highlights of the next golden age of Australian drama, the mini-series boom of the late 1970s and 1980s. Crawfords was part of that, especially with All the Rivers Run, produced with HBO. The company also made other successful, long-running shows like The Flying Doctors.

But the era in which a new or repeat episode of a Crawfords show was screening in commercial prime time virtually every night of the week – that was gone. It ended in 1975, it ended quickly, and there was a lot else going on. I think there were three shooters and three shots, but it felt like a single weapon, jointly wielded. •

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DESPITE what the treasurer and the foreign affairs minister might have tried to do on budget night, every national broadcaster has to think of itself as an international broadcaster. For the ABC, it just got $20 million a year harder.

A couple of days after the budget, the Communications and Media Law Association and the International Institute of Communications got people together in Sydney to talk about “public broadcasters.” The legal truth is that Australia doesn’t have any.

We used to have two kinds, but in 1992, the Broadcasting Services Act got rid of them both. Licensed “public broadcasters” became “community broadcasters.” That sector’s representative organisation, the PBAA, had to turn itself into the CBAA.

The other kind of public broadcaster, the kind we had gathered to talk about – “public service broadcasters” – became “national broadcasters.” At the time, I think this was mainly seen as a way to avoid confusion. If we were turning licensed “public broadcasters” into “community broadcasters,” it would be best to retire the term “public broadcaster” altogether. But it was also a revival of old terminology: the first Australian Broadcasting Act of 1942 articulated two sectors: the advertiser-supported licensed broadcasters were called the Commercial Service; the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Commission was called the National Service.

Fifty years on, we needed new language, but we actually revived some old language. The language we chose – “national broadcaster” and “national broadcasting” instead of “public broadcaster” and “public broadcasting” – brought with it more than we might have intended.

At the precise moment we chose to call the ABC and SBS “national broadcasters,” we were on the verge of a technological transformation: the Online Age. Until then, to broadcast internationally from Australia, you generally had to make a deliberate choice. Apart from the occasional lucky New Zealander who picked up 3LO or 4QG on a clear night, Australian broadcasters who wanted to reach overseas audiences had to erect shortwave transmitters, or buy satellite time, or make arrangements to relay their services though local terrestrial facilities, or – later – sell VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs.

Once broadcasters got websites, and broadcasting services could be streamed, or viewed on catch-up services or apps accessed via virtual private networks, or VPNs, the act of broadcasting to one nation became broadcasting to all of them. The technology of the age was simultaneously local, city-wide, state-wide, national… as well as regional and international. Every National Broadcaster was an International Broadcaster.

For the ABC and SBS, it was no longer just Radio Australia or the Australia Network that reached audiences outside Australia: it was all of ABC and SBS Online; every radio network or radio station that is streamed; everything available on iView or SBS On Demand or apps to overseas users prepared to take the risk with VPN access.

When Bob Mansfield took a close look at the ABC around this time – the mid 1990s – he thought you could eliminate the international bit, Radio Australia, and no one would notice, because Australian audiences weren’t able to listen to it. Now, the government thinks you can get rid of the Australia Network because the international audience can’t help but notice Australia’s ABC, especially if its News 24 service is made accessible online.

I don’t want to exaggerate the impact of internationalisation. National Broadcasters don’t stop being National Broadcasters just because so much of what they do is accessible to non-national audiences. Some broadcasters get much bigger international audiences than others; and some parts of broadcasters get bigger proportions of their audiences and users internationally than other parts. For example, Radio National cites very high overseas podcast numbers.

But the impact of internationalisation comes not just because each broadcaster reaches out to international audiences and users. It also comes because each broadcaster has to deal with every other broadcaster reaching in to its own domestic audience. So some of the distinctive role that national broadcasters once played in bringing certain kinds of overseas programming and services to the domestic audience is threatened.

Australia’s SBS used to brand its mission “Bringing the World Back Home.” As the world created new distribution channels to Australian homes, the SBS’s mission had to change.

Australia’s ABC used to be part of a global family of public service broadcasters that exchanged programs. The biggest and most significant was the BBC, and generations of Australian audiences got used to seeing the BBC’s dramas and David Attenborough’s nature documentaries on ABC TV, hearing Alastair Cooke’s Letter from America on ABC radio, and buying the DVDs and CDs in ABC shops.

But now the BBC deals with everyone. Top Gear was screened on the SBS, then the Nine Network, which also licensed the format to make an Australian version. Foxtel started buying some programs from the BBC, then some channels and finally entered into the kind of arrangement with the BBC that it used to have with its sibling, the ABC. The relationship will no doubt keep changing: the BBC will be assessing now whether the money it is receiving from partnering with a subscription TV service in Australia rather than free-to-air services is worth the loss of reach.

This shuffling recalls the earliest days of radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 30s, when the BBC and the broadcasting companies in Australia were very young. Over a period of just six or seven years, the BBC used at least four different models for dealing with Australian broadcasters.

Initially, following the arrangement it had arrived at for broadcasters in the United States, the BBC granted exclusive rights to retransmit particular programs in each overseas territory to the first broadcaster to apply within a month of the proposed broadcast. Then, not wanting to offend its emerging “opposite number” in Australia – the Australian Broadcasting Company – it changed its position to offer non-exclusive access to competing Australian broadcasters. Then, after the Australian Broadcasting Company became the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1932, the BBC awarded the ABC first-run rights for six months for a series of “Empire Recordings,” but sold second-run rights to a commercial network, AWA, for twelve months. A couple of years later, the BBC advised it would grant exclusive Australian rights to the ABC in future. The global “public broadcasting” family was in place.

These were baby “broadcasters,” manoeuvring around each other, crafting and recrafting the relationships that would mark the thing we call broadcasting.

Broadcasting came to be seen as a quintessential “national” task – indeed as a central part of the very process of defining states. State-owned broadcasters became synonymous with the nation states that founded them: the ABC, the BBC, the CBC, the NZBC, the SABC. But there, at its birth, the founders were thinking of broadcasting not just as a national medium, but also as an international one.

They still do, and in ways that are constantly evolving. For example, Australia exports the formats to shows like Rake and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, as well as the finished programs.

So it is curious that one of the products of that era of rising nationalism in the 1920s and 30s was a lively capacity to conceptualise broadcasting as a global activity; while today, in an era when globalisation is so present as to be a cliché, the government is asking our oldest “national broadcaster” to get back to its nation. The future for public broadcasters is going to need bigger thinking than that. •

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Thanking her team, she started with “Max. Agent. Make me rich. Thanks a lot.” Then the physio, Alex, the coach, Carlos, the husband, Jiang Shan. “Thanks for him giving up everything, just travelling with me to be my hitting partner, fix the drink, and fix the racquets, so he do a lot of jobs. So thanks a lot, you’re a nice guy. Also you are so lucky, found me.” And last, the Australian Open: “OK, now, I’d like to say thanks for all the sponsors to make fantastic tournament. I have to say again this is my favourite Grand Slam. I was so happy I can win title here.”

One of “game changer” Paul McNamee’s proudest achievements is helping to ensure the place where Li won the Australian Open carries the name of Australia’s greatest tennis player, rather than a commercial moniker like the venues nearby — Hisense, AAMI, Westpac. When Nine Inch Nails, the Rolling Stones and the Arctic Monkeys come to Melbourne in the next few months, they’ll play Rod Laver Arena, finding tennis is “front and centre, enshrined in the name of the stadium used for the sport only two weeks of the year.” Laver calls the tribute “the crowning jewel of my career.”

These three autobiographies cover three tennis generations. Li was born in Wuhan, China in 1982, McNamee in Melbourne in the mid 1950s and Laver in country Queensland in the late 1930s. Among Li’s generation, the top tennis players come from many parts of the world, although they are still rare in Asia. The top ten ranked women in the first week of February were from different countries, but fifteen of the top twenty were European and Li was the only Asian. (Sixteen of the top twenty men were from Europe and Japan’s Kei Nishikori was the only Asian.)

Li became the first Chinese player to win a Grand Slam singles title when she took the French Open in 2011, and she set a lot of other firsts before she got there, including first Chinese player to win a singles title on the Women’s Tennis Association tour and first Chinese player to make a Grand Slam quarter-final. China was strong in badminton and table tennis — but not in tennis, a much more globally significant professional sport, the “biggest of the small balls.”

For Li, unlike Laver and McNamee, the Australian Open has always meant Rod Laver Arena. Her first Grand Slam tournament was the 2005 Open, where she made it to the third round. Drawn to play reigning Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova, the match was scheduled for Rod Laver Arena. It is, narrowly, the smallest centre court at the four Grand Slam tournaments; Li found it “like the Titanic of tennis courts.” She was slaughtered 6–0, 6–2. A year later she came back and drew Serena Williams in the first round, losing again but getting a set off the then six-time, now seventeen-time, Grand Slam tournament winner. Li made the final for the first time in 2011. The following year, husband Jiang Shan was anointed “Best Husband/Boyfriend of the Year” by tournament fans.

When McNamee began life, a large share of the world’s top tennis players came from Australia. Once he was ready to try making a living from the sport, the golden age was over. Australian men won thirteen of the first sixteen Wimbledons after he was born; it was sixteen more years before another of them, McNamee’s great mate Pat Cash, did it again. By then, McNamee’s playing career was almost over and many more countries were producing top tennis players. For a time, he was the Number One doubles player in the world, winning the men’s doubles at Wimbledon and the Australian Open twice each, mainly with Peter McNamara, as the “Super Macs.” Professional tennis was now earning a lot more people a good living than it did in Rod Laver’s day; McNamee earned more than US$1.2 million in prize money.

For most of McNamee’s career, the Australian Open was held on the grass courts at Kooyong in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. He was a member of the Australian teams that won Davis Cups there in 1983 and 1986. His last professional match was in the first Australian Open held on the new hard courts at Melbourne Park in 1988. After Pat Cash knocked him out in the third round, McNamee went straight into a second career as an event manager, setting up the Hopman Cup in Perth with Charlie Fancutt, then becoming tournament director of the Australian Open from 1994 and CEO from 1999 to 2006. That career occupies the second half of his book.

Rod Laver was one of the stars of Australia’s tennis golden era. He won big tournaments from the late 1950s to the early 1970s and two Grand Slams — all four major tournaments — in 1962 and 1969. That set him apart from all other players before and since. “From my earliest tennis memories,” writes Roger Federer in the foreword to this memoir, “Rod Laver stood above all others as the greatest champion our sport has known.” For most of Laver’s career, the Australian Championships moved around the country, before shifting permanently to Kooyong in 1972. He won national singles titles at Milton in Brisbane (twice) and White City in Sydney, but never in Melbourne.

Money presented a huge dilemma for players of that era. Turning professional meant missing the major, amateur-only tournaments. The Rockhampton Rocket — Laver — joined the pro circuit because that was where the best players were, but also because, after tennis, he “didn’t want to be forced to put my name on someone else’s sports store in Rocky, or trade in my reputation by selling life insurance, or run a pub.”

All three of these authors changed tennis. Li Na’s professional status changed after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, when the Chinese Tennis Association allowed her and three other players to “go solo.” Instead of training, playing, touring and competing under the auspices of the national team, they were allowed to manage their own coaches, bonuses, participation schedules and income, although “a required revenue of 8 per cent and a match bonus of 12 per cent” still had to be paid to the state. Li agrees that playing with the national team and sharing resources “could protect a young player’s interests and open up more opportunities for experience,” but for “helping more mature players to compete at a higher level, this arrangement was useless.”

Laver learned to hit the heavy top spin on both the forehand and backhand sides that is now mandatory for good players, and was the first left-hander to really master the top-spin backhand. “Rodney, get under the ball and hit over it! Under and over!” his boyhood coach Charlie Hollis would shout. Decades later, McNamee suggested a late change to the sculpture of Laver at Melbourne Park: he’s now playing that signature top-spin backhand rather than a slice.

McNamee changed his own game first, then helped transform Australia’s big tennis tournaments. Mid-career, he ditched his single-handed backhand, adopting the double-hander that most top players now use. It was risky but eventually successful. His world singles ranking got as high as twenty-four, and he beat John McEnroe in four sets on Court Centrale at the French Open in 1980. McNamee’s liking for slow clay courts made him unusual in Australia. He has never forgotten the destructive pressure he felt to “serve and volley ‘like a true Aussie’” in the 1986 Davis Cup final.

Yet, as an event manager, he made it his mission to “Australianise” the Australian Open, equalising its status with the other three Grand Slam tournaments but giving it a distinctive character. “Every decision we made needed to reflect the essence of Australia — the sights, sounds and smells of our nation.” That meant changing the daily schedule so the crowd at every session got to see both men’s and women’s matches. Night-time matches were broadcast live and the women’s and men’s finals were shifted from afternoons to nights. The cheap “ground pass” was billed as the “best value sports ticket in the world.” Australian tennis legends were remembered in bronze busts around the Garden Square.

And while trying to embody the essence of Australia, the Open staged its own pivot to Asia. McNamee’s team settled on the tag The Grand Slam of Asia/Pacific after being warned off Asia’s Grand Slam by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. “Technically we are not part of Asia, so this may cause some offence.” •

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IT REALLY is going to happen. We are going to turn off the television. On 3 December, Sydney’s analogue TV transmitters will be switched off. A week later, the ones serving Melbourne and remote central and eastern Australia will be closed and analogue TV in Australia will be gone. For more than half the population, including people in Brisbane and Perth, it already is.

Over-the-air television, of course, won’t be done with, because analogue switch-off is also digital switchover. It will have taken around thirteen years from the start of digital transmission in January 2001 to the final shutdown of analogue, and fifteen years from the first round of legislation that set the rules for the transition.

Today, Australia is in the midst of another great transition in communications technology, the shift to a National Broadband Network. This time, though, the precise destination is not as clear. Until the federal election in September, the NBN was going to be an all-fibre network to 93 per cent of residential and business premises by 2021, allowing the progressive shutdown of Telstra’s copper access network. Now, under the Coalition, it is a mix of technologies offering download speeds of 25–100 mbps to all premises by the end of 2016 and, three years later, at least 50 mbps for 90 per cent of fixed-line users. For most premises, copper wires will still be the final link to the network.

Like the digital TV switchover, the NBN is a long–term plan to transform the delivery of essential communications services. So what lessons might be learned from the transformation of television?

First, governments can orchestrate big, complex, long-term plans that deliver on their main goals. The digital TV switchover was undertaken for two reasons – to transform television and to reap a “digital dividend” of spectrum vacated for alternate uses. Both have occurred. The five free-to-air TV channels available to most Australians in 1998 have expanded to around twenty. All of the three commercial and two publicly funded national broadcasters now provide multichannel services, and they have been joined by new services like the National Indigenous TV service and, in many places, community TV. The “digital dividend,” 126 MHz of UHF spectrum previously used by television services, will be available from the beginning of 2015 for services including wireless broadband. Nearly three-quarters was auctioned earlier this year, of which 60 MHz was acquired by Telstra and Optus Mobile. Spectrum use is being reorganised so that the capacity for digital radio (in the VHF band) will more than double and, for the first time, SBS will have VHF spectrum. This means viewers in all areas will only need a single antenna to watch all digital TV multichannels, including SBS.

It is easy to underestimate how difficult this was. Recall the original policy proposition in the mid 1990s, when mobile telephony was young, subscription TV had just commenced and the internet was largely unheard of. Analogue free-to-air TV ruled. It was available in virtually every household and watched for around three hours a day. Yet here was a plan to turn it off within about a decade. Knowing they would be blamed if it failed, politicians took some convincing. Around the world, most governments gave a lot of help to incumbent broadcasters, compromising the first goal – transforming television – so as to assure the second – freeing up spectrum – while taking care of a third – the politics of media power.

The NBN has already learnt that lesson. The fibre-to-the-premises version launched by Labor in 2009 was a bold plan for government to build and operate most of the network itself. In the end, a lot of money was committed to get the incumbent Telstra on board, providing access to its ducts and poles, migrating its fixed-line traffic, and eventually shutting down its copper network. Now, the Coalition’s proposed use of fibre-to-the-node draws more of Telstra’s existing infrastructure into the future network. The danger is that the new urgency to get the NBN happening faster will compromise other goals, like the separation of Telstra’s wholesale and retail arms, which was such an important justification for the scale of the NBN initiative.

Second, the fundamental features of the digital TV plan always had bipartisan political support at home and widespread endorsement abroad. There were disagreements about the detail, but the Labor opposition agreed with the Coalition government on the big things: that incumbent TV broadcasters would each get an extra channel to simulcast their analogue service while households bought up digital receivers, and that there would be no new commercial TV services during the transition period. Internationally, everyone was doing digital TV switchover. Australia would have had a hard time explaining why it wasn’t.

The NBN has been quite different. It provided a critical policy difference between the major parties at the last two elections, and the scale of its fibre-to-the-premises ambition made it an international policy outlier. Over time, both of these positions have eased. Almost every country has a national broadband plan now, reversing or at least moderating the privatising trend of the last quarter century. The Coalition now says it shares Labor’s goal of faster and cheaper broadband for all Australians, and its new broadband policy certainly involves a much higher level of public investment than the one it took to the 2010 election. On the other hand, fibre to 93 per cent of all premises is still a global policy outlier. Labor’s commitment to it, or at least to the timeframe over which it is achieved, may be tested if the Coalition succeeds in getting considerably faster fixed-line broadband to a lot of the places most in need of it by the next election. For the time being, it is the Coalition sitting all the tests.

Third, over the life of a long-term plan, things change and policy needs to adapt. Elements of the digital TV policy that were daft from the start, like the prohibition on broadcasters providing multichannel TV services, had to be changed. Sensible extra measures were developed to help achieve the goals, like the VAST satellite service that delivers the full suite of digital TV channels to people in remote areas and places with poor over-the-air reception, meaning fewer digital transmitters had to be installed on the ground. The timing can be altered, and even the ultimate goal can be adapted: Australia eventually chose a bigger digital dividend than most other countries, requiring further changes (“restacking”) to the frequencies used by TV broadcasters in many areas.

The four-and-a-half-year-old NBN is doing a good deal of adapting. Because the all-fibre network was taking longer than planned, it has become less tenable to expect already poorly served premises to keep waiting for any kind of improvement. As the cost of the all-fibre network and the revenue needed to deliver an acceptable return on capital have been more carefully analysed, closer attention has been paid to the affordability of the new network, especially for those likely to be most price-sensitive. As fixed-line technology has continued to develop, the consequences of leaving network deployment in NBN Co’s single set of hands have become more troubling.

Fourth, despite the apparent smoothness of the digital TV transition, people have been and continue to be affected differently. In the areas that are switching over to digital TV in the second half of 2013, just 5 per cent of households hadn’t already converted their main TV set to digital at the end of June, but the proportion varied considerably for different groups: it was 14 per cent in remote central and eastern Australia, 13 per cent for aged-pensioner households and 12 per cent for households whose main source of income is a government pension or benefit. The government’s tracking research shows plenty of people are still not thrilled about having to buy new TVs or the reception problems some encounter when they do. In the future, digital natives might be more relaxed about constant upgrades and switchovers than digital TV laggards, but digital consumers might be very noisy if things don’t go to plan.

Fifth, over the fifteen years since the first digital TV legislation, we have seen some trends in the media and communications business that were entirely predictable, others that were broadly predictable but played out in less predictable ways, and other things that were much more surprising. That seems a useful template for anticipating the future now.

The predictables? Much, much more content was made available and audiences took to it. Subscription TV grew and the major provider, Foxtel, became the country’s biggest TV operation. Free-to-air TV’s place in the media business became less central, though still important. Online advertising grew but its capacity to cross-subsidise the production of some existing forms of media content declined. Digital TVs got cheaper, and as they did, people bought more of them. Without its biggest personality, Kerry Packer, the free-to-air TV industry and its relationship with government changed, though not completely.

The broadly predictable unpredictables? A central part of the sales pitch for digital transmission was that TV would become more interactive. It happened, but not in the “red-button-interactivity” ways that dominated industry and policy discussion in the early days. Instead, audiences have used separate, mainly handheld “second screen” devices to engage with TV programming via SMS, Twitter and other social media, both spontaneously and in response to broadcasters’ integration of these practices into programming. This has provided a far richer “return path” than was widely contemplated but is quite unlike the “internet-on-TV” vision that some promoted. These devices have also helped fulfil the expectation that TV viewing would become more mobile, although that has happened via mobile broadband and WiFi, not through dedicated broadcasts using the mobile version of the digital transmission standard deployed by TV broadcasters.

The surprises? Everyone will have their nominations. Tablets, a wholly new category of mobile device with a screen somewhere between phone-size and PC-size? Widespread viewing of long-form TV programming on handheld devices? The local television industry’s reluctance to work more co-operatively to promote the free-to-air digital platform, initially through an integrated electronic program guide and more recently through a joint catch-up TV service? The tiny number of bidders for the digital dividend spectrum, long touted as the name-your-price waterfront property of the information age?

Digital TV’s position as the dominant media policy issue of the day in the late 1990s didn’t last long. It was passing even as it was being decided. Broadband was beginning to emerge as the next great challenge, then fast broadband. The continuing growth of mobile broadband suggests that universal access to it may become a hot policy concern, just as access to basic mobile telephony was during the privatisation of Telstra. As some kind of fixed-line NBN is built, the case may grow for television to switch over again, this time off radiofrequency spectrum and onto NBN’s wires. Someday, someone will propose turning off television altogether. Each choice will set the parameters for the next ones, constraining some possibilities while enabling others.

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THE first motor cars I knew that conquered Australia’s distances were not really Australian. My mother had a brother in North Queensland and a cousin in Sydney. At Easter and Christmas times, they would converge on Brisbane by motoring down the Bruce and up the New England highways in Volkswagen Beetles.

Designed to cruise a network of high-speed autobahns across Germany, the early VWs had become masters of Australian roads as well. They finished first and second in the 1955 REDeX Round-Australia Trial and took the first six places in the Mobilgas event two years later.

When my uncle was single, he’d do the 1500 kilometre trip from Ingham straight through, stopping only for petrol. After he married and had very young children, they’d pack everything in like a ship’s galley and turn the Beetle’s back seat into a playpen. Without compulsory seat belts or baby capsules, the kids rolled about, playing and crying and dozing. I was jealous; it looked a much more exciting carriage for Australian holidays than my family’s Holden station wagon.

The cousin in Sydney also had live luggage, a golden retriever that no doubt required a few more stops on the drive, but was so sweet-natured it would probably have held on till Queensland if you had asked.

VW Beetles, according to Bernhard Rieger, performed this kind of local heroics all over the world. The “people’s car” became “an icon with multiple nationalities.” In Germany, it was the most popular motor vehicle in the 1950s and 60s, solid, reliable and comparatively cheap to buy and maintain, its export success tracking a country emerging from its horrendous recent history and producing something of quality that the rest of the world wanted. In the United States, the major overseas market, the Beetle became the motor car of the counterculture — compact, cute, unconventional and completely inconceivable in Detroit, where size, power and baroque styling ruled.

In Mexico, where the Beetle was manufactured from the 1960s, the vocho or vochito started out as the vehicle that the slowly expanding middle class could afford, unlike the much larger cars General Motors and Ford were trying to sell to the wealthy. After tax breaks were announced for cheap cars in the late 1980s, VW cut the price by 20 per cent to get under

the fourteen-million-peso threshold (around US$5000). “Together,” it declared, “we are building… a fairer Mexico and a more prosperous future for our children.” Made in Puebla, the hardy, economical, easy-to-repair vocho became a “quotidian item,” a “carro del pueblo whose technical characteristics appeared to lend the automobile a cultural affinity with everyday life.”

Advertising helped shape the Beetle’s appeal. In an episode of Mad Men, one advertising executive is scathing about VW’s 1960s “Think Small” campaign, where a miniscule Beetle sits in an acre of blank space. “No chrome,” he says. “No horsepower. Foreign.” But another executive reads it differently: “Honesty. I think it’s a great angle.” Don Draper sees it too: “Love it or hate it. We’ve been talking about it for the last fifteen minutes.”

The Beetle became “one of the world’s most recognised shapes,” up there with the Coke bottle, but with locally crafted appeal. Germans started calling it the Käfer, importing the US nickname. Many women in the United States were encouraged to take up driving because there was finally a car that seemed to be designed for them. Mexicans responded to an image of the vocho, shaped as a loaf of bread and as much a part of their everyday lives.

All these nationalities elided the VW’s founding under the Third Reich. The people’s car, like the people’s refrigerator, the people’s television set, the people’s apartment, the people’s tractor and other commodities, was intended to “usher members of the Volksgemeinschaft into a novel era of affluence,” to “turn the average German from a spectator into a practitioner of modernity.” Hitler commended the people’s radio receiver, Volksempfänger, as a model for the Volkswagen. This was a basic radio set, retailing for a quarter less than conventional sets, developed in 1933 by a radio industry consortium formed under Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.

Hitler launched a prototype of the people’s car in 1938. A big factory was built and used to manufacture motor vehicles during the war, though not the Volkswagen itself. Located in what became the British-controlled zone of postwar West Germany, in a town renamed Wolfsburg, the factory and the design were promising enough to retain, but not so promising as to be worth pilfering by the victors, as happened to some other German engineering developments.

The distinctive shape, the rear-mounted air-cooled engine and the torsion-bar suspension all survived. The people’s car became the planet’s, “a prime example of West Germany’s successful postwar reconstruction under American auspices.” The world knew all too well what Germans had done; the Volkswagen showed what they could do now.

AUSTRALIANS do many things. This year, a bunch of them turned a Great American Novel into a Hollywood movie that grossed nearly $150 million at the US box office. Thirty years ago, a few of them sailed a yacht called Australia II to win the America’s Cup. Fifty years ago, one of them won the ladies singles at Wimbledon for the first time; another shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine; and many started using the first telephone cable under the Pacific Ocean to speak with the world.

In Sydney, a hundred years ago, a company was formed to take Australia into the wireless age. It would become a big manufacturer of consumer and industrial electronic equipment, but began by merging the small Australasian businesses of two European wireless companies, the German Telefunken and the British company formed by the Italian inventor, Marconi. At first, the main business was maritime, providing communication between ships and shore stations, but entrepreneurs soon imagined stretching the new technology further, to link Australia directly with the far-off hearts of the old European empires.

White Australians cared deeply about conquering this distance. While Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia), AWA, was trying to do it with wireless communication, others were thinking about doing it with air transport. “Australia’s consciousness of isolation from what it has always held to be important, its European origins, has resulted in Australia playing an extraordinary and disproportionate part in the conquest of distance by air,” wrote historian W.F. Mandle. Australian pilots, he says, “were the first to fly over every ocean in the world, save the Atlantic.”

The Germans made it to Australia by wireless quicker than the British did. They built high-power stations at Berlin and Tsingtao, on the Chinese mainland, to communicate with their Pacific colonies, New Guinea and Samoa. The British were slower, surrendering the early lead Marconi’s company had established in long-range wireless. Eventually they conquered the distance to Sydney late in the first world war. A decade later, AWA opened commercial services that Australians used to exchange direct wireless telegrams with people in Britain and North America.

In a 1929 talk, “Bridging the Gulfs of Distance,” for one of Sydney’s first radio stations, AWA’s managing director said, “If we develop wireless possibilities to their fullest extent, Australia’s isolation will be destroyed... No other country has so much to gain from the fullest development of wireless communication, and I consider that wireless is the greatest gift of science to Australia.”

As the second world war broke out, the wireless company opened new headquarters in York Street, Sydney. It was the tallest building in the country for nearly two decades. The flashing red light at the top was the last thing many Australian soldiers saw as they sailed away to the world. After the war, the company expanded its manufacturing of industrial and consumer electrical goods and was a major investor in Sydney’s Channel 7 and later Channel 10 TV stations. Only in the 1970s and 80s did various kinds of crisis force the break-up of Australia’s great wireless conglomerate and the disposal of its once-imposing wireless tower.

“WHATEVER you do in life,” implores Ivan Deveson, “don’t do it all your life.” He didn’t, though he spent a lot of time in motor cars. Growing up in Melbourne’s West Coburg, he joined General Motors Holden as a manufacturing cadet in the mid 1950s and stayed with GM for more than thirty years, much of it spent working overseas.

While on a GM Scholarship, Deveson was the 1958 Young Man of the Year in Flint, Michigan and met his future wife, a Mexican-American, who worked at the GM Institute. He was part of a team of Australian expats who set up an engine plant in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s; he managed the Copenhagen plant that was GM’s first outside the United States in 1923, and closed it after the oil crisis killed GM’s plans to start manufacturing for export; he had a senior job at GM in Detroit in the late 1970s, before returning to GMH at Fisherman’s Bend.

Taking early retirement in 1987, Deveson became managing director and CEO of Nissan Australia, which produced Pulsars, Pintaras and Skylines at the Clayton factory it bought from VW Australia in 1976 when local assembly of Beetles ceased — VW had made 260,000 cars and 75,000 light commercial vehicles there from the 1950s. Thrust into the middle of the Button Car Plan, which cut tariff protection but encouraged Australian car manufacturers to produce and sell at least 40,000 of every model in their line-up, Deveson found himself one of its first casualties. He resigned in 1992 when Nissan’s Tokyo head office decided to cease manufacturing in Australia.

Over the next twenty years, Deveson got on with those other things he hadn’t been doing all his life. He served as a director of companies including the Commonwealth Bank and Mount Isa Mines, and as chairman of the Seven Network when it was floated out of receivership in the early 1990s. He became foundation chancellor of RMIT University and lord mayor of Melbourne for three years from 1996. Watching the collapse of General Motors in the 2000s, he worried that he and his colleagues should have done some things differently during the company’s golden age.

THE young AWA took Ivan Deveson’s career advice for a short time. After starting out in marine wireless communications, its founding chairman looked around for other business opportunities and settled on motor cars. He persuaded the board to acquire the local dealership for Chevrolet while a critical director was overseas. The Marconi wireless men, still the biggest shareholders, were unimpressed and eventually forced the chairman’s resignation. His shares were sold and ended up mainly in the hands of shipping companies, AWA’s major clients. The wireless company would stay a wireless company.

Wireless led it to motor cars anyway. In the 1920s and 30s, AWA started selling two-way radios to police, ambulance, fire and other emergency vehicles, to taxi-cabs and to delivery trucks. As the one-way communication business of radio broadcasting grew and private motor car ownership expanded, AWA made and installed car radios: soon enough, a car wasn’t really a car without one.

All these new applications of wireless technology stimulated demand for wireless devices and equipment. Just a few months after Wall Street’s Black Tuesday, AWA announced the acquisition of a site on Parramatta Road at Ashfield, about eight kilometres from central Sydney. Then being used to assemble Dodge motor cars, the site had previously been the location of the failed attempt to produce the “Australian Six,” a motor car “Made in Australia, by Australians, for Australia.” (There is one in Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.)

The Ashfield Radio-Electric Works, with its many new workers, was opened by a grateful prime minister James Scullin in 1930. It became the home for AWA’s much-expanded electrical manufacturing and fared a good deal better than the industry it replaced. Motor vehicle registrations did not reach their 1926–27 peak again until after the war, but the number of new radio listener licences grew even more strongly in the 1930s than it had after the birth of broadcasting in the early 1920s. AWA landscaped the Ashfield grounds, christened the site “An Australian Factory in an Australian Garden,” and installed a bust of Marconi out the front.

THE VW Beetle ceased production in West Germany in 1978 but was made until 2003 in Mexico. A “Beetle” can still be seen in showrooms around the world but it is a New Beetle, a front-wheel-drive sedan built on the VW Golf platform since the late 1990s. Its shape echoes the original people’s car, but the retro concept was dreamt up in California and the car has always been manufactured in Mexico.

The AWA that is celebrating its centenary this year is an information technology services company, turning over around $40 million in annual revenue and employing about 300 full-time staff and 700 agents in country Australia. It is a very different organisation from the large, vertically integrated industrial and consumer electronics business that existed until the 1980s, but it still uses the red-and-white circle logo that used to glow in neon on the AWA Tower. Market research found Australians still felt the name and brand implied values the company wanted to preserve: “established, Australian, solid.”

The crises that rocked AWA in the 1970s and 80s are still being debated. Some tell a story of suicide, of a company that lost sight of its founding mission to bring wireless and electronics to Australia. Others see business as usual, an enterprise that changed direction because it found a more profitable business to be in (gaming, which ended up with Jupiters and eventually Tabcorp), and buyers that valued the older business units more highly than did the existing shareholders. Others recall a foreign exchange trading scandal reported to have cost the company $50 million: a former employee finally pleaded guilty last year to four charges of falsely obtaining a (much smaller) financial advantage.

Others, still, see the hand of policy. They blame governments that eliminated the long-standing mechanisms of public support they think Australia needs if it is to have a strong domestic manufacturing sector. The chief target is the Whitlam government, which started the long program of tariff reduction by announcing a 25 per cent cut in all tariffs in 1973, soon after AWA had entered into a joint venture with European consumer electronics giant Thorn, to manufacture colour TV sets. Of course, for the opponents of protection, Whitlam’s dramatic decision was a breakthrough to be celebrated, the beginning of the end of the wrong turn taken early in the twentieth century when Melbourne’s protectionists crafted more of the industrial policy of the Australian federation than did Sydney’s free-traders.

IAN McLEAN is not so sure about the completeness of the “wrong turn.” His wonderful economic history Why Australia Prospered argues that, in the light of recent research evidence, “a more nuanced assessment of the impact of the tariff may be in order.”

Why Australia Prospered is both expansively ambitious and narrowly precise. McLean wants answers to the big puzzle of Australia’s persistent prosperity over more than two centuries. Why did Australia get rich and stay rich?

He is more interested in very long-term factors than those that determine economic fortunes from week to week or year to year, and much less in the fate of particular enterprises or the reputations of their CEOs. As an economist he needs a metric, so he interprets his task as “accounting for the variation across time in Australia’s average level of income, and its changing relationship to the levels of income in other countries.”

Industry protection is just one of many issues that McLean explores — though, given its significance in Australian economic policy, it is a crucial one. He does not dispute the now “orthodox view” that Australia’s high tariff and non-tariff barriers after the second world war reduced economic growth, so agrees that the lowering of protection following the 1970s improved productivity and living standards. But while only offering “an interim assessment” of the implications of the recent research, McLean thinks it is not clear that freer trade before 1914 and then between the wars would have resulted in greater prosperity. That’s potentially an important qualification for the manufacturing activities established and publicly supported at that time.

He judges that “there was limited scope for Australians to protect their prosperity from the severity or duration of negative impact of… international shocks” between 1914 and 1939. With the country carrying a heavy debt after the first war with Germany, confronting increasing international political tension and a broken global trading system, and burdened by a narrow industrial base, McLean finds it “difficult to see how a significantly higher level of prosperity could have been attained in Australia in the 1920s under an alternative growth strategy.”

McLean is a meticulous analyst and a calm judge, comfortable with unorthodoxy and big turning points if that is where the evidence leads. He is sceptical about neat, single-issue explanations of Australia’s long record of economic prosperity. “The economist’s preference for parsimony when building theories of complex phenomena” has to be relaxed for any “satisfactory account.” He assigns a “prominent role” to abundant natural resources, but is curious about how Australia avoided the “resource” curse that inflicted other countries: corrupt allocation of those resources, adverse impacts on other sectors, lack of investment in education.

He notes moments of “luck” — finding gold in the 1850s near the already-developed port and town of Melbourne rather than, say, in the remote Pilbara — but thinks the incidents where chance contributed to the prosperity of a “lucky country” need deep analysis before concluding that luck is all it was. He thinks distance mattered but not that it was a tyrant: “the exceptionally long-distance economic relationship with Britain was integral to sustaining Australia’s high level of prosperity for almost one and a half centuries.”

Being a subject of British imperialism was not necessarily a drag: for the measured economic prosperity of the early settlers, it was a boon. They took land from the original owners, labour from the convicts and subsidies from the British taxpayer. Their descendants, of course, paid the price fighting the Empire’s twentieth-century wars, and GDP per capita is a poor measure of the human trauma wreaked on the people who gave over the land and labour.

Reflecting on why Australia was, and remains, so rich, McLean thinks two themes are central. “First, the interactions between the principal determinants of growth have been more important to the outcomes than the role of any one factor — such as investment, institutions or resources. And second, it is precisely due to the shifting basis of its prosperity that Australia has managed to sustain its status as a rich economy over so long a period and despite numerous negative shocks.”

Yes, Australia’s prosperity has often come from primary industries, but they have shifted between farming and mining, and “within each of these among a range of foodstuffs, fibres, minerals and energy sources. And for part of the twentieth century, when commodity-based prosperity proved elusive, manufacturing played a supporting role.”

What can Australians do? They do many things. They adapt.

OUR relatives didn’t drive Beetles all their lives. Three growing kids pushed my uncle’s family beyond the capacity of even an ingeniously packed one. My mother’s cousin bought one of the first Golfs when VW introduced them to Australia in 1976.

Our last family car was the first new one. It was not a Holden, but it was made in Australia: a Ford Fairmont, the fancy version of the Falcon. We drove it up the Queensland coast in the January of the 1974 floods and it rained and rained. A few nights were spent in a beach house at Yeppoon, staring through the deluge at a grey Coral Sea, before it all got too much. A few more were spent getting on each other’s nerves in a motel in Rockhampton, waiting for the rain to stop, then another, stuck with dozens of cars on the north bank of the Calliope, waiting for the river to go down.

When it did, my father, a cautious driver, inched through the flowing water, tapped the brakes a few times on the other side to dry them out, then flattened it. We couldn’t get back down the Bruce Highway fast enough. I don’t remember talking much; maybe we listened to the radio a bit. The Ford Fairmont was magnificent. This was what Australians did. •

The post The adaptable country appeared first on Inside Story.

HOYTS’s seven-screen cinema complex in Sydney’s George Street had been operating for just over a decade when the biggest Australian movie ever, Crocodile Dundee, opened in April 1986. It ran there for seventy-four weeks and grossed nearly $50 million in cinemas across the country – more than $100 million in today’s dollars.

Huge as it was, Crocodile Dundee was gone in a flash by the standards of earlier cinema blockbusters. South Pacific played for 179 weeks at the Hoyts Mayfair in Sydney after opening on Boxing Day in 1958. The Sound of Music, which opened in 1965, played 140 weeks at the Liberty.

This was a new era and the cinema industry had new plans, especially to deal with the rise of home video. In 1986 Hoyts opened the eight-screen complex in Melbourne’s Chadstone shopping centre that marked the beginning of the suburban multiplex building boom in Australia. Two years after Dundee, a sequel was released. Fans who might have seen The Sound of Music twice now got a second hit of Mick Dundee by going to see the next instalment of his adventures.

Nearly three decades later, the business and culture of cinema in Australia have been transformed again, this time by digital technology. All of Australia’s major exhibitors’ screens and more than three-quarters of independent exhibitors’ screens now use digital projection. Within months, few new movies are likely to be distributed in Australia on film.

Film-makers have been using digital technology for a long time. Theatrical distributors supported it because it reduced the cost of transporting movies to cinemas. Some exhibitors welcomed the ability it gave them to improve image and sound quality in their cinemas and to screen content other than movies.

But the digital era has also brought audiences more ways to see movies, along with many new types of content and novel ways of spending their time. Broadband has become almost ubiquitous, fast broadband is common and both major political parties are now committed to making it even faster. Cinema’s place in the media and entertainment economy is again being challenged.

MULTI-SCREEN complexes existed well before Hoyts’s Chadstone multiplex was built, but they were smaller and closer to the city. A series of Village Twin cinemas opened in the early 1970s in places like New Farm in Brisbane and Double Bay in Sydney. They doubled the number of screens without doubling the number of staff. Wallis Theatres opened the four-screen Hindley complex in Adelaide in 1975, not long before the Sydney Hoyts Centre opened.

What Hoyts Chadstone launched was the idea of the suburban multiplex. Over the next decade-and-a-half, the number of cinema screens in Australia almost trebled. Most of them were built in new places. Out of every one hundred screens in 1985, around eighteen were in major city centres, twenty-four in major city suburbs and fifty-eight in the country. In 2012, an estimated fifty-six per hundred were in the big city suburbs, forty in the country and just four in capital city centres.

For many people, this changed the cinema experience. In big cities, “going to the movies” became a visit to a nearby shopping centre rather than a trip to town. In country towns, it became a trip to a bigger town.

The major exhibitors Hoyts, Village, Greater Union and, in Queensland, Birch Carroll and Coyle, dominated this first, “suburbanisation” phase of the Multiplex Era. In the second phase in the 2000s, the expansion slowed but a wider range of cinema types and experiences were offered to audiences. A new major exhibitor – Reading International – arrived in the late 1990s. National art chains Dendy (now owned by Icon) and Palace were formed, and mainstream independents such as Grand in Western Australia, Wallis in South Australia, Cineplex in southeast Queensland and Majestic in central New South Wales built new complexes, renovated and expanded old ones, and acquired some from the majors.

Greater Union (now Event Cinemas), Village and Hoyts shifted the main focus of their investment to premium screens and increased operating efficiencies. Some screens got smaller and more intimate, branded with names like Gold Class, Gold Lounge, Director’s Suite and La Premiere. Others got bigger and louder – Xtremescreen, Titan XC, Vmax. At least one 3D screen was installed in virtually every multiplex, starting around 2008 and accelerating before the release of Monsters vs Aliens and Avatar in 2009. Hoyts launched the “immersive motion technology” D-Box in Hamilton, New Zealand, in February 2012: theatre seats “pitch, roll and heave in sync with the onscreen action.”

DIGITAL distribution and projection is “the biggest thing for the industry since sound,” says the chief executive of the Independent Cinemas Association of Australia, or ICAA, Adrianne Pecotic. “It’s huge and expensive. It has changed our business from one that didn’t have to invest in equipment every year to one that is going to have to upgrade constantly… You have to build a whole new scale of cost and complexity into the expense of running the business.”

The big investment encouraged groups of exhibitors to cooperate in new ways. Village, Hoyts and Amalgamated Holdings (owners of Greater Union and, since the early 1990s, Birch Carroll and Coyle) established a joint venture to negotiate “virtual print fees” with the major Hollywood studios. These fees are being paid to exhibitors, who have to install the projection equipment, by the distributors, who benefit most from the savings. Similar arrangements were negotiated for independent cinemas: ICAA established a joint venture with Los Angeles–based digital-cinema provider and virtual print fee integrator Cinedigm.

Different exhibitors and groups of exhibitors chose different projection and library management systems and “theatre command centre” software. Network Operations Centres were set up, connecting to the digital projection system in each member theatre, and gathering information about screenings to trigger the virtual print fees.

While 3D “has been a fantastic enhancement,” Pecotic says, cinemas have to consider whether it’s making them more money. “I still remember watching the thirty-five minutes of Avatar that James Cameron screened at the Movie Convention before the film was released here” in December 2009. “It was a new technology used in an incredibly creative and effective way.” But, adds Pecotic, “the projection equipment cost $160,000 a screen at the time, plus the cost of the 3D gear for the audience, and it still costs about $70,000 a screen… Exhibitors always have to ask, ‘Will it bring one more person into the cinema?’”

Digital technology is also being used to distribute “alternative content” to cinemas, mainly by satellite, including live or near-live opera, dance, theatre, music and sport. Their contribution to the box office, so far, is small – just over $3 million in 2012 out of a total box office of $1.1 billion – but the per-screen averages can be high.

According to Rentrak, the twenty-fifth anniversary performance of The Phantom of the Opera, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in October 2011, grossed approximately $722,000 in Australian cinemas, very close to the £551,000 reported for Britain. If it had been included in the week’s film figures, it would have been the tenth-highest-grossing title of the week, though only the 157th highest of the year. Other strong performers have been Andre Rieu’s Maastricht Concert in June 2012 (approximately $378,000), MET Opera’s Gotterdammerung ($176,000) and Leonardo Live ($173,000).

Online and mobile digital media have been used by cinemas to communicate session times and information about promotions and special events, and for ticket sales. This has reduced costs and helped to deepen relationships with audiences. By early 2013, the percentage of Hoyts tickets sold online was “well into double figures.”

But it’s the expanding role of digital technology in production that some see as the real revolution in twenty-first-century cinema. “Some films made now could not have been made, either at all or convincingly, before the twenty-first century,” says Screen NSW chief executive Maureen Barron. “When Life of Pi was published, it was hard to see how it could be made into a film. But ten years on, it is plausible and enchanting due to technology and a master film-maker who has made full use of that technology.”

For former Village Voice movie critic J. Hoberman, this is the final, irreversible uncoupling of cinema images and sounds from the real world – the creation of what he and others have called “post-photographic cinema” – that means “the nature and development of the motion picture medium has become irrevocably altered.”

AUSTRALIAN cinema audiences grew strongly in the first phase of the Multiplex Era but stabilised or, by some measures, declined in the second phase. From the peak of forty-two million admissions to see The Man from Snowy River, Mad Max 2, Raiders of the Lost Ark and other movies in the boom year 1982, numbers fell to a low point of around thirty million in 1984, but then trebled to a little over ninety million in the early 2000s. Each year since, admissions have ranged between eighty-two and ninety-three million.

The United States, Britain and New Zealand all shared this experience: admissions grew faster than the rate of population growth in the decade to 2001 but have fallen in the decade since.

Suburban and regional multiplexes got more people going to the movies and regular patrons seeing more movies, but in the second phase of the Multiplex Era, from about 2000, trends varied for different age groups. Young people still go to the cinema more than older people, as they have for decades. But the proportion of fourteen- to twenty-four-year-olds going to the cinema, and the number of movies they see, have declined slightly in the 2000s, while cinema-going among older people has grown strongly and continuously.

Back in 1984, a third of people aged fifty or over had been to the cinema in the previous twelve months, and they had been an average of twice. In 2011, more than half were cinema-goers and they went an average of seven times each. By comparison, 86 per cent of Australians aged fourteen to twenty-four went to the cinema in 2011 and they went an average of nine times each. (The Multiplex Era boom is still well below the pre-television peak of the 1920s–50s, when, according to one analysis, every man, woman and child in New South Wales averaged between nineteen and thirty cinema visits a year.)

Older cinema audiences are growing overseas as well. Writing in the Guardian, television producer David Cox called the arrival and success of movies like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Descendants, The Iron Lady, The Artist and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel a “historic… change of tack” for a business fixated on young people.

That fixation dates back to the 1970s, when the multiplex boom began in the United States and films like Jaws and Star Wars started drawing teenage baby boomers to cinemas deserted by the working-class audiences that filled them before television arrived. Says Cox: “When baby boomers become empty-nesters, they refuse to languish on the sofa like their predecessors… To them, cinemas seem like good value… and they recall affectionately their youthful delight in the medium.”

The number of films released commercially each year in Australian cinemas has grown by around 40 per cent during the three decades of the Multiplex Era, although this is still just below the peaks of the 1940s and 50s. Young Australians now get the chance to see more movies in cinemas than their parents, but not quite as many as their grandparents.

• Click chart to enlarge

This growing number of titles comes from a wider range of places. Asia, especially India, has been the major source of growth, followed by non-Britain Europe. The United States remains by far the largest single source of supply and its films earn the overwhelming share of the local box office.

Among the highest-grossing films in Australia since the mid 1980s, three films stand out: the first Crocodile Dundee in 1986 and James Cameron’s Titanic in 1997 and Avatar in 2009. Break-out successes like these are hard to predict but they occur often enough that they cannot simply be treated as anomalies.

Measured by the number of prints available on opening day, the scale of the release of films rose dramatically through the Multiplex Era. Of the nearly 700 cinema screens in Australia when Crocodile Dundee was released in 1986, around one in twelve had a print. Of the nearly 2000 screens when the last Harry Potter film was released in 2011, one in three had a print.

Paradoxically, although the Multiplex Era has been all about big films earning big box office fast, the share of the box office earned by the very biggest films in Australia – the Top 5 in each year – has fallen sharply since the 1980s. This is because that era is also the age of home video, DVD and, more recently, online distribution.

Films no longer stay in theatrical release for as long as there is money to be made there. Distributors move them on into these ancillary markets, making way for new first-release titles at the box office. The very biggest movies still earn huge box office grosses; as a group, however, they are generally not in cinemas long enough to perform quite the way they once did. At the Melbourne theatre where the biggest movie since the 1980s, Avatar, had its longest non-IMAX run, 97 per cent of final gross earnings were notched up by week 20.

Comparing the performance of Multiplex Era movies with those before it using inflation-adjusted box office figures – cautiously, given the limitations of the data – our research concluded that although there are now more big films, the very biggest individual films of the Multiplex Era are generally smaller in cinemas than those of the pre-Multiplex Era. (That does not necessarily mean fewer people see them, because so much movie-viewing now occurs outside cinemas.)

But when we added up the inflation-adjusted box office of so-called “franchises” – wholly Multiplex-Era series like Harry Potter, Shrek and The Lord of the Rings as well as longstanding series like James Bond and Star Wars – we concluded that the wholly Multiplex-Era franchises have outperformed their predecessors in cinemas.

The king of franchises, James Bond, has grossed nearly 40 per cent more than Harry Potter, but it has taken three times as many films to do it. Ranking the franchises by their average box office gross per film, half of the top ten are series that started in 1999 (The Matrix) or later. Of the $3.4 billion (at 2012 prices) earned by the top twenty franchises, more than half has been earned in the 2000s.

The concept of franchises, sequels and series is not new. Walt Disney’s animated features of Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse in the 1920s and 30s were a kind of franchise, regularly produced, released and re-released complete with matching merchandise. Studios like Pathé, MGM, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers (and, much later, Pixar) were themselves franchises. They signed stars – another kind of franchise – to multi-picture contracts. Early Australian film series included “The Hayseeds” and “Dad and Dave” movies, which drew on Steele Rudd’s 1895 stories and a series of books about a rural family, The Waybacks.

What is distinctive about the franchises of the twenty-first century is the scale of their commercial success and the decisions to produce them as franchises or series of films, rather than one-by-one: three Star Wars prequels then three more sequels; three Rings then three Hobbits; four Potters followed by another three, the last one turned into two; two Avatar sequels currently being shot back-to-back.

Film-makers who once pitched discrete stories now offer story-worlds. Adapters of popular literary classics are less likely to think about how to compress epic reads into tight cinematic packages and more interested in turning stories into sagas. Instead of one-off movies like Gone with the Wind and The Sound of Music, which played and played through the long theatrical runs of the pre-Multiplex, pre-home-video eras, the popular movie-makers of the twenty-first century construct sprawling narratives and reveal them by instalment, one movie at a time. Audiences, they hope, will commit to the whole thing and build as the story reaches its climax, rather than decline, as the sequels of earlier eras ran out of puff.

By setting out to tell stories by instalment, the most popular cinema of the twenty-first century has been televisionised.

IN THE twenty-first century, when screens are everywhere and always on, what is it that will make the ones in cinemas unique?

Cinemas face plenty of challenges in a world where fast broadband is pervasive. Popular cinema’s core audience for the last forty years – young people – are going out to see movies a little less often. They have other things to do, other things to watch and other ways to watch movies that either cost less than cinemas or – if they are prepared to take on the law – nothing at all. More spectacular screens need increasingly spectacular movies to show them off. Digital technology helps reduce the cost of reproducing yesterday’s spectacles but feeds bigger expectations about tomorrow’s.

Making movies as franchises reduces the risk that overloaded audiences won’t notice the next film, but magnifies the scale of the debacle if a whole project goes off the rails. Cinemas’ window of exclusivity for new movies has shrunk. Only one of Australia’s biggest exhibitors, Village Roadshow, now has a significant ownership stake in distribution and production that allows it to shape the fare it offers to audiences, although the smaller, art-cinema chains have distribution as well as exhibition interests. (Sharmill Films, established by the Nova Cinema’s Natalie Miller, distributed about three-quarters of the “alternative content” titles earning box office revenue in Australia in 2012.)

Alongside these challenges, cinemas have many things going for them. Their primary content, movies, have endured as a form of entertainment through many waves of technological and social change. The biggest blockbusters, which are so important to the economics and lustre of the exhibition industry, are unpredictable but they seem to turn up frequently enough. The population is ageing and older people are going out to see more movies. A larger number of movies are being made, creating opportunities for festivals and events that can curate compelling collections.

Earnings growth for commercial cinemas may be mainly in “premium” experiences, but they deliver premium entertainment a good deal cheaper than competitors like musical theatre shows, stadium concerts and the biggest sporting events. Once the costs of equipment installations are recovered, digital distribution and projection should improve profitability by reducing operating costs and allowing cinemas to screen new kinds of content.

Cinemas know that, in the Online Age, their position at the start of the release chain for the popular audiovisual form we call movies is not a fixture but something that has to be earned each weekend, each week, each year. •

Jock Given is Professor of Media and Communications at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research.

The post Old medium, new century appeared first on Inside Story.

Ken Rosewall must have spent more time on Australia’s centre courts this summer than any Australian player. He was at Ken Rosewall Arena in Sydney when Bernard Tomic thanked “Mr Rosewall” for his first ATP Tour tournament trophy. He was at Rod Laver Arena when Andy Murray was too good for Roger Federer in a semi-final of the Australian Open, and he was there two nights later when Novak Djokovic was too good for Murray.

Australians see a lot of this in January. There are many more Australian tennis champions in the stands than on the courts and it has been that way for a long time. Rosewall will turn eighty next year; Rod Laver will turn seventy-five in August, the day after Roger Federer’s birthday; Margaret Court is seventy. Australia’s last winner of an Australian Open singles title was Chris O’Neil in 1978. In six of the ten championships before that win, both the female finalists were Australian.

Australia’s golden age has produced a book bubble lately, with the release of Rosewall’s Muscles: The Story of Ken Rosewall, Australia’s Little Master of the Courts (as told to Richard Naughton), Laver’s The Education of a Tennis Player (with Bud Collins), and Hugh Lunn’s The Great Fletch: The Dazzling Life of Wimbledon Aussie Larrikin Ken Fletcher. These players come from an era when future champions lived with ironic nicknames from their early days on the court: Rosewall became “Muscles” because he didn’t have any; Laver, the “Rocket” because, as a boy, he wasn’t one. The two of them ended up in one of the great rivalries in the history of tennis, its duration, intensity and closeness masked by the invisibility of many of the matches they played as professional one-night stands all over the world, often in makeshift venues, in the 1960s and early 70s.

Laver came from country Queensland, Rockhampton, about 650 kilometres north of Brisbane; Rosewall from Rockdale in Sydney’s south. Neither was tall even by the standards of the time: Laver 1.73 metres (five feet, seven inches); Rosewall, four years older, an inch shorter.

Rosewall and his almost exact contemporary, Balmain boy Lew Hoad, were teenage stars. Chosen for the Davis Cup training squad in 1951 at seventeen, they travelled overseas the following year with an Australian team whose star, Frank Sedgman, won the singles and the men’s and mixed doubles at Wimbledon. In 1953, at nineteen, Rosewall won the Australian singles title at Kooyong and then the French title on clay in Paris. Back at Kooyong between Christmas and New Year, Rosewall and Hoad became national heroes when Australia won the Davis Cup from the United States. Down two matches to one after the doubles, both won their reverse singles, Hoad over just-crowned US singles champion Tony Trabert and Rosewall against reigning Wimbledon champion Vic Seixas.

Davis Cup coach Harry Hopman might not have thought Laver the quickest kid around the court but he saw enough in him to select him as one of two youngsters for the Australians’ overseas tour in 1956. Laver lost the Wimbledon junior final but won the junior US and was at Forest Hills to see Hoad fall one match short of the Grand Slam Laver would win twice – the Australian, French, Wimbledon and US singles championships in the same year. Hoad made the cover of Sports Illustrated and the US final, but his Sydney mate Rosewall got through as well, played better in the windy conditions and won in four sets.

Players now measure their achievements by the number of “slams,” or major tournaments, they win. Margaret Court won twenty-four in singles, the record, including all four, the Grand Slam, in 1970. Roger Federer has seventeen, the most by a man. In three separate years he has won three of the four, but has never won all four. Rod Laver’s two Grand Slams came first as an amateur in 1962, then in 1969 as a professional, the first calendar year professionals were allowed to play in all four major tournaments.

It was the chance of a Grand Slam in 1969 that Boston Globe tennis writer Bud Collins says gave him his book about Laver, first published in 1971 and re-released in 2009 for the fortieth anniversary of the achievement. Laver’s agent had approached Collins about a memoir. Publishers Simon and Schuster were interested but only if Rod won the four tournaments: “No Slam, no book,” though Collins didn’t tell Laver that.

The fact that he won a Grand Slam of mixed doubles with Margaret Court (Margaret Smith at the time) in 1963 is what makes Ken Fletcher’s disappearance from the list of Australian tennis champions of the era so puzzling. Explaining “the dazzling life” of this “Wimbledon Aussie larrikin” is the job former journalist with the Australian, Hugh Lunn, sets himself in The Great Fletch.

With Grand Slams in singles, Rod Laver and Margaret Court have got arenas named after them at Melbourne Park, where the Australian Open gets played each January. With plenty of grand slam singles tournament wins but no Grand Slam, Ken Rosewall’s Arena is in Homebush. Ken Fletcher has a park on the river outside the Pat Rafter Arena in Brisbane.

The authors of these three books have different relationships with their subjects. Lunn was the oldest of old mates with Fletcher, who died in 2006. They were “in the playpen together as babies,” at different schools a few hundred metres apart in the Brisbane suburb of Annerley, young men travelling the world together and, in 1965 and 66, tennis player and cheerleader at Wimbledon.

This is a much more personal story than the other two. Fletch, we learn, didn’t like people who were tight with their money, people with no personality, and skites. “No Australian man was ever more upfront about his feelings for others.” There is plenty of tennis, because that was what Fletcher was best known for – as well as his mixed doubles Grand Slam in 1963, he won another five major mixed doubles titles, won men’s doubles titles at Wimbledon and in the French Open, and made the singles final of the Australian Open in 1963, losing to Roy Emerson, and the Wimbledon or French quarter-finals five times.

But there is just as much of the anguish of falling short in an era when those around him were climbing higher, of the difficulties of piloting his own prodigious talent – “the greatest and purest tennis shot I have seen in my life, and I have seen them all, was Fletcher’s forehand,” says a contemporary, Jim Shepherd. There is a lot about life beyond tennis courts, sometimes rich and raucous, at other times troubled and impecunious. A park by the Brisbane River, just outside the courts, with swings and barbecues and lots of people, seems a much better memorial for Fletch than an arena.

Bud Collins is the voice of Rod Laver in The Education of a Tennis Player, credited as “Rod Laver with Bud Collins.” The reader gets Laver’s story, peppered with wisecracks that sound more Boston than Rockhampton. Cliff Drysdale is “a good-looking South African who could talk a Kruger Park lion into becoming a vegetarian.” On one Laver backhand: “You don’t plan a shot like that, not unless you’re on marijuana, and the only grass I’m partial to is Wimbledon’s.”

But Collins, Laver’s choice of biographer, gives a strong sense of the distance a kid from Rockhampton traversed to become a world champion. He worked out very early what he wanted to do and set about doing it. It meant leaving home, travelling constantly, living everywhere at once, eventually mainly in California, grinding out tennis matches when he was exhausted or injured or just not playing his best, getting himself ready for the ones that really mattered.

Collins doesn’t give us a neat linear tale of Laver’s career or even of his second Grand Slam year. The rough chronology of tournaments and matches is there, but he detours for the backstories and twenty-five “Lessons” on topics like “The Crisp Volley” and “Playing against Familiar Opponents.”

Rosewall’s biographer Richard Naughton – credited “as told to…” – is an academic lawyer and tennis lover, a senior fellow in the law faculty at Monash University and author of Australian Labour Law: Text, Cases and Commentary, as well as a biography of Australia’s first Wimbledon champion, Norman Brookes. His story is relentlessly chronological, but it seems exactly the right way to write about Rosewall’s long quest, match after match, set after set, serves, returns, approaches, passes, handshakes at the net. Rosewall just kept doing it and in a way he still does. You can’t summarise Muscles without diminishing him.

All three books are centrally about the era when becoming a professional tennis player meant not being able to play the four major tournaments. Rosewall turned pro at the start of 1957, aged twenty-two, Laver in 1963, at twenty-four. Fletcher, two years younger than Laver, stayed an amateur. John Newcombe, younger still, won Wimbledon as an amateur in 1967 and turned professional right at the beginning of the Open era.

This was not a split like World Series Cricket or Super League that blew sports apart for a couple of years before they got back together again and lived happily ever after. It went on for decades. Pancho Gonzales turned professional after winning the US championships in 1948 and 1949 aged twenty and twenty-one. He got to play his country’s national championships again at forty. Two-time Wimbledon champion Laver got a letter from the All England Tennis Club after he turned professional advising him he could no longer wear the club tie.

When professionals were finally allowed to play the major championships again, they were called “Opens” but separate playing circuits continued for most of the year. Queensland’s amateur tennis boss Bill Edwards, no supporter of pro tennis, put on an embarrassing Australian Championships in January 1969, apparently heading to the races one afternoon rather than watching the tennis. This was how Queensland welcomed the Rocket back to Milton. The International Lawn Tennis Federation banned Rosewall, Laver and members of the professional World Championship Tennis circuit from the French Open and Wimbledon in 1972 and the professionals boycotted Wimbledon the following year over a different issue. Australia’s professionals could play the Opens from 1968 but weren’t allowed back to play Davis Cup until 1973.

The pro tours were rough and hard, small groups of fine players up against each other over and over again on all kinds of weird, temporary surfaces – canvas stretched over boards or even ice-rinks – and only occasionally getting access to the established tennis venues. They drove themselves from one town to the next each day after treasurer Rosewall had counted the money, set up again, and faced up to the same opponents. If you got injured you played on because if you didn’t there’d be no crowd and no pay next time the troupe came to town.

We know how the story ends now, in an Open Era when professionals got to play in the great championships again, but there was never any certainty about that. The pros were better, and if you wanted to be the best and make decent money without taking a PR job with Dunlop or Slazenger then you had to turn your back on the great trophies and accept it might be forever. When Rosewall turned pro, Pancho Gonzales whipped him, although Rosewall eventually turned that around. When Laver turned pro at the start of 1963, having just won his first Grand Slam against the amateurs, Lew Hoad beat him in their first seven matches and Rosewall in four of their first six. Meanwhile, the next generation of “amateurs” were winning the major championships the pros couldn’t enter.

Laver says Rosewall is the “least appreciated great player in the history of tennis.” He – Rosewall – “was the player we all had most trouble with.” In the French Pro Indoor final in 1963, Laver says he played “the finest tennis I believe I’ve ever produced” and still got beaten by Rosewall. Fred Stolle said he’d “rather play Laver any day than Rosewall. If the Rocket’s hitting his shots there’s no chance for me… But there’s always the chance he’ll be a bit off and then you’re right in the match. Rosewall was never off.”

Harry Hopman said the initially “scrawny and slow” Rocket “worked harder at it than anybody else.” “The dangerous thing about Laver is he hits the impossible shot when he’s out of position – the time you least expect it,” said Pancho Gonzales. Rosewall thought – and Laver doesn’t deny – that Rocket always found something special when there was big money at stake.

One tennis historian scores the many Laver–Rosewall matches 80–67 Laver’s way, another 79–71, also Laver’s way, including 22–7 in the Open era. On his way to his two Grand Slams, Laver met and beat Roy Emerson in five of the eight tournaments, but Rosewall only once, in the French final in Paris in June 1969. They’d met in the final a year earlier, in the ’68 Paris Spring; Rosewall had prevailed. This time at Roland Garros, the Rocket put Muscles down in straight sets. The tennis jury is still out on what happened: some thought it was Laver’s day, Laver’s year; others that it was just Laver.

With two legs of his second Grand Slam secured, Laver won thirty-one straight matches between July and September, including Wimbledon, the US Open and five other tournaments. After winning the four major tournaments in a single year for the second time, he never won another one.

The stories of Fletch, Muscles and Rocket are about the long, hard work required to get to the top of tennis and stay there. But tennis, more than most other sports, is also about moments and these books feast on them.

There’s Rosewall in his first Wimbledon final in 1954, his best chance it turned out, getting a strange soft serve on match point from the Czech Drobný and pushing it into the net. And Laver, match point down against Marty Mulligan in the quarters at Roland Garros in 1962; getting a crucial line call against Tony Roche late in the fifth set of the semi-final at the 1969 Australian Open, the first tournament in his ’69 Slam; hitting a backhand slice across court to pass John Newcombe, who was serving at a set apiece, 4–2, 0–15 in the ’69 Wimbledon final – a point Laver later thought to be “the whole match.”

For Ken Fletcher, it’s a different kind of moment: playing the Hungarian István Gulyás in the 1966 French, unable to put away three smashes in a row, fed another by the scrambling Gulyás, choosing to belt it over the stands and into the Bois de Boulogne, shouting, “Get that one, you Hungarian bastard!” It’s Fletcher’s response to the relentlessness of top tennis – or maybe just a grass court specialist’s frustration at how often the ball comes back on clay.

If you were starting to watch a bit of sport on TV in the early 1970s, after live satellite broadcasts began but before colour, you might have seen the Davis Cup final in Cleveland Ohio in late 1973, when all the pros were finally allowed back. Australia picked the apparently ageless Rosewall (thirty-nine), Mal Anderson (thirty-eight), Laver (thirty-five) and Newcombe (twenty-nine). The younger Geoff Masters and Ross Case, who later won a Wimbledon doubles, were there too, but it was a sign that Australia’s golden tennis era was almost done.

They all had to earn their spots. Laver showed he was ready at the Sydney Indoor tournament, beating Rosewall and recently crowned US Open champion Newcombe. Picked for the semi-final against Czechoslovakia at Kooyong, he beat Jan Kodeš in straight sets, won a marathon doubles with Rosewall, and beat Jiří Hřebec – surprise conqueror of Newcombe on the first day – in five sets.

For the final in Cleveland, the triumphant return of Australia’s greats to the Davis Cup, Newcombe and Laver got all the work. Both won their opening day singles in five sets, Laver coming back from two-sets-to-one down to beat Tom Gorman. Then captain Neale Fraser chose Newcombe ahead of Rosewall to partner Laver in the doubles. They made short work of the Americans and the Cup was Australia’s. Two decades after his and Lew Hoad’s teenage heroics at Kooyong, Rosewall didn’t get the chance to put on his whites.

The next year, astonishingly, the thirty-nine-year-old Rosewall made the finals of Wimbledon – twenty years after his first final there – and the US Open, five years after Laver’s last wins there, but had to play the tough young superstar of the moment, Jimmy Connors, in both. Rosewall won just eight games over six sets in the two finals. Fans came away from Forest Hills, according to Tennis World, wearing “the glazed expression of those caught too near an exploding bomb.” It felt like the cruellest luck that Rosewall had been extraordinary enough to be on the court at all. To be so good for so long, to want it so much… and that was the reward.

Whether or not Connors really demanded that his manager “Get me Laver!” after that 1974 US Open, as was reported, Jimmy got him. The Rocket turned up at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, in February 1975 for a match billed as “$100,000 Winner Take All,” though Laver tells Bud Collins he got $60,000 for it, his biggest ever single payday. The twenty-two-year-old American was too good for the thirty-six-year-old Australian, but Laver did manage to get a set off him.

Laver also hit a shot that has stayed with me, a running forehand from way, way out of court. I didn’t know then what it took to play that shot – the left forearm as big as Rocky Marciano’s and the seven-inch wrist, the legs to get to the ball, the head to believe it was possible, the heart to want it. But something about it stuck. It was a moment and you were so lucky to see it. Jimmy couldn’t reach it, it was in, it was the Rocket. •

The post Fletch, Muscles and the Rocket appeared first on Inside Story.

IN 2012, we learned some truths. Lance Armstrong was a drug cheat. Jimmy Savile sexually abused young people. Phone hacking at the News of the World was not the work of a single rogue reporter.

As secrets go, these truths were not very secret. A lot of people knew that the official stories were untrue well before the facts became public. The inaccuracy did not stem so much from a lack of truth-seeking as from the coordination of many silences.

We trust some institutions and individuals to find truth for us. Journalists ask us to trust them when they tell us stories. The courts ask us to trust them when they decide who is guilty and who is innocent. Search engines ask us to trust them when they answer our queries. For each of these, 2012 was a challenging year.

Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press in Britain concluded that “there does exist a cultural strand or tendency within a section of the press to practise journalism which on occasion is deliberately, recklessly or negligently inaccurate.” Some inaccuracies were inevitable given the volume and speed of news production, but Leveson found evidence of five main ways that journalists and their editors were unacceptably untruthful.

First, sections of the press deliberately invented and fabricated stories or failed to check the truth of them. Second, headlines could be deliberately misleading. Third, reporters could be carelessly or recklessly inaccurate, especially when reporting fast-moving, high-profile stories. Fourth, sections of the press reported political and social issues inaccurately to fit their paper’s worldview. Finally, science stories were “reported poorly and often inaccurately by much of the press.”

For fabrication, Leveson particularly quoted former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt. “This is not a truth-seeking enterprise,” Peppiatt told the inquiry. “Much of tabloid journalism is not truth-seeking primarily. It’s just a stream of stories.”

Peppiatt recalled a day when the Star was close to deadline without a page-three story. The desperate editor offered 150 quid for a good one and Peppiatt came up with lads’ mag favourite Kelly Brook seeing a hypnotherapist to help her cut the time she took to get ready to go out. “I made it up,” Peppiatt said. “At 6 pm and staring at a blank page I simply plucked it from my arse.” (Star witnesses denied this and said Peppiatt was disaffected, “unhappy after he was passed over for several staff positions.”) Other inquiry witnesses spoke of “fabricating quotations to push a particular line with regard to a story and then find a willing contact to ‘own’ the quote.” Piers Morgan admitted altering a photograph digitally to show Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed kissing.

For deliberately misleading headlines, Leveson cited front pages pointing to “exclusive interviews” that weren’t exclusive and sometimes weren’t even interviews – or claimed that Jennifer Aniston had revealed “I’m having a baby!” when the story below it said Aniston was only thinking about having a baby. The Daily Telegraph published a story about the introduction of a requirement for balloons to carry a warning under the headline “Children to be banned from blowing up balloons, under EU safety rules.”

In the case of “fast-moving and high-profile stories” – the ones that are followed by all the press, and often involve crime or a famous individual – Leveson thought “there is a tendency amongst large parts of the press to disregard the rule book.” Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who broke the story about the scale of the News of the World phone hacking, told the inquiry about ­another story in which police were reported to have evidence that children had been killed and buried in the ruins of an old children’s home on the isle of Jersey. “The evidence for the truth of that proposition,” he said, was “screaming its falsehood.”

According to Davies, “The police said, ‘We have been looking into the ruins of this building and we have found a cellar which is ­exactly­ like the cellar which is described by our survivor witnesses.’ It’s ‘very dark.’ Cellars are dark. It means nothing. Then they said, ‘And in this cellar we found a bath,’ and it’s quite alarming, this, the sort of hints of torturing. ‘It’s actually bolted to the floor,’ as though everybody’s bath was mobile.’”

But by then “the problem… on all news­papers across the whole spectrum is it’s too good a story to knock down… A reporter from any paper is sent out to Jersey to follow up on this story. The reporter who rings up and says, ‘Actually, this is crap, there’s just no evidence for this at all,’ they will not be thanked. It’s a great story.”

On reporting political and social issues inaccurately to fit a paper’s worldview, Leveson did not try to outlaw all “blurring of fact and comment,” which the Editors’ Code prohibits and former prime ministers Blair and Brown condemned. He thought it “an inevitable part of press reporting in the ­twenty-first century… first, because purely factual reporting devoid of all opinion is, to all practical purposes, impossible… Secondly, because in a world of twenty-four-hour television and online news, readers expect newspapers to provide something more than pure news.”

What he did think was harmful and worthy of criticism was “prioritising the worldview of a title over the accuracy of a story.” Leveson highlighted four main problem areas: disability and social welfare benefits, criminal justice issues, immigration and Britain’s role in Europe.

The Daily Mail and Daily Express ran “Immigration soars 20 per cent” headlines over separate articles about annual immigration figures that made clear immigration had remained stable. It was net migration that had increased by 20 per cent because emigration had fallen. Among the “spongers” in a Sun article about a report on sickness benefits, “Fit as a Fiddler: ‘Sick’ Spongers Could Start Work Right Now,” were people considered unsuitable for immediate work, but potentially suitable for work in the future. These included people undergoing chemotherapy or dialysis treatment, hospital in-patients, and those suffering from uncontrollable, life-threatening diseases.

On science stories, Leveson criticised “false balance” – where the scientific view of a very small minority is given prominence, implying a significant conflict of opinion within the scientific community – and the sensationalising of “scares” and “breakthroughs.” So a Nature paper modelling climate change projected warming between 2 and 11 degrees but emphasised that most models show warming around 2 degrees: newspapers used 11 degrees in their headlines. Another Nature story reported on a drug discovered on Easter Island that may extend life in mice but is harmful to humans: newspaper headlines included “Scientists discover Easter Island ‘fountain of youth’ drug that can extend life by ten years.”

LEVESON, the lawyer and judge, did what lawyers and judges do to get at the truth. They read documents, call witnesses and get them to swear to tell the truth and nothing but. They weigh the admissible evidence, draw conclusions, make decisions, and write judgements and reports.

When juries are involved, judges give them careful instructions about the evidence and methods they can use to arrive at their view of the truth. No independent research, no chatting to family and friends, and definitely no contact with witnesses or other people associated with the case. All are forms of jury misconduct that can lead to trials being aborted.

In the social media age, those kinds of restrictions are proving especially challenging. Melbourne saw it when Jill Meagher disappeared after a night out in Brunswick. Once her body was discovered and a suspect arrested, her husband and the police warned publicly of the dangers that truth-seeking and sharing on social media could pose to the later job of truth-seeking by a jury in a court room.

A recent pilot study of jury use of new media by the United States’ National Center for State Courts explored this “change to the very nature of how people engage in truth finding” and the challenge it poses for what the Kennedy School’s Christopher E. Stone called “an institution that is used to insisting on its own ways of knowing things, ways that are different from what ordinary people do.”

While cautious about its own limits, the pilot study found few jurors reporting misconduct of any kind, including independent internet research. Substantial proportions, however, did not recall the judge’s instructions and believed such research was permissible. A sizeable proportion of actual and prospective jurors “indicated a desire to use the internet to obtain information relevant to the trial,” and a significant proportion of jurors said they would “be unable to refrain from internet use for the duration of a trial.”

The researchers concluded that juror misconduct involving new media currently was “less than one might imagine based on the number of recent news media accounts of jurors run amok.” But they were less optimistic about the future.

“The vast majority of trial jurors are already exceptionally wired-in, having both the technological access and the practical experience to use these communication devices effortlessly…,” they wrote. “As younger cohorts join the jury pool… judges and lawyers… can expect to see jurors’ desire to use these tools increase… They will have to take more effective steps to convince jurors to forgo these tools in the interest of fairness to litigants. A key factor will be the degree to which jurors continue to believe that the testimony of witnesses, especially expert witnesses hired by the parties, is more compelling evidence than what they can uncover on their own through information available to them via the internet.”

THE tool that Australians use more than any other to find information on the internet struck a challenge of its own in 2012. Google was found by the Full Federal Court to have engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in presenting its search results.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission argued that internet users are misled when an advertiser uses the names of its competitors as key words to attract visitors via Google’s AdWords. The court agreed both that consumers could be misled and that the misleading representations were made by Google, not the advertisers, as Google argued. The key words may be selected by the advertiser, perhaps with input by Google, but “the enquiry is made of Google and it is Google’s response which is misleading,” said the court.

Google was granted leave to appeal to the High Court, which heard the case in September but has not yet handed down its decision.

Truth-seeking is expected to continue in 2013. •

The post The year in truth appeared first on Inside Story.

The Asian economic crisis came and went. The long boom in the West went back to booming, apparently confirming the durability of the economic model underpinning the WTO. In 2000, Bob Woodward published his biography of US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Maestro: Greenspan’s Fed and the American Boom. The reviews were still coming out when the Twin Towers fell and the soldiers set off for the Middle East.

Trade negotiators headed there too. Amid the tension and uncertainty of the days after the September 11 attacks, the US Trade Representative declared that the long-planned ministerial meeting in Qatar – the meeting that would launch the Doha Round of trade talks – must go ahead. “Let there be no misunderstanding,” he said. “The United States will continue to advance the values that define this nation – openness, opportunity, democracy and compassion. Trade reinforces those values, serving as an engine of growth and a source of hope for workers and families in the United States and the world.”

Even before the attacks these were crucial talks. The last WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999 had been suspended because of street protests. This time around, China and Taiwan (officially Chinese Taipei) were admitted to membership of the WTO and trade ministers said they were “determined, particularly in the light of the global economic slowdown, to maintain the process of reform and liberalisation of trade policies.” A work program was laid out, and a deadline – “not later than 1 January 2005” – was set for new agreements.

They didn’t make it. In 2008, as the negotiations continued, the Economist dubbed them “The Doha round… and round… and round.” Meanwhile, the day-to-day work of the WTO continued. The implementation of WTO obligations was monitored; member states’ trade policies were reviewed; periodic reports about trade barriers were published. Countries requested consultations with each other and notified disputes under the existing rules, panels were appointed to settle them, decisions were announced, sanctions were sometimes imposed.

Canada complained about Korean restrictions on beef imports and European restrictions on seal product imports. The Europeans disputed the Philippines’ taxes on distilled spirits. El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica complained about the Dominican Republic’s safeguard measures on imports of polypropylene bags and tubular fabrics. The United States contested Chinese measures affecting raw materials exports; the Chinese contested American measures affecting tyre imports.

The WTO was busy. Plans were developed to “renovate, densify and enlarge” its headquarters, the Centre William Rappard on Lake Geneva, funded by a donation and loan from the Swiss Confederation. Due to be finished by the end of 2012, the new building will combine “sobriety, modernity and efficiency,” housing 300 staff, a new library partly open to the public, a new restaurant and an underground car park.

Late last year, another WTO ministerial meeting took place in Geneva. Russia joined, the last big economy to do so. Still there was no resolution of the Doha Round. As the members of the General Council headed out of Geneva for their summer breaks at the end of July this year, director-general Pascal Lamy told them, “Those of you who believe that, as time passes, inexorably, the Round might lose all its remaining steam may be right, whether we like it or not.”

More progress is reported to have been occurring in Melbourne, Dallas, San Diego and Leesburg, Virginia, where the last four rounds of negotiations for another trade agreement – the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or TPPA – have been held this year. Round 14, in Leesburg, was in early September. The negotiations have attracted media attention when protesters have rallied outside the meetings or when sections of the negotiating texts have been leaked. A draft of the intellectual property chapter leaked in February 2011, a US proposal about access to medicines in March this year, and a draft of the investment chapter in June.

The TPPA originated in a 2005 deal between Chile, Singapore, New Zealand and Brunei. When the United States expressed interest in joining that group, other countries got interested as well, even though they already had bilateral agreements with some of the partners. The first round of negotiations towards what became known as the TPPA was held in Melbourne in early 2009 with eight participants. Peru and Vietnam joined the United States, the original four countries, and the host, Australia. Malaysia was admitted soon after, and in June this year Canada and Mexico joined in. These eleven are now considering a formal expression of interest from Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, which means things are getting very interesting indeed.

The group of countries that met in Melbourne in 2009 was an odd crew. Those that didn’t already have bilateral free trade agreements with the United States saw the TPPA as the best way to get one. But for the United States, these were tiny markets and the likely gains from trading more freely with them were marginal. What made the group attractive to US trade negotiators was the fact that it might be willing to do the kind of trade deal America now wanted. This could serve as a model and perhaps a building block for other negotiations in the Asia-Pacific region and around the world. The TPPA was “the most credible pathway to broader Asia-Pacific regional economic integration,” according to the US Trade Representative, and became a central economic expression of President Obama’s “pivot” to Asia.

All the statements about the TPPA’s aims highlight three buzz phrases. It is to be a “high-quality agreement,” a “twenty-first-century agreement” and a “living agreement.”

A high-quality agreement means it should cover all sectors of economic activity, including sensitive ones like agriculture and textiles, and require liberalisation with minimal exceptions.

A twenty-first-century agreement – “an ambitious, next-generation trade agreement” – means it should not only aim to limit restrictions like tariffs, import quotas and export subsidies that have impeded cross-border trade in the past, but also target the trade restrictions that matter most now and in the future. These include the “behind-the-border” restrictions that obstruct the creation and flow of intermediate and completed goods and services through the complex, multi-country production and supply chains that are now common. It also means the agreement must deal with digital economy, electronic commerce and green technology issues and be useful to the small and medium-sized enterprises that are now responsible for so many of the new jobs created.

A living agreement means one that can be updated to cover new issues and expanded to accommodate new members. But new members will need to join an agreement struck by its founding members, and there are important members of the Asia-Pacific region that are playing no part: South Korea, India and China.

Until the 1980s, most trade negotiations were multilateral. Regional or bilateral agreements like the European Common Market, later the European Union, and the Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Agreement, were unusual. During the 1990s, these “preferential” trade agreements multiplied.

As if already anticipating that the formation of the WTO might represent multilateralism’s high-water mark, negotiators got busy in smaller groups. Freer trade with neighbours and major trading partners could deliver significant economic benefits, and the deals might actually get done. According to WTO director-general Pascal Lamy, the average WTO member is now a party to thirteen separate “preferential” trade agreements, and there are around 400 in total.

The shift to preferential trading agreements like the TPPA has tested Australia’s historical commitment to multilateralism, and the TPPA negotiating process is severely stretching the current federal government’s strategies and philosophies. In its April 2011 trade policy statement, “Trading Our Way to More Jobs and Prosperity,” the Gillard government reaffirmed its view that a “multilateral trade deal offers the greatest prospective benefits.” It said it would continue pushing for an “ambitious, comprehensive outcome of the Doha Round that liberalises trade in agriculture, manufacturing and services,” but conceded that “during the present recovery there is little obvious appetite among a number of major economies for further trade liberalisation…”

In these circumstances, the government said it is interested in bilateral and regional deals, but only if they are “truly liberalising.” It is not interested in “collecting trophies for the national mantelpiece: empty vessels engraved with the words Free Trade Agreement that formalise and validate existing trade restrictions.” It also says it doesn’t want to muddle up trade policy and foreign policy. “Entering into bilateral and regional trade deals for the geo-political purpose of excluding others can be fraught with danger,” it said, and the “tough process of negotiating trade deals” is not necessarily the best recipe for closer political friendship.

Labor watched the rapid negotiation of the Australia–US Free Trade Agreement from the opposition benches after 9/11. It criticised the lack of transparency and the Howard government’s failure to provide a credible analysis of the economic benefits of the final deal, as opposed to the aspirations declared at the outset. Two changes to the negotiated outcomes – protecting the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and local program quotas for commercial broadcasters – were forced when the implementing legislation was introduced into parliament.

The transparency of the TPPA negotiations is stretching Labor’s philosophy now. The government’s April 2011 trade policy statement says the public should be kept “closely informed of the nature and progress of negotiations.” As stages in the deal-making process are completed, “relevant information should be posted on government websites.” Transparency can certainly be “time-consuming and give anti-trade interests partial information to use against the government before the public has had the benefit of considering the fully-completed deal,” but “negotiations shrouded in secrecy enable opponents to speculate inaccurately about the content of agreements.”

Bringing transparency to the TPPA negotiations has proved difficult. Departmental officials have worked hard to consult with interested parties but the negotiating texts are not being made public and the updates posted after each negotiating round are bland. This makes it particularly tough to scrutinise what is happening on novel issues where the negotiations may go beyond precedents in other agreements, or where the relationships between different parts of a big, complex agreement are critical to its practical impact. Before the Leesburg meeting, 134 members of the United States Congress wrote to the US Trade Representative to try to get “broader and deeper” consultations with relevant Congressional committees, access to the draft TPPA text and observer status at the meeting.

Consistent with the nature of a single negotiation where “everything is on the table” and “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” the government has been reluctant to rule any measures in or out of the TPPA. In general, it says it “will not support provisions in trade agreements that constrain our ability to regulate legitimately on social, environmental or other similar important public policy matters.” Specifically, it won’t accept provisions that “limit its capacity to put health warnings or plain packaging requirements on tobacco products or its ability to continue the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.”

Significantly, the government says it opposes “investor–state dispute resolution procedures… that would confer greater legal rights on foreign businesses than those available to domestic businesses.” These procedures could give investors from member states new rights to take action directly against national governments, rather than through their own governments.

Pharmaceutical companies, for example, like investor–state dispute resolution processes because they provide another way to challenge legislation and regulation that they believe exaggerate health risks of new drugs. Philip Morris is using the investor–state dispute resolution process in the 1993 Australia–Hong Kong Agreement for the Promotion and Protection of Investments to challenge the plain packaging legislation that Australia’s High Court declared valid in August.

These kinds of provisions are included in many of the United States’ bilateral free trade agreements, though not the one with Australia. They are clearly on the US agenda for the TPPA and are included in the US Trade Representative’s November 2011 outline of the provisions it says will be in the investment chapter.

Despite its conditions, the government’s April 2011 policy statement said the TPPA was its “highest regional trade negotiation priority.” It is also “one possible pathway” to the government’s long-term goal, a Free Trade Area of the Asia–Pacific spanning all APEC economies – not the only one, but “currently the most-advanced.”

In early September 2012, Australia’s trade minister Craig Emerson and the trade ministers of China, Japan, India, Korea, New Zealand and the ten ASEAN countries met in Cambodia and “laid the foundations” for another: a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Australia already has a free-trade agreement with ASEAN; this ASEAN-plus-six deal would include eight of Australia’s top ten trading partners. Ministers will meet again in November, when negotiations are expected to be formally launched. According to the minister’s media release, this “will constitute the early delivery of work being conducted for the Gillard Government’s White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century.”

So Australia is negotiating a TPPA with the United States but not China, India and Korea, and a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership with China, India and Korea but not the United States. Emerson didn’t call the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership just “another possible pathway”; it was, he said, “the perfect vehicle for advancing Australia’s interests in the Asian Century.”

In the round of negotiations that created the WTO, three countries or blocs – Japan, the United States and the European Union – called most of the shots. Among the three, it was the United States that negotiators called the “G1.” All are now in different kinds of economic crisis. Japan’s is the longest-running, Europe’s seems the deepest, but it is America’s that is the most unsettling for the multilateral trading system, because it was America, more than anywhere else, that provided its intellectual and political bedrock.

Younger members of the WTO are not so deeply in thrall to the mid-1990s economic policy consensus. Some were less surprised than Alan Greenspan to find its ideological footings unsure, but even some who believed it most profoundly were shaken by the roles that deregulated banks and capital flows played in the Asian meltdown in 1997 and later global financial crisis.

When the WTO’s predecessor, the GATT, was founded in the late 1940s, it had twenty-three members. As it got bigger, the work got harder and the negotiating rounds got longer. Sixty-two countries participated in the three-year Kennedy Round in the early 1960s; 102 in the six-year Tokyo Round in the 1970s. For the Uruguay Round, starting in 1986 and ending in 1994, there were 123 countries. The World Trade Organization they formed now has 157 members and an eleven-year-old Doha Round with no end in sight.

The WTO’s challenge is not just the number and size of the new economies that now are part of it, but the different models of economic progress they have brought. They may have all joined the same organisation and agreed, at least over time, to play by the same rules, but they did not all come with equal passion for its mission to keep liberalising all trade measures for all-comers. Some joined to change it, and change it they have.

WTO headquarters, the Centre William Rappard, is named after a Swiss diplomat and academic, “one of the most articulate and influential voices against collectivism and nationalism… an international man in an age of nationalism.” It was built for the International Labour Office in the 1920s, when the League of Nations was trying to keep the warriors of 1914 at peace. The WTO’s predecessor, the GATT, moved in in 1977.

The United States has always had a complex relationship with multilateralism. It didn’t join the League but hosted the conference in July 1944 at Bretton Woods that laid out the elements of postwar economic order. An International Trade Organisation was one of the three new global economic institutions proposed. The other two, the International Monetary Fund and the organisation that became the World Bank, were both established; their trade counterpart was not. The United States supported the idea strongly at first, determined to turn back the economic protectionism of the 1930s, but enthusiasm waned after a Republican Congress was elected in 1946. Democrat president Harry S. Truman allowed the necessary domestic legislation to lapse in 1950.

In 2012, a presidential election year, the American political system is again a crucial factor in whatever might be done in global and regional trade negotiations. The Democrat platform boasts that “this administration has doubled the rate of trade cases brought against China by the last administration.” On 17 September, China launched a WTO dispute against the United States about “Countervailing and Anti-dumping Measures on Certain Products from China” and the United States started one against China over “Certain Measures Affecting the Automobile and Automobile-Parts Industries.”

Passionate free traders worry about the role the United States is playing in global trade at the moment. Columbia University professor of economics and law Jagdish Bhagwati thinks that “the US has abandoned any pretence of leadership on world trade.” The TPPA, Bhagwati says, “is a political response to China’s new aggressiveness, built therefore in a spirit of confrontation and containment, not of cooperation.” It “is being sold in the US to a compliant media and unsuspecting public as evidence of American leadership on trade. But the opposite is true… The TPP is a testament to the ability of US industrial lobbies, Congress, and presidents to obfuscate public policy.”

This means that the kind of trade deal the United States now wants might be a long way from the kind that other TPPA partners want, or even that it would once have wanted itself.

And the kind of trade deal China wants? Australia has been exploring that since 2005, when a joint feasibility study was completed. It concluded that “there would be significant economic benefits for both Australia and China through the negotiation of [a bilateral free trade agreement].” But a deal, signed and sealed? According to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s website, “The negotiations are complex, covering an array of issues…”

This is what it means to be a middle power in the Asia-Pacific region. •

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What we have learned in the decade-and-a-half since is that some of what happens on the internet is much more accountable. Newspapers, for example, have learned which of their stories attract online readers in a way they never knew offline. Digital technology has given us many better tools to measure what people are doing with media.

But it has also enabled people to do new things with media that are incredibly hard to measure reliably. Audiences and users may have become less knowable at precisely the moment when we thought we finally had the technology to pin them down. Some extraordinary machines have been built to drive that highway to the marketers’ Holy Grail, but the road still winds on and uphill.

THERE are several ways we can try to find out what people are doing with media. We can track them; we can ask them; or we can watch them. Tracking them, recording particular actions, seems the most reliable. We know what they did. The old media of live performance and cinema still provide the cleanest examples. People buy tickets; they watch a show. We record who bought the tickets and can safely assume most watched the whole thing, and once only. If they want the media experience over again, they buy another ticket and we record them again. For audience researchers, that’s about as good as it gets.

Other media products also leave behind a recorded transaction – a book, a newspaper, a magazine, a DVD, a paid music download. But while this tells us who bought the product, it doesn’t tell us as much as a cinema or concert ticket about who listened, watched or read, especially if they did it many times.

Online and mobile digital media seemed more like cinema tickets than CDs, a supremely trackable kind of media use. We record the keystrokes and know the user went to that URL, then this one, then sent an email, then checked the weather, Skyped a relative, paid a bill.

At least, someone knows. The sites that users visit can know a lot about their own visitors: how many of them there are, what countries they visited from, where they were online before they came to the site, how long they stayed, and where they went afterwards. Many site owners do this by installing tools like Google Analytics or by getting someone else like Web Trends or Web Analytics to do it for them. What the organisations using these “on-site analytics” don’t discover directly is what is happening on other sites.

That’s what “off-site analytics” can do. These come from internet service providers or panels of users recruited for the purpose. ISPs can analyse their own data about their users’ activities or provide it to companies like Experian Hitwise, which can in turn supply data to third parties on the behaviour of much larger aggregations of users. Hitwise now says it gathers data from around three million Australian internet users via its ISP partners (though the biggest, Telstra’s BigPond, is not among them), and twenty-five million users worldwide.

Other “off-site” data providers, like Nielsen and ComScore, recruit users to participate in panels chosen to represent the demographic characteristics of the whole user population. The activities of this sample are tracked using software installed on their computers, and aggregated to give an estimate of what all users are doing. By recruiting a particular sample of users, panel measures aim to get closer to the activities of real people with known characteristics, rather than those of whoever happens to be visiting a site or using a particular ISP.

These different methods can be combined. ComScore’s Unified Digital Measurement meth-odology integrates panel and site data. Since late last year, Nielsen has been using a hybrid approach in Australia, incorporating panel data and information gathered from tracking tags placed by publishers on their own web pages. The Interactive Advertising Bureau of Australia appointed Nielsen as the sole and exclusive preferred supplier of online audience measurement services in Australia in May 2011.

These different methods can tell different stories.

RATING the Audience explores the history of the methodologies and conventions governing media measurement from the midst of this contemporary maelstrom. Balnaves, O’Regan and Goldsmith locate the beginnings of systematic audience measurement at the start of radio broadcasting in the 1920s and 30s. Unlike the popular media that preceded it – print, recorded music and cinema – radio listening left no trace beyond the initial decision to buy a receiver and, in some countries, to pay an annual listener licence fee.

The pioneers of radio audience measurement had to come up with a new approach. They decided to ask listeners what they listened to. In an era when most houses had a woman at home during the day, research teams could walk down the street and find, behind most doors they knocked on, someone happy to be asked. Others asked listeners to fill out listening diaries. As more people got telephones, researchers called them up either to ask what they were listening to at the time (“telephone coincidental”) or what they had listened to in the recent past (“telephone recall”).

Developing their methods alongside the pioneers of political polling, these audience researchers had to deal with all the factors that judges in courtrooms are trained to manage. They learned to probe the tricks memories play. Radio listeners might not tell researchers the truth. They might not even know what it was. Did you really listen to the news last night? Or have you forgotten you were late home after a meeting ran over time? Or you were catching up on something else while the dinner cooked? Or chatting about something not nearly as memorable as your normal routine?

Surprising things were discovered. The BBC thought no one dined before eight and was horrified to discover many were finished their evening meals by seven. Audience researchers absorbed these surprises and tested them against their instincts and professionalism and the needs of the parties that wanted their data. Balnaves, O’Regan and Goldsmith attribute “the core of the modern ratings convention” to Archibald Crossley. Hired in 1929 by a group of American radio advertisers, Crossley’s job was to measure the “unseen audience” and develop a mechanism that enabled advertisers to choose which broadcast outlets best reached their target audiences.

Crossley’s system made “exposure” the key measurement. It used a sample of the audience rather than a complete census, produced a “single number” whose “inherent correctness” appealed to all parties, and insisted that any distortion by the ratings provider or subscribers was unacceptable. Crossley’s “telephone recall” ruled in the United States in the 1930s but was overtaken by C.E. Hooper’s “telephone coincidental” system in the early 1940s and then by Arthur C. Nielsen’s “audimeter” later in the decade.

Nielsen was a market researcher who tested new products and determined market shares. Where his predecessors in the ratings game had asked listeners what they did, Nielsen tracked them with an audimeter that picked up and recorded the frequencies radio receivers were tuned to. The information gathered was stored on a wax drum then transferred to film and later solid-state memory. When radio homes started buying television sets in the 1940s and 50s, Nielsen started measuring their use too. His company became a near monopoly in the new medium, eventually leaving radio measurement altogether, which Arbitron came to dominate.

In Britain, where broadcasting itself was a monopoly, the BBC set up a Listener Research Section, later called BBC Audience Research, which rejected the methods being developed in the United States as “one-dimensional and unreliable.” According to Aberystwyth University’s Sian Nicholas, a “Listening Barometer” was developed to measure “pressure rather than heat.” It used weekly returns from volunteer listeners to measure a variety of radio publics rather than a monolithic radio public.

In Australia, there was competition, deep and sustained, between Bill McNair and George Anderson. Initially working for the advertising agent J. Walter Thompson, McNair published the landmark Radio Advertising in Australia in 1937 and built up a ratings business using personal interviews and the recall method. Anderson worked in radio and wanted to know “who was on the other end of the microphone, listening.” In the 1940s, he established a diary system, rejecting the American audimeter as too capital intensive for Australia. The two systems ran in parallel for nearly thirty years (although McNair shifted to diaries in the 1960s), until the two companies merged to form McNair Anderson in 1973.

EMBEDDED in this unusual level of competition in the early decades of Australia’s broadcast ratings, according to the authors of Rating the Audience, was “a perception of checks and balances, even if it was costly to run two methods of audience measurement.” Both suppliers thought their methods were best; the competition drove them to be as good as they could be.

Competing ratings systems are attractive because each helps to keep the others honest and innovative. Technical and methodological innovation might throw up different and perhaps more accurate or commercially powerful pictures of audiences, or the scope for more detailed or timely analysis. A single ratings system is attractive, however, because it delivers an industry consensus about audience size and saves money.

With competing providers, the methodological arguments are fought more publicly, day-by-day, as the providers compete for customers. With a single provider, the methodological tussles are more private, bursting out only occasionally in major assaults on the whole system. Rating the Audience discusses several of these: the contentious decision to choose Television Audience Measurement ahead of Nielsen when the BBC finally got commercial competition in the 1950s; the United States Congressional hearings in the 1960s, after the Quiz Show scandal, which were “traumatising” for the Nielsen witnesses and put some other ratings companies out of business; Australia’s shift from diaries to people-meters for measuring TV viewing in the early 1990s and then to a different kind of meter and a new operator and owner of the ratings data in the early 2000s.

Rating the Audience stresses the frequency of these conflicts and the familiarity of the issues at their heart. Transistor radios allowed mobile listening and made people rather than households the listening units. Video cassette recorders and electronic games players enabled people to do something with TV sets other than watch measured television services. Still, the measurement maelstrom today seems of a different order to those brawls. Some elements of it have been building for decades; others are more recent.

First, what has been building for a long time is the fragmentation of media use. More media options mean smaller numbers tuned in to any one of them. That requires bigger samples if the results are to be statistically reliable and bigger samples cost more money. The internet did not invent this. Until pay TV arrived in the mid 1990s, audiences in the big cities had more radio stations than TV channels to choose from. Radio samples needed to be larger, although the industry’s revenue was smaller. The internet, however, has dramatically increased the electronic choices available to users. Measuring what online and mobile users are doing is more like trying to determine what book they were reading or what record they were playing: no one much bothered to ask that of individual users in analogue media days.

Second, more active audiences strain existing measurement methodologies. New media devices have decreased the simultaneous consumption of most media experiences by large numbers of people but greatly increased the simultaneous consumption of different media experiences by individuals. So media products like TV dramas now gather their audiences over time – on first release, on catch-up TV, DVD and download, and via apps, all measured in different ways – but particular individuals are members of more than one audience or user group at a time – watching a TV program, on Facebook, text messaging.

Service providers, content producers and especially advertisers want to understand not just how many people used their service or watched their show (“consumed their content”) but also what else they were doing at the same time, how engaged they were, if they were letting others know how they felt. For this year’s Olympic Games, the Nine Network is offering its telecast partners and sponsors a “customised real-time cross platform reporting dashboard” integrating “metro and regional TV ratings, online ratings, online video and mobile ratings, App usage, social media buzz and brand health metrics.”

Third, media users engaged in this kind of multi-screen complexity have little time or patience for the kinds of measurement activities used in earlier eras, like completing diaries or pushing buttons on a TV meter. They are tired of being asked, don’t have time to answer and might not think too much before they do. Particularly in some demographic groups, they are less likely to have the telephone landlines whose near universal take-up gave researchers a contactable census from which to draw demographically representative samples. ThinkBox, the marketing body for commercial TV in Britain, recently commissioned a major study that watched its subjects: a research company filmed the living rooms of twenty-three homes and examined over 700 hours of TV viewing for a psycho-psychological analysis of multi-screen behaviour.

Fourth, by leaving their traces with operators like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple, new kinds of media use have created immense, proprietary sources of data about user behaviour to rival those collected from structured panels measuring radio, TV and now online use. For these behemoths, panel data offered by third-party providers provides an interesting second opinion about what internet users are doing, not, like TV ratings, a universal currency broadly accepted by everyone trading in their markets.

SO THE information age has a paradox: more sophisticated tools enable us to know so much more but increasingly complex behaviour means there is so much more we need to understand. Digital media users are easier to track but harder to follow.

This is not just a battle for the media industry whose users are being measured. Balnaves, O’Regan and Goldsmith stress the public as well as private role that ratings providers have always played. The global financial crisis showed how significant the measures of risk determined by information providers like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s were to the decisions made by private traders in financial markets, eventually with immense public consequences.

Data about media use will be directly relevant, for example, to evaluations of the National Broadband Network. Just what people choose to do with much faster broadband is plainly a matter of big political significance, given the role the issue played in the 2010 election and the formation of a minority government. Since then, the Convergence Review has recommended that a new category of major “content service enterprises” should become the target for some forms of regulation that previously applied only to TV and radio licensees. One of the elements proposed for determining exactly which “content service enterprises” is the size of their audiences. If the recommendation is adopted, we’ll need an agreed way to measure that.

Rating the Audience’s historical perspective on contemporary media measurement highlights both its unprecedented elements and its familiar complexion. By exploring how we got here, the authors remind us of the necessity and the limits of numbers, and of the conflicts and compromises that go into defining those shifty entities sometimes still known as audiences. •

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Tickets seem an unlikely thing to get emotional about. They are, surely, just administrative tags that get us through the door? Ticketmasters shows they are far more important than that, though we might have sensed it already from everyday expressions: cocky people “have tickets on themselves,” good locations are “front row seats,” a popular occasion “standing room only.” Nothing demonstrates a person’s stature or smarts like a pair of great tickets to a sold-out event. Tickets are currency, as valuable and tradeable as the US Treasury’s greenbacks.

It is the currency that Ticketmaster has been especially good at. Established in the United States in 1976, the company first ticketed an Electric Light Orchestra concert in Albuquerque the following year. Twenty-five years later, in 2011, it sold 141 million tickets around the world and nearly as many again through the box offices of its venue clients. Ticketmaster is the official provider of ticketing services for this year’s London Olympics and Paralympics.

They have not always done so well with the emotion. They are the dealer standing between the fans and the bands, the people popularly pilloried for taking a day to answer the phone (78 per cent of their tickets are now sold online, just 7 per cent by phone, 15 per cent through outlets), sending callers into automatic voice recognition systems that recognise everything except the caller’s voice, having only the restricted-view seats left, charging like wounded bulls for them, and adding a surcharge they call, without irony, a “service fee.”

Music journalists Dean Budnick and Josh Baron, executive editor and editor-in-chief respectively of Relix magazine, have done a wonderful job of explaining the labyrinthine, oddly emotional business of ticketing and its migration over the last half century from the bureaucracy of the “box office” to a business of its own. The story is partly about technology enabling things that weren’t possible before networked computers, but it is crucially about particular business models and corporate relationships and the people who created and challenged them.

The “free” market for concert tickets has been structured and restructured in ways that have not always served consumers well. But their power to change those structures, while still getting to see the bands they love, is limited.

MAIL order, ticket agencies in major hotels and the telephone had long allowed people to book tickets to shows without going to the box office. Computers, especially networked computers, offered new possibilities. The pioneers in the 1960s and 70s saw these opportunities differently. A company called Select-A-Seat thought people would like to choose the exact seats they would sit in rather than taking the ticket-seller’s idea of “best available.” It thought it could make money by selling ticketing software to theatres. Control Data saw the chance to sell or rent a lot of computers, and backed a company called Ticket Reservation Systems, later Ticketron. Computer Sciences Corporation invested in a system called Computicket.

None of these initiatives came from theatres themselves. Electronic ticketing companies were independent enterprises that needed to pitch the benefits of their systems to the people who put on shows. They had to promise something: to cut theatres’ costs or to increase their revenues, perhaps by selling more tickets or improving the experience so consumers would pay extra for it. Each of these occurred, but it was the last that was most transforming.

Ticketmaster, which became Ticketron’s main competitor and eventual conqueror, had another approach. An accountant, later its chief operating officer, called it “Ticketing 101”:

Fred [Rosen, Ticketmaster’s CEO for most of the 1980s and 90s] came in and said, “Right now you have a cost centre, it’s called your box office. You pay for the equipment and you have to pay for the labour to sell the tickets. I’m going to give you the equipment for free. I’m going to equip your entire office with terminals. I’m going to teach your people how to sell tickets over those terminals and I’m going to support those people. What I’m going to ask you to do is close down the first day of sale on concerts and let me sell those tickets through my outlets [in places like record and department stores]. So now you don’t even have to pay the labour on the first day of sale. But if that’s not enough, I’m going to give you a piece of every ticket I sell. So I’ve just turned your cost centre into a profit centre.”

The “piece of every ticket” was the “service fee.” All the nascent ticketing companies charged them. Ticketmaster’s breakthrough, “what did in Ticketron,” was to see the service fee as the instrument for changing the relationship between the people who put on the shows and the people who sold the tickets. First, the service fee could be whatever you wanted it to be, so long as the consumer would wear it. Second, paying venues a share meant they were less likely to complain about it.

Over time, Ticketmaster started paying venues advances against their shares of service fee revenue, entering into multi-year deals with venues that committed to use Ticketmaster’s services exclusively. Venue operators used those advances to upgrade their facilities, or to put in their pockets. While some competitors survived, Ticketmaster benefited from significant network effects. The more venues it had exclusive arrangements with, the more consumers came to expect to be able to buy tickets from Ticketmaster for the acts they wanted to see. The bigger and more prestigious the venues Ticketmaster controlled, the harder it became for bands to tour without them.

AS Ticketmaster’s power grew, a major band that wanted to tour the United States but didn’t want Ticketmaster handling its ticketing would have to play hokey venues where its fans might not want to go. Some bands confronted this power. The chapters of the book that describe these battles are enthralling vignettes in the long and messy history of conflict between the emotion and business of music.

The Grateful Dead was a class all of its own, “sui generis” as the lawyers might say. It founded its own ticketing service on a mailing list of “Deadheads” that numbered 25,000 by the late 1970s. Formed for several reasons, not least that the band’s ageing fans now had more jobs and kids and less time to stand in queues, GDTS started doing its own fan-friendly mail order ticketing for blocks of tickets to Grateful Dead shows, and ended up in a full-scale confrontation with Ticketmaster. Like the taping and trading of live performances that the band encouraged, GDTS became a significant part of the fan experience. Staff and volunteers would allocate rows of seats boy/girl/boy/girl or fill them with fans sharing the same first name or visiting from the same out-of-town location. Eventually, GDTS was insisting on an allocation of 50 per cent of the seats at every show, even in notionally exclusive Ticketmaster venues. Though troubled about the precedent it set and determined to keep it a unique arrangement for a unique band, Ticketmaster let the Grateful Dead get away with it until their last concert in 1995.

Pearl Jam was a different matter. Releasing its first album Ten in 1991, the band became one of the hottest acts around. It had several run-ins with Ticketmaster, but particularly objected to the size of its service fees. When it started exploring other ticketing options, Ticketmaster made it clear it would insist on the exclusivity of its ticketing deals with any venues Pearl Jam wanted to play. There would not be a second Grateful Dead. Pearl Jam cancelled a tour, politicians and the Department of Justice got involved, and the band’s appearance at a public hearing in Washington became “standing room only.” REM’s attorney told the hearing every part of the business – promoters, venues, agents, managers – had competition except one:

At this point in 1994 … there really isn’t any choice. If you want to do a major tour, a major arena level tour in major markets, you have no choice. [Ticketmaster] comes along with the building.

But this was the year Newt Gingrich’s Republicans overwhelmed Clinton’s Democrats in the mid-term elections. There might have been some political mileage in a “youth” issue, but not enough, and the technical anti-trust case was underwhelming. When the Department of Justice talked with Ticketmaster’s venue clients, it found they liked the status quo. Their contracts typically ran for three to five years, they put them to tender when they came up for renewal, and the system of revenue sharing, signing bonuses and service fee advances from Ticketmaster suited them. Pearl Jam’s critics argued that if they wanted lower ticket prices for their fans they should cut the guarantees they were demanding from promoters rather than ask Ticketmaster to cut its service fee. The Department of Justice announced the closure of its investigation in a two-sentence media release.

String Cheese Incident, a “quintet of Colorado ski bums” that got together in 1993, had “a lot of kinship” with the Grateful Dead ticketing model, plus online technology. They set up SCI Ticketing in late 1998 using the TicketWeb platform launched a few years earlier. TicketWeb “turned any PC into a fully functioning box office, complete with call centre.” Ticketmaster bought it in 2000. A year later, SCI Ticketing licensed software from the Australian company Softix, whose platform was used by Ticketmaster’s Australian rival, the Packer-owned Ticketek. As String Cheese Incident, the band, got bigger, they started wanting the bigger venues that came with Ticketmaster’s exclusive deals: nearly 90 per cent of the top fifty arenas and top fifty amphitheatres in the United States and 70–75 per cent of the top theatres and clubs.

In 2003, they filed a civil law suit against Ticketmaster, alleging infringements of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The band was “not saying Ticketmaster doesn’t have a place in the ticketing business, but we have a different philosophy of doing business, one that caters directly to our fans.” Eventually Ticketmaster offered to settle, allowing the band, among other things, to sell 50 per cent of the tickets to its own shows just like the Grateful Dead, although there was to be no crowing. Some were uncomfortable accepting the offer, seeing it as a failure to seize the opportunity “to really take [Ticketmaster] the full length and uncover some stuff and really help restore some balance to the industry.” But bands want to play music, String Cheese Incident were being offered everything they had asked for, and settle they did.

THE many owners Ticketmaster has had over its four decades reveal different strategic visions. Jay Pritzker, the head of Hyatt Hotels, bought the company in the early 1980s. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen acquired a controlling interest in the mid nineties, presciently seeing the opportunity for e-ticketing to be a “killer app” of internet commerce. Then Barry Diller, the head of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox in the 1970s and 80s, brought Ticketmaster into the “interactive commerce conglomerate” that came to be called IAC/InterActiveCorp, which controls Match.com and Vimeo.

In Australia, Ticketmaster’s operation has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the international company since 2005, when the Seven Network sold out of the half share it acquired in the late nineties internet boom (“Ticketmaster7”). The US group bought into Australia when the Victorian government partly privatised BASS Victoria, part of the pioneering online ticketing organisation in Australia (originally the “Bay Area Seating Service” in San Francisco and later “Best Available Seating Service”). BASS still operates in arts and entertainment in South Australia.

Ticketmaster Australia’s main competitor is Ticketek, a wholly owned subsidiary of Nine Entertainment Co, which also owns the Nine Network, ACP Magazines and Allphones Arena, the indoor stadium where the basketball finals were held at the Sydney Olympics. The two supply ticketing services to some of the country’s main venues and events: in Melbourne, for example, Ticketek has the MCG and Rod Laver and Hisense Arenas; Ticketmaster has Etihad and AAMI Stadiums, the Arts Centre and the Comedy Festival.

It is the global Ticketmaster’s latest ownership permutation that troubles Budnick and Baron most. In 2010, it merged with Live Nation, becoming a division of the Los Angeles–based entertainment and e-commerce conglomerate, Live Nation Entertainment. This consolidated the world’s biggest concert promoter and the world’s biggest management group (Frontline Management, bought from Warner Music Group in 2008) under the same roof with the world’s largest ticketing services company.

The company made a small operating profit in 2011, but a net loss of $83 million after interest expenses. The concerts division made an operating loss of over $100 million; Ticketmaster and the Sponsorships divisions each made operating profits of nearly $120 million. The theory behind the multi-divisional Live Nation behemoth was that the synergies between the businesses would make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts. Big acts would undertake big tours with big sponsors and advertisers in the big venues that Live Nation and Ticketmaster controlled. It was the music industry’s answer to the file-sharing and downloading era, when consumers buy less music and pay lower prices for it when they do.

But vast amounts are now guaranteed to the big acts to keep the vast machine running. So far, they are too big to be made up through all the promised synergies with the rest of the Live Nation conglomerate, if the cost of the debt taken on to assemble the integrated business is taken into account. Some see the merger as the concert industry’s AOL/Time Warner – the “synergy” deal that marked the peak of the internet boom.

The numbers in the concert business are extraordinary. The Rolling Stones were offered a guarantee of $65 million for their fifty-date Steel Wheels Tour as far back as 1989, a “game-changing” deal unlike the venue-by-venue deals done with individual promoters in the past. The band ended up doing much better than the minimum guarantee, netting more than $260 million for the tour, a record at the time. Rod Stewart was getting a guarantee of $175,000 to $250,000 per show in the early 1990s. That went up to $350,000 to $400,000 as the corporate relationships and the kinds of deals changed. In 1981, according to Budnick and Baron, the top 1 per cent of artists took 26 per cent of US domestic concert revenue; by 2003, still well before the creation of Live Nation Entertainment, they were accounting for 56 per cent.

It’s not clear whether the sums being paid for the major acts can be recouped even through the many revenue streams available to a conglomerate like Live Nation. It is, however, absolutely clear that one of the strategies has been to significantly increase the amounts consumers pay. Here, the networked computer that has helped to transform the business so fundamentally over the last thirty-five years is again a crucial tool. Everyone always knew some seats were more valuable than others; now information technology makes “secondary markets” easier to operate and “dynamic pricing” a practical reality. Concert tickets, especially for premium seating, can become commodities like hotel beds and airline seats, rising and falling in price hour-by-hour, day-by-day as ticketing IT systems manage the inventory to maximise yield.

Ticketmaster will get the blame, but the story will always be at least a little more complex. As a famous New York “friends and family” ticket dealer told Paul McCartney, there’s no such thing as a sold-out show. People have been making money out of that for a long time, arguing, like today’s Ticketmaster, that the true monopolist, the one who really gets to call the shots, is the great artist. •

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IMAGINE a line-up of very young babies, all just four months old. Your job is to predict which ones will turn out to be introverts and which ones extroverts.

Experimentation is allowed, so you decide to test their reactions to sounds, sights and smells. Tape-recorded voices are played and balloons are popped. Colourful mobiles dance in front of their eyes. Cotton swabs are doused in alcohol and placed near their noses.

One in every five babies cries lustily and pumps its arms and legs. These will be the extroverts, right? And the two in five who stay placid, moving their limbs a little but without all the drama, will be the introverts? (The other two in five fall between the extremes.)

Wrong, says Jerome Kagan, a professor at the Laboratory for Child Development at Harvard, whose research and ideas are one of the foundations of Susan Cain’s Quiet. Kagan has been running longitudinal studies of temperament for decades. He conducted these very experiments with young babies, then brought the same children back to his lab for more tests at two, four, seven and eleven years old.

Kagan found that the infant limb-pumpers were more likely to turn into quiet, introverted children, and the quietest babies tended to become relaxed, confident extroverts. This seems counter­intuitive, but it was just what Kagan had been expecting. He had a hypothesis about the biology of the very responsive babies, whom he called “high-reactive,” and the unresponsive ones, whom he billed “low-reactive.”

The sensitivity of the nervous systems of the high-reactives seemed to be linked not just to noticing novel or scary things but also to noticing in general. To high-reactive babies and children, the world could be impossibly stimulating. They would see danger where others didn’t, and complexity where others found simplicity or nothing at all. They would be at home with puzzles, the more complicated the better. They would sense rejection where others felt acceptance and jubilation when others were unmoved, be alert and absorbed when others were bored, and feel deeply about things that others hardly noticed. High-reactives brought “an extra degree of nuance to everyday experiences.”

Children with this temperament could find it hard to fit in. Cain quotes one high-reactive child’s solution to the everyday puzzle of how to share toys in a group: “Alphabetise their last names and let the person closest to A go first.” (My prediction: The rest of the kids would instinctively implement a shambolic first-come-first-served scheme, and the extroverts would get the best toys. The high-reactive would despair, feeling deeply that alphabetising surnames was a fairer way to do it. She would be bewildered that others couldn’t see it and seek solace in inner worlds and private games where she could control things better.)

Despite the strength of his conclusions, Kagan insisted that high- and low-reactivity were not the only routes to introversion and extroversion. Indeed, when Cain went to interview him, he got testy about how people over-simplified his results in ways that implied a person’s temperament was necessarily their destiny. A child’s environment and experiences go to work on its temperamental predisposition. High-reactives don’t all end up intense introverts, although a quarter of Kagan’s apparently suffer from “social anxiety disorder,” a chronic and disabling form of shyness.

According to one of his “colleagues and protégés,” however, the influence of a high- or low-reactive temperament “never fully disappears in adulthood.” Carl Schwartz, director of the Developmental Neuroimaging and Psychopathology Research Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, retested Kagan’s kids as adults. In Cain’s words, he found that “we can stretch our personalities but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead.”

SUSAN CAIN says that a third to a half of all Americans are introverts. Through history, the world’s introverts have included people like Moses, Albert Einstein and Charlie Brown.

Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, took care of them in the desert for forty years and turned up the Ten Commandments. How? Not by giving PowerPoint presentations to venture capitalists and setting big, hairy, audacious goals. He climbed a mountain and took careful dictation.

Albert Einstein once said, “I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork,” and on another occasion, “It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s that I stay with problems longer.” And Charlie Brown’s introversion, according to one website, means that “he constantly rehearse[s] what he will say to the little redheaded girl” but also “prevents him from actually delivering the goods.”

Cain is an introvert herself and she’s naturally drawn to these people. But she needed to learn more about extroverts, so she headed off to “the Spiritual Capital of Extroversion,” Harvard Business School. Students go there partly to study but mainly to build a personal network that will last a lifetime. By day, they are consumed in group exercises. By night, socialising is “an extreme sport.” “Isn’t there anyone on the quieter side?” Cain asks one student. “I couldn’t tell you,” he replies.

The essence of a Harvard Business School education is to teach students to “act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information.” Of course, no decision-maker will ever have complete information, even in hindsight. So what should they do? Act now? Or ask more questions, collect more data? “By hesitating, do you risk losing others’ trust and your own momentum?” asks Cain. “If you speak firmly on the basis of bad information, you can lead your people into disaster. But if you exude uncertainty, then morale suffers, funders won’t invest, and your organisation can collapse.”

The choice takes us some way beyond introversion and extroversion, but Cain believes this aspect of our personality is especially important.

HORSES are the most sensitive of creatures, but two dozen of them galloping down the home straight at Flemington make a sound like thunder. The Melbourne Cup is watched and listened to all over Australia and the world, but the Cups King, Bart Cummings, is a quiet man.

“He never said a lot, but he listened a lot,” jockey Roy Higgins told Les Carlyon, a journalist who has watched Cummings close up since he started winning Melbourne Cups in the 1960s and has now written a “personal portrait” of The Master.

“He’d throw you a question relevant to the horse, a short, sharp question, and he’d just stop and listen,” says Higgins. “Most of the time he wouldn’t be looking you in the eye – he’d probably be looking at a horse walking around or having a pick of grass. Everything was dead quiet and he’d take in every bloody word you said. He could absorb.”

First taking Australia’s richest race with Light Fingers in 1965, Cummings has trained a Melbourne Cup winner, on average, every four years since. Twelve Cups is “what elevates him to the highest place in the pantheon,” says Carlyon. It’s “as freakish as Bradman.”

If Susan Cain and Jerome Kagan are right, Cummings could have been a hell of a limb-pumper at four months. He seems a classic introvert and Carlyon’s portrait is full of quietude. The 1950 Cup winner trained by Bart’s father Jim, Comic Court, was “the quietest loveliest” horse. The son’s “exquisite colt” Beau Zam was “the sweetest of horses”; 1996 Cox Plate and Melbourne Cup winner Saintly “the most docile, quietist horse ever,” at least until he stepped onto a racetrack.

Bart’s father taught him “that horses were a puzzle waiting to be worked out and Cummings, who had extraordinary powers of observation (and not just with horses), was always staring and speculating, cross-examining his track riders, picking up hoofs, changing bits, looking in the unlikeliest places for the clue that might unlock the puzzle.” Cummings “lived in his solitary world and answered only to himself. He was patient to the point of being perverse about it,” though that should not obscure his “fanatical intensity” or ruthless competitive spirit.

A couple of times we see and hear Bart let things out, but they are hardly fireworks. In 1988, when Beau Zam won the St Leger at Randwick by ten lengths, Cummings, unusually, led in his own horse. “Too much post-race hysteria tends to frighten the horses and the horses are the real heroes,” Carlyon thinks.

Then in 2010, after perhaps the best horse he’d ever trained, So You Think, was sold by its owner and lost to his stable while Cummings was in hospital, Bart said the owner’s racing manager “talked [the owner] into it while I wasn’t there. He did it while I was in hospital – that was the worst part.” This was not just any owner, it was Cummings’s most successful, Dato’ Tan Chin Nam, for whom the Master won four Cups: Think Big (twice, in 1974 and 75), Saintly and Viewed (2008). They’d sought and worked horses together for four decades, found one “about as near to perfect as possible,” and suddenly it was gone.

In the recession of the late 1980s, Cummings was almost ruined financially when a scheme to buy yearlings and sell off units to investors collapsed. A fire sale of the horses raised $11 million less than the debts run up to buy them. Cummings had shaken hands with his partners and thought they were working together in a joint venture; the Federal Court found the debts were all Bart’s. The Master was on his own.

A scheme of arrangement was worked out with creditors. Cummings went back to what he was best at. Let’s Elope won the 1991 Caulfield and Melbourne Cups double.

INTROVERSION is not shyness, although they might look the same. Shyness, says Cain, is “the fear of social disapproval or humiliation.” Introversion is just a “preference for environments that are not over-stimulating,” what writer Winifred Gallagher calls “the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them.”

So, Cain argues, we can have shy extroverts like Barbra Streisand, a larger-than-life personality paralysed by stage fright, and non-shy introverts like Bill Gates, who apparently keeps to himself but is not fussed by the opinions of others.

Introversion and extroversion are not inherently good or bad, as the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator stresses. A favourite tool for those off-site corporate team-building exercises, Myers-Briggs identifies an individual’s preference for introversion or extroversion as one of four personal “dichotomies” specified or implicit in Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types.

Myers-Briggs calls it “Favourite World.” Do you prefer to focus on the outer world (extroversion) or on your own inner world (introversion)? The other three are about information (sensing/intuition), decisions (thinking/feeling) and structure (judging/perceiving). These attributes can be combined in sixteen different ways, corresponding to different personality types. Charlie Brown, for example, was probably an ISFP: “a very low need to lead and control others, and yet driven by a desire to see everything – plants, animals, and people – living harmoniously,” according to one description.

Explains the Myers & Briggs Foundation:

Personality type is what you prefer when you are using your mind or focusing your attention. Studies and experience have shown that there are consistent patterns for each person. For example, one pair of preferences is about whether you choose to spend more time in the outside world or more time in your inner world. We call this a preference for Extroversion or Introversion. Neither is wrong. You can do both. You just prefer one.

Read the publicity and op-eds about Quiet and you get the impression Susan Cain wants an open season on extroversion. Out with brainstorming sessions, groupthink, open-plan offices and the bankers who led us into the GFC without listening to the quiet guys who saw it coming.

She doesn’t. She cites a lot of research studies that simply found brainstorming is not what it’s cracked up to be. Loudly expressed ideas prevail over good ones. Pumped-up participants believe they have performed better than they have. But getting the team together to toss around ideas might still be a worthy goal, so long as a feast of great, fresh ideas is not thought to be the principal benefit.

Cain also cites research studies that show brainstorming does work online. When online groups are properly managed, they do better than individuals, and the larger the group the better it performs. Academic researchers who work together electronically, from different physical locations, have also been found to produce research that goes on to become more influential than the findings of those working alone or collaborating face-to-face.

That’s a huge qualification to the initial idea about the ineffectiveness of brainstorming. The “world that can’t stop talking” has a lot to do with the pervasiveness of information technology, but IT is also bringing productive new ways for introverts to contribute alongside its extroverted demands for people to be noisier.

Cain just worries that we’re now so impressed by the power of online collaboration that we’ve come to overvalue all group work at the expense of solo thought. “Introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation… We failed to realise that what makes sense for the asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the internet might not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically noisy confines of an open-plan office.”

As for the quiet guys who anticipated the GFC, Australians could point out that the developed country that got through it best decided to “Go Early, Go Hard, Go Households.” Extroverts got us into this and now they had a plan to get us out of it.

Cain would probably not demur. She’s not asking us to stop doing things. She married an extrovert herself and wouldn’t have it any other way. Her point is just that, at least in her country, the United States, “we tend to overvalue buzz and discount the risk of rewards-sensitivity: we need to find a balance between action and reflection.”

The final chapters of the book are full of quiet, practical advice for people whose natural disposition is to “stop to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them.”

THE paradox of Bart Cummings, says Les Carlyon, is that “a shy man, a man happy in his own solitary world, a man not given to speeches, is the racing figure everyone always wants to interview. The man who shies away from the media has somehow become a media darling. The world changes and he stays the same; other people look dated and he looks timeless.”

Cummings belongs “to the era of Don Bradman, when it was thought proper for sports heroes to be humble, and when they didn’t use social networking sites and a forest of exclamation marks to tell us about their trip to the supermarket.” Yet “Bart” has not needed a surname since he won his first three Melbourne Cups in a row in the mid 1960s. “Racing [is] smaller and he [is] bigger.”

Susan Cain has learned to front the corporate training sessions and conferences that once terrified her. She knows she wouldn’t have got a contract to write Quiet unless the publisher had thought she could do chat shows and book launches to sell it. “It’s not true that I’m no longer shy; I’ve just learned to talk myself down from the ledge.” She’s even done a TED Talk, one of those Everests of Internet Age extroversion.

At a workshop at the Public Speaking–Social Anxiety Center of New York, the instructor told her: “There are only a few people out there who can completely overcome their fears, and they all live in Tibet.” The secret to life, Cain now thinks, “is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk.”

Bart Cummings has spent a long time in the spotlight but a longer time on dark mornings watching those big, sensitive puzzles gallop around Morphettville and Flemington and Randwick.

“You had a tear in your eye?” asked a reporter after Saintly won his Melbourne Cup:

Cummings: Yeah, didn’t have enough on it…

Reporter: Some said Saintly couldn’t stay?

Cummings: He told me to tell you he can now…

Reporter: How good is Saintly?

Cummings: Quite a nice horse. •

The post Quiet, please appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN governments around the world decided to open their broadcasting and telecommunications markets to competition, they needed people who could make something of the moment. Some countries got the neighbours, nearby monopolies facing competition in their own markets. Others got distant giants used to serving cities bigger than many of the newly liberalising national markets. A lot got Denis O’Brien.

A child of a Protestant mother and a Catholic father raised in a well-to-do area of south Dublin, O’Brien became part–Rupert Murdoch, part–James Joyce, an entrepreneur-in-exile bullocking his way into once-closed communications markets.

The Irishman won an FM radio licence in Dublin in 1989, then picked up Ireland’s second mobile phone licence in 1995. After selling his telecommunications company at the height of the telecoms and internet boom in early 2000, he got a licence to start a mobile phone service in Jamaica. The new company, Digicel, rapidly expanded across the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the South Pacific, and now operates in thirty-two countries. O’Brien also acquired and was awarded more radio licences in Ireland and Central and Eastern Europe, creating a sizeable international radio empire on the foundation of Dublin’s 98FM.

Along the way, he got a lot of money, some enemies and a big problem. A tribunal established in 1997 to investigate irregular payments to politicians concluded in 2011 that payments made by and on behalf of O’Brien to Michael Lowry, the minister who oversaw the allocation of Ireland’s second 2G mobile licence, “were demonstrably referable to the acts and conduct of Mr Lowry… that inured to the benefit of Mr O’Brien’s winning consortium, Esat Digifone.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions is taking a long look at the findings of the tribunal. (It won’t comment on the status of individual cases.) It was not a court, though it was run by a High Court judge, Michael Moriarty. No charges have been laid against O’Brien or Lowry. O’Brien still runs his companies. He has kept the money and the enemies and set up a website, moriartytribunal.com, to present the “true picture” rather than the “self-serving supposition, hearsay, rumour and biased opinion” that were “hallmarks of the Moriarty Tribunal.” His company won the mobile licence, says O’Brien, “on merit alone.”

BIOGRAPHERS love durable genesis figures – inventors, founders, single-minded visionaries who take the first steps that others follow, then keep stealing every scene. O’Brien is perfect, a big personality who takes big risks, wears some failures, but wins large enough, often enough, to keep the story rolling and building.

O’Brien’s biographer is former Irish Times finance journalist Siobhán Creaton. This book, A Mobile Fortune, follows her account of Ryanair, whose founder Tony Ryan employed O’Brien as a personal assistant when he was running the aircraft-leasing company Guinness Peat Aviation. Ryanair and Digicel are two of Ireland’s most visible global corporate successes. Both moved quickly into industries that had been highly regulated until the 1980s, establishing low-cost operations and launching aggressive, unconventional marketing campaigns.

Before Dublin’s 98FM, O’Brien started a TV shopping channel carried on the British satellite provider, BSkyB. The money ran out before Sky had enough viewers to make the venture profitable. He failed again when he bid for a commercial radio licence to serve the whole of Ireland. The Dublin franchise was a consolation prize. He made a success of it, acquired more stations in Europe and started looking for other opportunities.

Esat Telecom, the telecommunications company he’d established in 1990, was one of the first to sell international calls in competition with Telecom Éireann. The incumbent responded with price discounting to keep the best customers and technical obstruction to slow rivals wanting to interconnect to its network, a strategy right out of the playbook of former monopoly telcos around the world. Esat Telecom retaliated, taking forever to pay its interconnection bills and firing in complaints to the regulator every time one arrived; a customer in arrears couldn’t be disconnected while a complaint was unresolved.

Mobile telecommunications provided an opportunity to blend the customer focus of the young telecoms reseller with the showbiz of FM radio. O’Brien’s Esat Telecom formed a company called Esat Digifone with the Norwegian telco Telenor. Its bid for the mobile licence was delivered through the streets of Dublin in a Viking ship, crewed by twenty-four warriors, carrying the documents in glass boxes. Irish violinist and vocalist Fionnuala Sherry, fresh from victory in the Eurovision Song Contest with a Norwegian band, played the winning song in the street outside the government offices for “stunned” officials.

Within a few months, Digifone had 40 per cent of Ireland’s mobile market. The success stretched its network capacity so much it became known for a time as “Dodgyfone.” While commercially successful, the Irish and the Vikings didn’t get on. Telenor launched a hostile takeover that O’Brien quickly realised he was unlikely to win. Instead, he redirected his energies to finding a buyer for his whole telecommunications business, Esat Telecom, including its stake in Esat Digifone.

He found BT, the formerly state-owned British telco, in early 2000, around the time AOL and Time Warner were getting together. Digifone had paid €19 million for its mobile licence. BT paid nearly €2.5 billion for Esat Telecom about four years after the mobile company started trading. It then mopped up the minority shareholders in Digifone and snatched control of the mobile company from Telenor. O’Brien had lost his telecoms company but his personal share of the sale price was over €300 million.

Shortly before his mobile fortune vested, O’Brien did what so many Irish have done through the ages: he left. Unwilling to hand over a large slice in capital gains tax to the Irish state, he went to live in Portugal and later Malta. He kept the Irish radio stations and played a big role as chairman of the organising committee for the 2003 Summer Special Olympics, held in Dublin, for competitors with intellectual disabilities. This meant travelling back and forth to Ireland regularly, but not so often as to constitute residency in the eyes of the Office of the Revenue Commissioners. Friends warned him it would be an unpopular way to deal with a fortune earned mainly from a briefly held franchise awarded by the Irish government.

DENIS O’BRIEN turns up a couple of times in Michael Lewis’s Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, a book-length collection of articles first published in Vanity Fair about the causes and impacts of the global financial crisis in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California.

O’Brien was deputy governor of the Bank of Ireland for a year from September 2005, three years before the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers. He tells Lewis that he remembers the CEO of the Anglo Irish Bank “coming in and saying ‘We’re going to grow at 30 per cent a year.’ I said how the f—k are you going to do that? Banking is a five-to-seven-percent-a-year growth business at best.” Anglo Irish later admitted losses of €34 billion, nearly half its total loans. This was about a third of the property-related losses sustained by all Irish banks. Anglo Irish’s chairman resigned after it was revealed he had €84 million in loans from his own bank. In January 2009, the bank, with all its losses, was nationalised.

Unlike in Iceland, where men in banks “used foreign money to conquer foreign places,” men in Ireland “used foreign money to conquer Ireland,” writes Lewis. “Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do was buy Ireland. From each other.” Denis O’Brien’s second appearance comes as part of this trade. While serving as a Bank of Ireland director, O’Brien paid €35 million for a house on Dublin’s exclusive Shrewsbury Road. It was reported to be the second-highest price ever paid for a house in Dublin, on a street that, for a time, was one of the most expensive in the world. Since then, prices are reported to have fallen more than 50 per cent.

The Irish government’s “odd but suicidal” decision in September 2008 to underwrite the losses of its banks was, according to Lewis, “a single decision that sank Ireland.” The “Celtic Tiger,” a nation “that had finally clawed its way out of centuries of indentured servitude [was thrown] back into indentured servitude.”

Trying to explain the government’s decision, Lewis concludes it was about family. He thinks the “way entire countries jumped when the money was made freely available to them obviously told you a lot about them: their desires, their constraints, their secret sense of themselves. How they reacted when the money was taken away was equally revealing… In Ireland the money was borrowed by a few banks, and yet the people seem not only willing to repay it but to do so without so much as a small moan.”

An American, Lewis is struck by two things in Ireland: “how small it is [4.6 million people in 2011, about the same size as Sydney] and how tight-lipped… The famous Irish gift of the gab is a cover for all the things they aren’t telling you.”

O’BRIEN loves a stoush. In many Caribbean countries, his company Digicel confronted the same competitor: Cable and Wireless. In the late twentieth century, this London-based descendant of the Victorian-era Eastern Telegraph Company still had mini-monopolies in former British colonies all over the old, global empire.

Digicel fought a savage battle over the Caribbean’s sponsorship jewel, the West Indies cricket team. Cable and Wireless claimed that the West Indies Cricket Board breached its longstanding sponsorship arrangement by negotiating behind its back with Digicel. After Digicel won a five-year deal with the board in 2004, Cable and Wireless signed individual endorsement deals with seven players including captain Brian Lara. They proved reluctant to support Digicel’s team sponsorship; the board dropped them from the side.

A Cable and Wireless executive told Creaton that at one attempted mediation meeting chaired by the prime minister of Grenada, O’Brien “was accusing Cable and Wireless of being a colonial power, of misusing the people of the Caribbean for a hundred years.” The executive thought it “very unseemly.”

Back in Ireland, O’Brien took on a local legend, Sir Anthony (once Tony) O’Reilly. A 1950s British and Irish Lions rugby great knighted in 2001 by Britain’s queen, O’Reilly had turned Kerrygold Butter into a major Irish export product, become chief executive and later chairman of the US food giant H.J. Heinz (the first non-Heinz-family chairman), and become chairman and a major shareholder in the famous glass, porcelain and china makers Waterford Wedgwood (which went into receivership in 2009 and was bought by a US private equity firm). He built the Irish-based Independent News and Media, or IN&M, into a large international media enterprise with interests in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Britain.

O’Brien hated the coverage he got in O’Reilly’s newspapers. In 2006, he started accumulating a stake in IN&M. He is now the largest shareholder. It gave him the power to push the septuagenarian O’Reilly into retirement (son Gavin O’Reilly took over as CEO) and to appoint his own representatives to the board, although the stake in a declining newspaper business is now worth only a fraction of what he paid for it.

When O’Brien confronted O’Reilly in early 2009 about the direction of the company, Creaton writes, he refused to meet at O’Reilly’s County Kildare mansion, Castlemartin, but agreed to come to the IN&M boss’s Georgian townhouse in Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Square. They met on the morning of the England–Ireland rugby match at Croke Park, the scene of Bloody Sunday in 1920 and the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association, where the hurling and Gaelic football championship finals are played. Rugby and other English “garrison” sports like soccer and cricket are not normally played at Croke Park; an historic exception had been made while the usual rugby venue, Lansdowne Road, was being redeveloped. O’Brien and O’Reilly didn’t make much progress but the Irish won the match by a point.

DENIS O’Brien could be squeezed into one of those national stereotypes that Michael Lewis’s Boomerang relishes – insular Icelanders surviving winters of eternal darkness, lazy and corrupt Greeks, obsessive Germans, crazy Californians redeem-ed by a single firefighter who thinks he can turn it all around. O’Brien could be the hard-drinking, hard-fighting Dubliner, except that’s not Lewis’s image of the Irish and it’s not nearly adequate to describe O’Brien’s achievements.

“The Irish insistence on their Irishness – their conceit that they are more devoted to their homeland than the typical citizen of the world – has an element of bluster about it, from top to bottom,” Lewis writes. “At the top are the many Irish people who emit noisy patriotic sounds but arrange officially to live elsewhere so they don’t have to pay tax in Ireland; at the bottom, the waves of immigration that define Irish history. The Irish people and their country are like lovers whose passion is heightened by their suspicion that they will probably wind up leaving each other. Their loud patriotism is a cargo ship for their doubt.”

Denis O’Brien’s Digicel is one of the companies that enabled many people in small, poor countries to make telephone calls for the first time. That changed lives, businesses, families. Mobile networks were faster and cheaper to build than fixed-line networks, and the companies awarded new licences to build and operate them were often the first competitors in national telecommunications markets. Territories like Jamaica, Haiti and Papua New Guinea were very, very tough places to survive in, let alone start businesses.

It took a special kind of enterprise to convince the governments of these former colonial states to open their markets, to win the new franchises, and then to survive and prosper against well-connected former monopolists.

Even someone sceptical about national stereotypes might be tempted to think that the Irishman O’Brien was especially well-qualified for this kind of struggle. Communications ministers around the world could have been attracted to him not just because of the charm, the craic, the gift-of-the-gab, but also because they felt he had what it would take to confront deeply entrenched power.

What Denis O’Brien did to confront one piece of power – what it really took to win that mobile franchise back at the start, around the time Ireland was severing its past and becoming the Celtic Tiger – is now up to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in Dublin. It needs to decide if O’Brien has a case to answer and if anyone inside the now fallen tiger wants to find out and tell. •

The post Mobile fortunes appeared first on Inside Story.

As he covered the wrestling at Sydney Stadium for radio station 2UW, listeners might have imagined Angles was “standing tiptoe with excitement, every nerve alert, every muscle taut, his face working violently in the unfolding of the drama.” But at most, Angles merely smiled. “No matter what he was thinking, no matter what terrific emotions were wringing his soul, Cyril’s face would reveal nothing… Perched uncomfortably in his little iron grating above the ring… his kindly face with its little blue eyes twinklingly alive, his top-notch of curly black hair and his mouth going turkey-gobblers,” Angles was “the personification of commentatorial efficiency.”

Angles saw and spoke. Audiences for the new medium of radio broadcasting listened, and imagined the scenes he was watching, distant intruders on the spectacle. Sydney’s racecourses, however, did not welcome Angles’s gaze. When the practice of broadcasting from the track began to affect race-day crowd numbers, the clubs printed new tickets. These were contracts, prohibiting everyone paying the price of admission from communicating descriptions or results to anyone off-course until five minutes after the last race. Any infringers were immediately deemed trespassers.

Angles and others responded by investing in more elaborate infrastructure outside the tracks, where they could still get good views of the action with binoculars. Connected by telephone to the 2UW studio, there was a Moreton Bay fig at Warwick Farm, a chair on a table on the back of a truck at Rosehill and, across the road from the Victoria Park racecourse, a five-metre wooden tower constructed on George Taylor’s land in Dowling Street, North Kensington. It was the view from this tower that got lawyers around the world watching and listening.

In mid-1936, Victoria Park commenced legal action against Taylor, Angles and 2UW. Although these defendants had committed no trespass, Victoria Park argued they had still affected the use and enjoyment of its land, infringing the law of nuisance.

Smith’s Weekly called it “a struggle between every sporting organisation in the world and every broadcasting station in the world,” a “novel test of the adaptability of the common law of England to meet the changing circumstances which speed progress and prevent stagnation in the community.”

The case was dismissed, first in the Supreme Court of New South Wales and then on appeal by a narrow majority in the High Court of Australia. Chief justice John Latham thought Taylor, Angles and 2UW had not undermined the Victoria Park racing club’s ability to use and enjoy its land. The racecourse was “as suitable as ever it was for use as a racecourse.” Any person was entitled to look over the fence to see what went on. If Victoria Park was unhappy, it could build a higher fence. “The law cannot… erect fences which the plaintiff is not prepared to provide.”

No wrong was done, either, by describing to others what went on, even to as wide an audience as possible. Latham dismissed the idea that the club had some kind of quasi- property right in the spectacles it organised. This would prevent people “from opening their eyes and seeing something and then describing what they see.”

Justice George Rich disagreed. There was, he thought, “a limit to this right of overlooking.” He was influenced by the looming arrival of a new kind of broadcasting: television. Just two months after the High Court’s decision, the BBC commenced a regular public television service in London, although it was twenty years before Australians got permanent services. “The prospects of television,” Rich said, “make our present decision a very important one, and I venture to think that the advance of that art may force the courts to recognise that protection against the complete exposure of the doings of the individual may be a right indispensable to the enjoyment of life.”

Only one other judge, Herbert Vere Evatt, shared this view. Latham, however, had two supporters, Owen Dixon and Edward McTiernan. It was their view that prevailed. The law would not prevent Australians “from opening their eyes and seeing something and then describing what they see.”

ABC boss Charles Moses reported to the BBC that the matter was “almost certain to go to the Privy Council and quite likely to be reversed.” He was right on the first point but not the second. A few months after the Privy Council refused an application to hear an appeal, Angles and other 2UW stars were bigger than ever, broadcasting not just from Victoria Park and Warwick Farm, but live from the tigers’ cage at Wirths Circus.

GENERATIONS of Australian lawyers brought up on Victoria Park v Taylor and Others thought Australians had no enforceable general right of privacy. They may have been wrong in 1937 and they are even more likely to be wrong today, though not completely.

When a Tasmanian abattoir tried to stop the ABC’s 7.30 Report broadcasting unauthorised footage of its operations in 1999, a majority of High Court judges gave a Victoria Park-like answer. Images and sounds of the processes employed to turn brush-tailed possums into exportable pet food had been obtained by someone other than the ABC and passed on to the broadcaster by Animal Liberation. The pictures were not pretty.

Unlike Victoria Park, the installation of cameras and audio recording equipment clearly involved trespass, though not by the broadcaster. The abattoir could have succeeded in an action for trespass against whoever took the footage, had their identity been known, but a majority of judges would not prevent the ABC transmitting what the unauthorised cameras caught.

Some of the judges, however, said that those who thought Australians had no enforceable, general right of privacy might have taken too much from Victoria Park. The racecourse proprietor was not a person wanting privacy but a corporation seeking “the rights to a particular kind of publicity.” Its sensitivity was “pocketbook sensitivity.” Similarly, the abattoir operator was not an individual defending some concept of personal privacy but a business worried about the commercial consequences of public exposure of its controversial, though entirely legal, killing processes. A person “genuinely seeking seclusion from surveillance and communication of what surveillance reveals” – in the chief justice’s example, “a film of a man in his underpants in his bedroom” – might find the courts more sympathetic. Since then, judges in Queensland and Victoria have regarded these comments from what is now Australia’s highest court as clear enough for cases to be decided in favour of plaintiffs claiming a right of privacy. These lower courts acted as if an enforceable right of privacy was part of Australian law.

In its review of Australian privacy law, For Your Information, published in May 2008, the Australian Law Reform Commission argued it was time to remove any lingering uncertainty. George Rich’s moment had come.

Protection against the complete exposure of the doings of the individual has become a right indispensable to the enjoyment of life. In the last of its seventy-four chapters, the ALRC recommended that a cause of action for a “serious invasion of privacy” should be introduced. Federal law should erect a fence higher than those that people provide for themselves.

SOME think it is too late for such construction. “For most people, privacy will end in 2013, or a little beyond that,” according to Alex Fuss, a researcher at global IT services company CSC. “Privacy will be available, but only to those who can afford to pay for it.” If he is right, there are three ways of responding: get over it, get on with it or get out of it. “Get over it! You have zero privacy anyway” is the approach famously attributed to Sun Microsystems boss Scott McNealy over a decade ago. Village societies always knew everything about everybody. What privacy there was accrued only to those wealthy enough to afford walls and rooms of their own.

The authors of Blown to Bits and The Spy in the Coffee Machine are get-on-with-it types. If there was ever a time to turn off the array of intrusive technologies and practices that are so much a part of daily life in developed countries, it has passed.

These books are about the opportunities and threats this presents. On balance, the authors are more enthusiastic about the opportunities than troubled by the threats. They want to get on with developing new solutions to the privacy problems posed, rather than suggest, as do the get-over-its, that they don’t exist or, like the get-out-of-its, that efforts to erect impenetrable fences around individuals need to be redoubled.

Blown to Bits is about the whole digital transformation, not just privacy. Its chapter on the subject asks, Why We Lost Our Privacy or Gave It Away? The authors think it happened “because we judge, perhaps without thinking about it very much, that the benefits outweigh the costs.” We pay for things with credit cards and loyalty cards, send email, search for information online, use mobile phones and GPS devices, swipe our way into buildings and bleep our etags along toll roads. All these leave digital footprints that add up to an increasingly detailed picture of our actions and movements, our lives and ourselves.

Why do we do it? Because it saves time or money. You avoid retyping personal details and you get a discount for customer loyalty. Companies tell you more about products that are likely to interest you and less about ones that are not. Call it a privacy tax. If you want to withhold information about who you are, you pay a little more or get a little less. Or we do it because it is almost impossible to function in contemporary society without using the tools that leave such footprints.

We also create documents, images and sound recordings and send them to others or make them available online to individuals, chosen social networks or total strangers. It can sometimes be fun or productive to present aspects of ourselves or our work for public view.

Sometimes we do very little. Information about us is publicly accessible from electoral rolls and registers of political donations; registers of births, deaths and marriages; lists of company shareholders and directors and other sources. When these were physical lists held in different places, it was time-consuming to put together information from each. Now that at least some of this information is accessible online, and tools for gathering and analysing it have become much cheaper and more widely available, wholly new pictures can be drawn by people and organisations wholly unknown to the subjects.

“The digital explosion doesn’t just blow things apart, it blows things together as well,” write the authors of Blown to Bits. “Gather up the details, connect the dots, assemble the parts of the puzzle and a clear picture will emerge.” The authors say 87 per cent of the US population can be uniquely identified by combining three pieces of information: gender, date of birth and zip code. So supposedly anonymised health, financial or other records that contain these three elements can be tracked to most individuals.

As more objects are given tags that can supply useful information – dumb ones, such as supermarket barcodes, writeable ones such as magnetic strips or those with a power source of their own that can transmit data – the nature and quality of the pictures that can be drawn increases dramatically. This is the spy in the coffee machine of O’Hara and Shadbolt’s title, the gossipy techno-barista that knows you made two coffees this morning rather than one, or none at all. It’s the printer that leaves a unique marker on every page it prints, so your hand in creating a document is almost as plain as if you had signed it with an autographic flourish.

The startling detail of the personal portraits that can be drawn by aggregating data from different sources about our spending, searching and moving did not happen overnight. There was no single technological leap that defeated anonymity and turned private activities into public ones, just “a steady advance on several technological fronts that ultimately passed a tipping point,” according to the authors of Blown to Bits. People spent more time doing more things online, phones went mobile, then got cheap enough for almost anyone to afford one, acquired still cameras then video cameras, and got connected to the internet.

Users are not always aware of the nature or extent of the information gathered, the period for which it is retained, the forms of aggregation and analysis undertaken or the third parties to whom it is distributed. But when asked, many users are relaxed about the implications and even support some forms of surveillance. Sixty per cent of US internet users said they were not worried about how much information is available about them online, according to a 2007 Pew Internet Project report. A YouGov–Daily Telegraph poll in Britain in November 2006 found strong support (85–97 per cent of respondents) for closed-circuit television cameras in banks and building societies, on trains and buses, outside pubs and in high streets but less than majority support for a comprehensive national DNA database.

O’Hara and Shadbolt summarise the findings of the British study, suggesting techniques are more popular when they counter specific, quantifiable risks, are relatively unobtrusive and do not impinge on the normal actions of daily life, operate in public milieux where one would not ordinarily expect to indulge in highly private or intimate behaviour, and capture events or images of particular events or situations, as opposed to creating a permanent and traceable record of identifying features.

Research undertaken by the ALRC in 2006 found just 4 per cent of Australian respondents thought surveillance in public places was a major concern. In contrast, 73 per cent thought telemarketing was a major concern; 19 per cent thought the same of the handling of personal information by the private sector.

People have learned that surveillance can get them out of trouble as well as into it, prove that they could not have been at the scene of the crime, for example. Believing themselves less likely to be troublemakers than trouble-takers, most accept the watching.

WOLFGANG SOFSKY does not. He is a get-out-of-it. We have allowed our privacy to be sacrificed to spurious promises of security and bureaucratic efficiency. Privacy, he argues in Privacy: A Manifesto, is the individual’s fortress. It is an area free of domination, the only one under the individual’s control. The private comprises what is no one else’s concern. It is neither public nor manifest. The private is not for other eyes, ears or hands; it is not shared with others and is not accessible to them.

Since even majority-rule democracy is a form of domination, “the defence of privacy is the individual’s most effective objection to the fatal universality of power.” Sofsky does not think efforts to erect walls around individuals are forlorn. On the contrary, they are essential. Behind a wall individuals can lay down the weapons with which they customarily defend themselves against the demands of the public. A wall guarantees personal freedom. Inside the wall lie family, friendship and leisure time, outside it “the pressures of society, vocational obligations, the demands of community and state dominate.” This “right to be left alone,” a famous formulation of privacy by American jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in 1890, is not feasible, appropriate or sufficient for the authors of Blown to Bits. Privacy, to them, is not a right to be separated from society, but one that makes society work. People need room to experiment, to deviate from accepted social norms, because there are no universally and permanently satisfactory ones. They also need to develop and rehearse independent thought before its public exposure, and be able to keep adolescent misjudgments and personal conflicts to themselves, provided these are not of lasting significance to their position in society.

BLOWN to Bits, The Spy in the Coffee Machine and even Privacy: A Manifesto are works of analysis and description about how things are and might be, rather than manuals for what to do about it. For that, you have to dip into the ALRC’s mighty tome.

Before it reaches its closing recommendation for a new cause of action for serious invasion of privacy, it proposes an overhaul of the federal Privacy Act. This legislation sets out principles for government and business to comply with when handling personal information. Although only twenty years old, it predates much that is commonplace in contemporary privacy debates: supercomputers, the internet, mobile phones, digital cameras, e-commerce, sophisticated surveillance devices and social networking websites.

The ALRC wants more consistency, clarity and simplicity in the legislation and fewer exemptions. It would remove the exemptions for small businesses (annual turnover of not more than $3 million), political parties and employee records. It would keep, though reword, the exemption for “journalism,” which currently makes media organisations that are publicly committed to privacy standards exempt from the operation of the act.

Journalism would not have a blanket exemption from the proposed new cause of action for a serious invasion of privacy. Instead, the courts would be required to balance the public interest in any claimants’ privacy against competing public interests, particularly those that matter to the media, such as free expression and the publication of information about matters of public concern.

Some guidance is proposed about the kinds of situations that would fall within the new cause of action. These include interference with someone’s home, family life or correspondence, unauthorised surveillance and disclosure of sensitive facts about an individual’s private life.

The great challenge for a sea change in the law on this scale is that we are only beginning to learn how we feel about the kinds of privacy intrusions that are now routine.

As the authors of Blown to Bits put it, “The technology revolution is outstripping society’s capacity to adjust to the changes in what can be taken for granted.” In Angles’s day, racetracks were worried that broadcasting was undermining their business model. They were right to worry. But not only did they find a new business model, they found it in the very practices that ate their old one: broadcasting and off- course betting. So important did live coverage of sporting events become to the audiences of radio and television that broadcasters were prepared to pay vast sums for the exclusive right to bring their microphones and cameras inside the venues the sporting bodies controlled. The games, and especially the salaries of those who play them, are now unimaginable without the trading of rights to broadcast, narrowcast, stream, download or whatever we will come to call it.

It’s time Australia’s legislators caught up with its courts on an enforceable right of action for serious invasion of privacy. But that right needs to come with the ALRC’s recommended case-by-case balancing against other rights to free expression and the publication of information about matters of public concern.

We differ and change in how we respond to those who come too close. Some build walls to discourage the sharp eyes, cupped ears and long noses of surveillance, or try to turn off the always-on connectedness of communications technology. Others strike out against the invasions, ninjas in their own defence. But even each individual can differ in how we feel about different encroachments at different times. Wandering, watching, listening, rummaging about in other people’s business is part of what makes us human. Our private selves crave dark, quiet spaces but our social selves wrestle to be part of whatever is going on. •

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THE free-trade agreement Australia signed in 2004 seemed like the last one that would ever matter for culture and information industries. Negotiating with the global superpower of these sectors, the United States, it was inevitable that concessions would be made beyond those included in Australia’s other trade deals. But once that deal was done, future agreements would be easier. In bilateral negotiations, the other side would never be as strong. In multilateral negotiations, Australia would never be alone.

Things might not be so straightforward. Australia’s trade negotiators are now back at the table doing the job all over again with an unusual group of countries in a changed global economic and political environment. They have met three times already this year with counterparts from the United States, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Brunei Darussalam, Peru and Vietnam to develop a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or TPP. Malaysia joined in October.

Australia’s goal is “a high-quality, comprehensive 21st century Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that increases economic integration in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly as membership expands over time.” Four of the aspiring partners – Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore – already have an agreement with each other that entered into force in 2006. Australia has agreements with several of the partners – the United States, New Zealand, Singapore and Chile – and wasn’t much interested in the idea of joining Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore in yet another agreement until the United States declared that it was. Australia is now very interested.

Because the TPP partners are already the most open economies in the region, the proposed trade agreement is best seen as part of a wider strategy for dealing with a multipolar world – a world in which it was the G20 rather than the G7 that was energised by the global financial crisis. As World Bank president and former US trade representative Robert Zoellick said, “The old world of fireside chats among G7 leaders is gone. Today’s discussion requires a big table…” Asia, which tripled to 21 per cent its share of the global economy between 1980 and 2008, is a huge part of that political and economic transformation.

For American industry, the TPP is an opportunity to connect more deeply to that prosperity and to resist any decline in its importance as a trading partner for Asian countries as China continues to rise. Even if the new export opportunities in the small economies are “relatively modest,” it is “an important geostrategic group,” according to Myron Brilliant, the senior vice president for international affairs with the US Chamber of Commerce. It is a potential foundation for a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific that has so far been beyond APEC’s reach. At a time when Washington-consensus capitalist countries have found themselves uneasily dependent on the economies of nation states choosing different ideological routes to economic growth, the TPP provides an opportunity to lay some political bedrock beneath the trading practices of the Asia-Pacific region – a “western” far-eastern bloc.

Announcing the TPP negotiations, US trade representative Ron Kirk said Washington was engaging with “an initial group of seven like-minded countries… to craft a platform for a high-standard, comprehensive agreement – one that reflects US priorities and values.” For the other countries, it will be no small test to secure their own cultural interests and values, while accommodating both the American giant at the table and the Asian one waiting outside.

The idea behind trade agreements is that countries agree to give up some of their capacity to implement policy measures at home in exchange for other countries giving up some of theirs. You surrender some ability to regulate and support your own businesses and in return you get better access to your partners’ markets. It has always been an unlikely agenda for culture and information industries. In the negotiations with the United States in 2002–03, these were among Australia’s main “defensive interests” – sectors where negotiators tried to give away as little as possible, knowing they were crucial “offensive interests” for the United States. What concessions were made were designed to lever better access to American markets in unrelated sectors like agriculture.

In Sydney on 15 November, Lori Wallach, director of the Global Trade Watch division at Public Citizen in the United States, said that before the November Congressional elections, the chances of getting better access to US markets through the TPP negotiations was “slim to none.” Since the election, she said, “slim left town.”

FRUSTRATED about the lack of progress in reducing government assistance for audiovisual services through the World Trade Organization, the United States has had more success over the last decade-and-a-half in bilateral and regional negotiations. Finalising agreements with several countries that had made no commitments to liberalise audiovisual services in the WTO, the United States secured bilateral concessions from all, including aspiring TPP partners Australia, Chile, Peru and Singapore. But these concessions have been limited, especially in television and radio, where restrictions like content quotas remain “the norm rather than the exception,” according to the WTO’s Martin Roy, Juan Marchetti and Aik Hoe Lim. In film production, distribution and projection, and sound recording, concessions have been less restricted – that is, the United States’ partners have been more prepared to constrain their capacity to retain, modify and introduce new policy measures.

The real success of these bilateral negotiations for the United States has been the very different treatment of “old” and “new” media sectors. Chapters covering “electronic commerce” have been included in all its bilateral free-trade agreements, requiring very liberal treatment of trade in “digital products.” The goal has been to fence off established media sectors like television, radio and film where governments have so many assistance schemes in place and beneficiaries that resist their removal. As audiovisual commerce shifts to new formats and forms of distribution and exhibition encompassed by “digital products,” the share of trade affected by traditional cultural policy measures should shrink.

THE GOAL for the United States in the TPP negotiations will be to improve upon the gains made in these bilateral agreements and to “multilateralise” them – that is, to get all the TPP partners to accept the most US-friendly position already adopted by any one country. Comments submitted to the US trade representative make this agenda clear. Representing the major Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Association of America supports agreements that “protect intellectual property, lower market access barriers to US audiovisual products and services, and promote legitimate electronic commerce.” Noting that its industry is “one of the few… that consistently generates, even in these difficult economic times, a positive balance of trade” for the United States, the association wants the TPP to:

avoid “cultural exceptions,” and rely on the flexibilities built into FTAs to promote economies’ cultural interests. Such exceptions are an unhelpful precedent and suggest that cultural promotion and open markets are incompatible, fostering protectionist inclinations that rear their heads in the other international fora.

It wants the TPP to replicate the US free-trade agreement with Australia by prohibiting tariffs on both tangible and electronically delivered digital products, and to improve on it by avoiding the kind of broader reservations for audiovisual products that Australia took out under the services, investment and electronic commerce chapters. While the Motion Picture Association of America concedes the reservations are “not wholly problematic given Australia’s obligations under the services chapter,” it opposes them because it believes they are “incompatible with the reality that open markets fuel cultural diversity and consumers’ access to diverse content and ideas.”

The association also wants incorporated into the TPP some machinery provisions that were included in most of the United States’ free-trade agreements, but not the one with Australia: an obligation to publish new final regulations before they take effect, along with “investor-state” provisions allowing US corporations to argue their cases direct to overseas regulators rather than through the US government. Further provisions are also sought targeting “cam-cording,” a practice used to produce bootleg copies of movies, and the pirating of encrypted cable TV signals.

Australia’s reservations to the services, investment and electronic commerce chapters of its free-trade agreement with the United States affect its ability to maintain and adopt local program requirements in established and new media. With established media services, it can retain the existing “transmission quota” of 55 per cent for all programs broadcast on commercial TV stations between 6 am and midnight and the program-specific quotas for adult and children’s drama and documentaries. Similar quotas can be imposed on at least one, and a maximum of two, further free-to-air digital multichannel services provided by each of the three commercial broadcasters. Local music quotas are also permitted for commercial radio and the 10 per cent local drama expenditure requirement for pay TV drama and general entertainment channels can be increased to 20 per cent.

With new media services, Australia’s right to introduce local content requirements (though not all other policy measures) is tightly circumscribed. Measures can be imposed on “interactive audio and/or video services,” but only so as to ensure Australian content or genres are “not unreasonably denied” to Australian consumers, and only on companies that carry on business in Australia. This was a small but significant victory, given the United States’ determination to keep “digital products” free from the kinds of assistance measures it has fought against for so long in film and television. So far, Australia has not used the powers reserved for established or new media services.

These reservations are not the only source of Australian policy-making capacity under the Australia–United States free-trade agreement. The services, investment and electronic commerce chapters provide considerable capacity to retain, modify and introduce measures to support domestic production and distribution of cultural material and information. Tax concessions, international co-production agreements providing more favourable treatment to projects co-produced with partner countries, Indigenous programs, spectrum allocation processes and universal service policies in telecommunications can all continue. Australian government representatives also argued strongly at the time the free-trade agreement was finalised that it did not constrain public cultural agencies like the ABC and SBS or limit grants, subsidies and investments in cultural activities and enterprises.

Inevitably, these and other reservations in bilateral free-trade agreements with the United States will be targeted in the TPP negotiations. The United States will try to minimise any reservations taken out by other countries. Those other countries that already have bilateral free-trade agreements with the United States will probably try to maintain similar reservations in the TPP. Since each reservation is unique to one country, the United States’ aim will be to isolate them, contrasting the singular protectionism of the parties maintaining them with the preparedness of the other parties to concede in equivalent agreements.

An obvious example is Australia’s local TV program quotas. Australia allows New Zealand programs to count towards these quotas, but not programs from any other trading partner. New Zealand has no local program quotas and has agreed never to introduce them, through a commitment made in the WTO. Having already compromised its policy-making capacity, New Zealand might see nothing to gain from opposing the inevitable US pressure on Australia’s quotas. But paradoxically, New Zealand’s preferential access to Australia’s TV quotas gives it a good reason to support Australia’s continued capacity to maintain and perhaps even broaden them.

BECAUSE trade agreements are difficult to renegotiate, they tend to last. Deals done are generally much more durable than those expressed in domestic legislation. The audiovisual economy in 2010 is unrecognisable from the one that prevailed when the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, was concluded in 1947, yet its rules still apply to trade in audiovisual goods. This is the reason some are so wary of compromising nation states’ ability to implement measures in the future.

The TPP negotiators will need to think well beyond the inevitable squabbles about TV quotas and contemplate longer-term trends in cultural and information trade. They will need a more sophisticated understanding of their uncertainties than the rhetoric that so often presents these sectors as places where perfectly informed consumers in every part of the world will get whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want it. At least four issues seem especially relevant.

First, emerging global digital distribution systems are proving remarkably concentrated. Google’s dominance of search, Facebook’s in social networking, Apple’s power in the markets for music downloads and smartphone applications, and Amazon’s online bookselling strength all challenge the expectation that global digital media would end scarcity and distribution bottlenecks. None of these dominant positions is necessarily timeless, and new fronts are opening up, as the current battle about the future of reading and bookselling among Google, Apple, Amazon, Sony and others demonstrates.

But network effects are real and the prospect of a very small number of globally dominant sources of supply for audiovisual content is not far-fetched. It need not only be undemocratic nations that worry about the influence wielded by such global behemoths and seek flexible powers to implement measures ensuring their citizens are makers, as well as takers, of their outputs. A good current example is the Google Books settlement, under which decisions of US courts will have immense significance for authors and publishers around the world.

Second, the global financial crisis has encouraged significant new state interventions in western countries. Of particular note for cultural and information trade are the broadband networks being built with large government subsidies in several TPP countries, including Singapore, New Zealand and Australia, and the national broadband plan submitted to the US Congress by the communications regulator. These represent major reversals of the trends towards liberalisation and privatisation that have dominated telecommunications policy and been reflected in trade agreements over the past twenty years. They involve complex new partnerships between private and public enterprises, new structural relationships across network, wholeales and retail activities, and novel access and other regulatory arrangements. These might be difficult to reconcile with trade commitments, especially if the networks being built are targets for full privatisation in the future.

Third, global debates about internet censorship are acquiring at least as much heat as those about culture and local content did during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, firmly linked these concerns to economic policy in a speech about internet freedom at Washington’s Newseum in early 2010: “We feel strongly that principles like information freedom aren’t just good policy, not just somehow connected to our national values, but they are universal and they’re also good for business.”

Where some thought global digital media and the fall of the Berlin Wall would undermine the ability and the desire of nation states to censor information products, both the technical capacity and the will have survived. Indeed, the intimacy of online and mobile media for both corporations and individuals has given them special significance. The corporations that citizens trust for their goods and services have not always been as robust in their defence of free speech during commercial negotiations as they have asked their representatives to be in trade talks. Yet those seeking to defend the capacity of nation states to implement policy measures about culture and information are going to find themselves grouped with net censors and corporate cyber warriors.

Finally, although it has resisted the United States’ position on measures like TV program quotas, the local industry has tended to acquiesce in its positions on intellectual property, on the premise that rights-holders are better served by tougher intellectual property protection. Even if one accepts the basic premise, it is not clear that every element of the United States’ aggressive promotion of rights-holder interests is always in the best interests of producers in Australia and elsewhere, who properly understand their dual roles as both users and creators of intellectual property. A more sceptical attitude to some US demands in this area might help to clarify that the overall goal of cultural policy is to encourage tomorrow’s creativity, not just to secure a perpetual revenue stream from last century’s. •

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THE BIGGEST star of last week’s Fiber to the Home Conference and Expo, Mike Quigley, was not in Las Vegas. Australia’s National Broadband Network CEO was due to deliver a keynote address but withdrew a couple of weeks earlier while the alternative prime ministers negotiated with country independents about the formation of a minority government. It would not have been a good time for a public employee to spruik the politically controversial plan, especially on The Strip.

Those negotiations went famously well for NBN Co’s plan to build a fibre-to-the-home network to 93 per cent of Australian households and businesses over the next eight years. Tony Windsor, the second-last independent to announce whom he would support, said Labor’s broadband plan was one of the two main issues that eventually made up his mind. The last, Rob Oakeshott, agreed. Labor’s $43 billion NBN whacked the Coalition’s $6 billion broadband plan and with it Tony Abbott’s shot at the prime ministership, at least for now. “You do it once, you do it right and you do it with fibre,” Windsor said, and that’s what Australia is now doing.

It’s a message that would have gone down well in Las Vegas last week. “All Fiber, All the Way!” was the conference theme. Everyone wanted to do it with fibre. Even without the Australian, there were plenty of people ready to talk. Quigley’s spot was taken by Katie Espeseth, vice-president of fibre optics at EPB, which launched a 1 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) residential broadband service, said to be the United States’ fastest, in Chattanooga the same day the conference opened.

NBN Co was born in the latest global financial crisis. EPB is a child of the last one, the Great Depression. For most of its life, this non-profit agency of the City of Chattanooga has been an electricity distributor. Its first power flowed from the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1939. In the late 1990s, it got into the telecommunications business, and in 2007 Chattanooga City Council approved a plan for a fibre-to-the-home network. The network has now been built past 140,000 of the 170,000 homes EPB serves in greater Chattanooga, the surrounding counties and North Georgia. It will pass the rest of them by the end of the year.

Last week’s announcement of a 1 Gbps symmetrical service – meaning the speed is available for both downloading and uploading – made the front page of the business section of the New York Times. The super-fast service is not cheap – US$350 per month for the top speed (50 Mbps will cost you $140, 15 Mbps $50) – but it’s ten times the download target recommended in the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, released earlier this year.

The FCC proposed a “100 Squared” target – 100 megabits-per-second (Mbps) download speed (50 Mbps for uploading) to 100 million US households (about 90 per cent of the total) by 2020, and 1 Gbps to “anchor institutions” like schools, hospitals and government buildings. 100 Mbps to 90 per cent of households and to business was the target stated in April 2009 for Australia’s fibre NBN. Since then, the government has accepted a recommendation to increase coverage to 93 per cent of premises and Quigley announced during the election campaign that the architecture and technology being deployed would enable 1 Gbps services to individual homes.

There are intense debates in the communications industry around the world about whether these kinds of speeds are necessary for most households now or in the foreseeable future. As you’d expect, there was plenty of enthusiasm for them at the FTTH Conference. EPB won the FTTH Council’s Star Award for “a person, community or company that has gone above and beyond what is expected in the advancement of fiber to the home.” Steve Klein, director of marketing and business development at Allied Telesis, said that most of the all-fibre Requests for Proposals his company was receiving were for 1 Gbps networks. Was this speed needed today for every home for services? No, 100 Mbps was sufficient. But were 1 Gbps networks “economically feasible” today? Yes, he thought.

Ericsson North America’s director of deep fibre access, Fred Terhaar, laid out a “use case” anticipating what a household consuming 120–130 Mbps by 2020 would be doing with all its bandwidth. The residents could be simultaneously using cloud-based 3D gaming (20–40 Mbps), a high-definition video conference (18 Mbps), three high-definition TV channels including one video course lecture (total 45 Mbps), home security (10 Mbps) and “other equipment” (24 mbps). Noting that telcos all around the world are falling short of their targets for homes passed by fibre, he said, “I don’t think the business case for FTTH is a slam dunk.” Working hard to sell its “wave division” fibre technology, Ericsson is also pitching its vision of the global wireless future – “fifty billion connected devices by 2020.”

The overall picture for all-fibre networks in the United States painted by researchers and analysts at the conference was cautious. Mike Render, president of RVA Market Research, which monitors FTTH network construction and take-up for the FTTH Council in North America, released his latest research showing all-fibre networks have now (September 2010) been built past nearly twenty million US homes, 17 per cent of all homes. That figure had increased by 2.7 million over the past twelve months, but it had increased by 4.1 million in the previous year.

Render thought this slowing down was caused by the near-completion of the largest project by the big east coast incumbent Verizon, which has now passed around sixteen million of its planned eighteen million homes, and to delays while many smaller projects have waited for decisions about the allocation of federal “stimulus funds.” The number of “connections,” or subscribers, in the United States grew 11 per cent from 5.8 million in September 2009 to 6.5 million now. FTTH networks increased their share of the broadband type primarily used at home to 6.1 per cent in 2010, up from 4.8 per cent in 2009. DSL and cable still have much bigger shares and, as in Australia, wireless broadband has grown fast – accounting for 13.4 per cent of households’ primary broadband in 2010, up from 11.9 per cent.

According to Roland Montagne, director of the Telecoms Business Unit at European consulting firm IDATE, three-quarters of the world’s 63 million fibre subscribers at the end of 2009 were in Asia, especially Japan and Korea. Many of these are residents in high-rise apartments with fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) networks – the final link inside the building from the fibre access point to the customer’s apartment is still copper, so they are not strictly fibre-all-the-way. It is a similar story in Europe, where over half the 7.7 million “fibre” subscribers are on FTTB networks.

WHY are all-fibre networks being built? In North America, different kinds of organisations are doing it for different reasons. Pure commerce – a direct expectation of increased profits – is not the only one and often not the most important.

Incumbent telcos are doing it to make money but their strategy is mainly defensive. They are trying to resist the drift of customers who don’t care about fixed-line telephones anymore and can get faster broadband speeds from cable operators or more convenience from mobile broadband. Verizon has signed up more than three million subscribers from the sixteen million homes it has passed so far, but is adding them more slowly – 174,000 in the second quarter of this year, down from 300,000 in the same period a year ago. It won’t extend the FTTH network to all its customers at present, even in big cities like Baltimore and downtown Boston, and has no public plan to shut down its copper network and migrate all the traffic to fibre as is now planned in Australia under the agreement-in-principle between Telstra and NBN Co.

Further north, in the Atlantic states of Canada, regional incumbent Bell Aliant is spending half a billion dollars to take fibre past 600,000 homes in its territories by 2012. Its biggest city is Halifax, with a population of around 370,000 people. According to chief technology officer Ivan Toner, the company is building FTTH because it delivers more bandwidth to customers, reduces the complexity and operating costs of the company’s networks and allows it to “leverage its unique cost characteristics.” Getting the green light for the investment from the company’s board was “more about the business case than the technology.”

Power utilities are doing it partly because they think an advanced communications network will help them improve the reliability of their electricity distribution network and assist their customers to monitor and reduce power usage. EPB in Chattanooga got US$111 million from the federal Department of Energy to get its “smart grid” built in two years rather than five. It will offer its customers an Energy Channel that they can watch to see how much energy they are using and what it’s costing.

Other “muni’s” – municipal bodies like local councils – are doing it because they are public bodies with public charters that think fibre is a good idea. IDATE’s Montagne says local authorities were the FTTH pioneers in the United States. In Europe, more than half the 249 fibre access projects in place or under way are being built by power utilities and municipalities. (The state-owned electricity distributor Aurora is heavily involved in the NBN in Tasmania.) Municipalities want all-fibre networks to stimulate the local economy, to enable them to offer innovative online services like health and education, and to ensure the fixed-line telecoms network of the future is run for community rather than financial purposes. If fibre seems a good idea and incumbent telcos are not building it, muni’s will step in.

They are also the most likely to be establishing the kind of wholesale-only, “open access” network that Australia’s fibre NBN will be. This means the network is built and operated by an entity that doesn’t offer retail services. Mike Render’s annual study of FTTH in the United States found take-up rates significantly lower for “muni wholesale” networks (25 per cent of homes passed) than for “muni retail” networks (42 per cent of homes passed) like EPB in Chattanooga, whose customers can take internet, TV and phone service direct from the company building the network. Overall, Render found a take-rate of 36.4 per cent of homes passed by all-fibre networks. The big companies with the big fibre plans, like Verizon and AT&T, have lower than average take rates (31.0 per cent). Smaller telcos building smaller networks are doing much better (49.0 per cent).

Render suggested two related problems that “muni wholesale” networks have had. First, because of their public mandates, they have been reluctant to market themselves aggressively, believing this is the job of the service providers that buy wholesale capacity on their networks and deal direct with retail customers. Second, this has left them dependent on the quality of the service providers they attract. Because they have “no skin in the game” like the infrastructure owner/operator, they have not always been great marketers of everything FTTH can offer. But he says they have been improving over time and thinks the wholesale networks might eventually get better take rates than the retail ones because of the level of service competition that might develop. Once established, a critical mass of service providers on the open-access fibre should make customers reluctant to shift back to another network. Customers who can easily switch retail service providers might stay loyal to fibre.

An example is Utopia, a wholesale network owned by sixteen cities in Utah, which was one of the FTTH pioneers in 2000. Vice president of marketing solutions and operations, Chris Hogan, says the network has been turned around over the last two years. Then, there were just two service providers on the network, now there are seventeen, many home-grown. Four of them offer video, “our crowning achievement.” The incumbent telcos, however, are not among them. Hogan thinks, “There’ll be a day when they come on board but I don’t expect it any time soon.” Verizon’s manager of engineering process assurance, Kevin Smith, concurred. “We don’t share infrastructure.” Could he ever imagine Verizon going onto someone else’s open-access network? “I’d never say never. But we like to control everything we do from start to finish.”

Alongside these examples, Australia’s public wholesale network plan is now unusual because the incumbent is “in.” As a result of the in-principle agreement between NBN Co and Telstra, NBN Co will be able to use Telstra’s ducts and poles, reducing the cost of stringing the fibre (though paying $5 billion for the privilege). It will also get Telstra’s fixed-line traffic shifted across to NBN’s fibre network progressively as it is built in different parts of the country (it’s paying $4 billion for this). In the United States, the incumbents are either building fibre themselves and keeping others off it or, as in Utah, staying away from the wholesale networks being built by others. Telstra is being paid a handsome price for its cooperation, but it means it is in a very different position from vertically integrated North American counterparts like Verizon and Bell Aliant.

Over the last year or so, two factors – the government and Google – have provided some extra motivation to fibre aspirants in the United States. The 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act allocated US$7.2 billion to expand broadband access and adoption in communities across the country. In the second round of funding announced in August, US$1.8 billion was awarded to ninety-four projects. Some residential all-fibre access networks received awards but many more were for “middle mile” (backhaul) projects, “anchor institution projects” delivering fast broadband to educational, healthcare, government and other public institutions, and wireless “last mile” networks in rural areas. The FCC’s National Broadband Plan also proposes other funding initiatives, including shifting up to a further US$15.5 billion over the next decade from the existing Universal Service Fund program to support broadband. “If Congress wishes to accelerate the deployment of broadband to unserved areas and otherwise smooth the transition of the Fund, it could make available public funds of a few billion dollars per year over two to three years.”

In February, Google announced it would build and test 1 Gbps fibre networks in a small number of locations across the United States reaching between 50,000 and 500,000 people. It received over 1000 responses but is yet to announce a decision on the successful communities.

Even with subsidies, this is a tough time to be thinking of making a major investment in a new fixed-line telecoms network. Unemployment in the United States is running at nearly 10 per cent and the most optimistic growth forecasts won’t put much of a dent in that. The old telecommunications cash cow, fixed-line voice telephony, is collapsing, mobile broadband is surging. “It has not been the easiest year of our business lives,” conceded FTTH conference chair, Michael Hill.

Those who are going ahead with all-fibre networks in this climate need a lot of spirit as well as a plausible business case. Accepting the Chairman’s Award at the FTTH Conference for “an individual or company that has shown tremendous effort to promote, educate or accelerate fiber,” the CEO of Hiawatha Broadband Communications in Winona, Minnesota, Gary Evans, said that you do it because “you care deeply about making sure that rural America is not disadvantaged in the new age of connectivity.”

JUST ALONG The Strip from the Fibre to the Home Conference and Expo venue, the Sydney band Human Nature has had a gig at the Imperial Palace six nights a week for a year. They’ve just signed on for another two. Having sung a verse of the national anthem at the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony and supported Michael Jackson and Celine Dion tours, the four blokes from Hurlstone Agricultural High had already been big for a while. Las Vegas has put them somewhere else.

The show is a “Celebration of Motown,” ninety minutes of My Girl, A.B.C., Stop! In the Name of Love, I Heard it Through the Grapevine and others from the Detroit factory. Tourists file in, worn out after another searing Southern Nevada day, looking like they’d be happy just to sit, listen and enjoy, but they get dragged out of their seats by the music and the moment and the energy of these Australians. It’s The Wiggles for Boomers, full of folksy growing-up-in-Sydney patter, a crafted mix of self-deprecation and In-Case-You-Hadn’t-Heard-Of-Us self-promotion, and the fabulous harmonies that got them started. Respectful of the legends like Smoky Robinson who’ve supported them, the stars whose hits make up the show and a tight band, they rotate the focus around all four singers, crank up to an encore then bounce out to the merch desk to sell CDs, sign programs and be thoroughly nice to everyone. The Las Vegas Review-Journal awarded them the tag of Number One Best Singers in Las Vegas.

Australians don’t often get to tell the biggest story, especially in Las Vegas. Had Mike Quigley been in town last week, that would have been his gig, because Australia’s NBN, by several country miles, is the big daddy of public broadband plans around the world. Obama’s US$7 billion, Singapore’s and New Zealand’s half a billion or so US dollars each, €2 billion in Greece and France… by these standards even Tony Abbott’s cut-price A$6 billion is big.

Late in life, the nineteenth-century American merchant in Richard Powers’s novel Gain, Jephthah Clare, tried to interest financiers in “visionary risks that made the Lord of All Creation seem a mere jobber.” In his prime, he had done it all. Once he took a chance shipping ice to yellow-fever-addled Martinique, taking on the trade “simply because all his fellow merchants considered it mad. Whatever the mind of man stood unanimous against probably had some merit in it.”

No one is doing fibre quite like Australia. A national plan for a huge territory, fibre to almost all premises, a publicly owned network, wholesale-only but with the incumbent, in principle, now inside the tent. This is structural novelty, cash and ambition on a grand scale.

Do it once? Do it right? We Australians have plenty to do. •

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AS THE ALTERNATIVE prime ministers scout around for the numbers they need to form government, they’re finding broadband enthusiasts in every corner. One of the areas where the policies of the major parties were most distinct has started to sound not just bipartisan but multipartisan.

In a campaign where Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott came up with lots of similar policies that voters didn’t believe, the plans for broadband were absolutely credible, though radically different. Policy differences in many areas were narrowed; on broadband they were maximised. Spending vs saving, vision vs caution, public vs private, future-proof cable vs wireless-for-today.

Labor’s $43 billion plan for a state-owned fibre network was already under way and hardly a day went past without some member of the government turning up in a hard hat beside a hole in the ground and a roll of fibre. The policy was consistent with Labor’s opposition to the privatisation of Telstra through the Howard years, and was presented as part of Labor’s response to the global financial crisis and the failure of neo-liberalism. Linking it to improvements in education and health fitted neatly into Gillard’s 2010 pitch.

The broadband policy the Coalition invented in the last days of the campaign was very like the one it developed in 2007 once the long task of privatising Telstra was over but complaints about telecommunications services remained. It emphasised the private sector, and proposed to spend money to solve the problems that were most urgent or that the market was least likely to fix, especially in country areas. The fiscal modesty was part of a wider attack on Labor’s profligacy, preference for government control and failure to deliver on promises.

Liberal leader Tony Abbott was especially modest, choosing not to participate in the launch and then struggling to explain the detail. Peak download speeds? “If you’re gonna get me into a technical argument, I’m going to lose it, Kerry, because I’m not a tech head.” What spectrum would be used for the wireless network? “I’m no Bill Gates here.” But a few days later, the line was clearer: “I mean, all of the people who are using their Blackberrys or their iPhones for Facebook. All of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotel rooms doing their work, they’re all using wireless technology and we shouldn’t assume that the only way of the future is high-speed cable.”

That was until voters, according to the latest predictions, decided to give the balance of power in the Senate to the Greens and in the House of Representatives to independents and one Green. The Greens have broadly supported Labor’s broadband policy although they have criticised some of the detail and the process for determining it. Tasmania, where Labor’s National Broadband Network is starting, swung to Labor. For the three country independents in the House of Reps, telecommunications is not merely important, it is one of the touchstone issues that explain why they are independents rather than members of the National Party.

Living a long way from major cities, Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott all tell stories in parliament about how much communications means to them and their constituents. Windsor remembers “as a relatively young person having to go out and untangle the party line, which the galahs or whatever had twisted up, or a branch had fallen across it.” Oakeshott says: “In this chamber and in this House, it is a very quick process to turn on your computer and to access any website anywhere you want in the world. Think of people such as year 10 students from Camden Haven High School who are still on dial-up. Think of the challenges that they face in a knowledge economy and trying to keep pace with students in communities such as where we all are now, discussing this issue.”

Growing up in Cloncurry, Katter remembers “a gentleman named Mr Dave Christerson. He started with absolutely nothing. He became a very successful cattleman, but the first thing he bought when he had a quid… was a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. That opened the doors for us bush kids to see and to access a wider world, and broadband can provide exactly the same advantages for us if we are given it and if we are given it in such a way that it becomes a genuine service that we can afford and that we will get repaired when breakdowns occur.”

These personal experiences crystallised in policy when Telstra was privatised. Windsor sent a survey to his constituents; of the 6000 who responded, 98.6 per cent opposed privatisation. “It is quite obvious that people do not want Telstra sold,” he told the parliament. “It is not up to scratch… If [senators] are serious about taking on board the concerns of country people they should not support the sale of Telstra.”

Katter acknowledged that privatisation could bring great benefits to city consumers but was sceptical about its impact in the bush. “These wonderful people who come into this place – in one speech they will tell us about justice and in the next speech they will tell us about markets,” he told parliament. “You know, they will tell us about how our free markets are going to save and rescue us all. Have a look at Woolworths and Coles and then tell me about free markets. Have a look at the transport industry in Australia and then tell me about free markets. Have a look at the mass media in Australia and its ownership and then tell me about free markets. As I have said on many occasions in this place, their problem is: their mummies and daddies did not get them to play Monopoly when they were young…”

Tony Windsor interjected: “They were playing Snakes and Ladders!” Katter responded: “I think there were other things that were played, but I will not go into that.”

West of the Great Divide, north of Goyder’s line, telecommunications was all about Telstra. A privatised Telstra was slower to repair services and could not be trusted to invest in new technologies in the areas where they might not be sufficiently profitable. “In my nearly thirty-five years in parliament,” said Katter, “until Telstra was sold I could only think of one example where the telephones were out for more than seven hours. It was because there were Telstra workers at every community point throughout North Queensland. They could get there quickly, assess the problem quickly and fix it up quickly. Since then we have had seven centres that have been out for two weeks – including half of Innisfail, a town of twenty-odd thousand people.”

Interrupted one day by the member for the seat of Deakin, Katter said: “This member, who is from Melbourne, is putting a proposition to this parliament that, after Telstra is privatised and Mary Murgatroyd’s phone breaks down in Julia Creek, they are going to fly a technician from Townsville or Brisbane to fix her phone. Is this the proposition that the honourable member is seriously putting to this House? Does he seriously expect a single person in this country to believe that proposition?”

On keeping pace with changing technology over time, Katter said, “when I had a cattle station right up in the middle of nowhere, we saw four changes of technology in a fifteen-year period. Not us, but some of our neighbours had copper wire and then that was replaced by DRCS [digital radio concentrator service, a technology developed by Telecom/Telstra for delivering telephone services using terrestrial wireless transmitters]. Then the DRCS was changed to satellite and some of the other stations have now been changed from satellite to HCRC [another terrestrial wireless technology]. I saw four changes of technology. I did not have to go on bended knee to the treasurer and say, ‘Please will you finance this new technology?’”

A special target in the debates about privatisation was the National Party, a party these independents had walked away from. In the parliament, it voted with its city-based Liberal coalition partner to privatise Telstra. Katter, whose father was a member of Labor before the split in the 1950s, praised the “courageous stand” taken by Barnaby Joyce, now the Nationals Senate leader, but “I said to him, ‘If you continue with your opposition then we will applaud you, and you will be a great hero throughout Queensland. If you don’t, you have raised our expectations and you will break our hearts.’ He broke our hearts. I do not give this speech to condemn him; at least he put up some sort of a fight, which is more than I can say for the other representatives of rural Australia in this place.”

Tony Windsor thought the National Party had been “led by the nose right through this Telstra debate.”

When Labor’s National Broadband Network was discussed and supporting legislation debated in parliament, Oakeshott said: “A need for an Australia-wide communications network that makes education equally accessible to regional and rural students is a no-brainer.” He also suggested that the federal Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy could be shifted to a regional location.

“If the policy settings are right, there is absolutely no excuse for that department to feel any impediment by being based in a regional location,” said Oakeshott. “And if the policy settings are wrong, wouldn’t it be some great tough medicine for a few people to feel what it is like to live in a regional area in regard to accessing the internet and communications services that so many other people take for granted in their everyday life? With a national rollout about to happen, I would ask the government to consider having those that are involved with that rollout located in a regional area. What a great message for Australia that would be.”

Windsor also supported Labor’s plan. “The movement to a national broadband network will, in fact, deliver the most important piece of infrastructure that we will see this century.” Structural separation of Telstra was “long overdue.” If the National Party was “led by the nose again and oppose this for reasons of city-based interests within the Liberal Party and corporate interests, we may well see a scenario where country Australia misses the opportunity to engage in a true national broadband arrangement.”

Katter is in a more complicated position because so many of his constituents will not be reached by the “fibre-to-the-premises” that is so central to Labor’s plan but will stop at 93 per cent of households and businesses. The rest will get “next generation” terrestrial wireless and satellite services, just as the Coalition has promised, although the detail of the technologies offered and timing may be different. Katter also understands that the challenge is an ongoing one, to keep pace with changing technology, not just a once-off battle to secure a supposedly “future-proof” network like the fibre access network Labor is staking so much on.

During Saturday night’s election coverage, cameras had been set up for live crosses all over the country but no one seemed to have communications facilities ready for any of the three independents in country New South Wales and Queensland who have become so crucial to the make-up of the national government, or for Andrew Wilkie in Hobart. Only the Greens’ Adam Bandt at the Melbourne Town Hall was catered for, just up the road from the offices of the National Broadband Network company.

The cameras are ready now as one of the most partisan issues of the campaign suddenly turns. Sea-changing retirees in Port Macquarie following their grandkids on Facebook, farmers in the “clean, lean, hungry country” of New England, remote graziers, miners and service suppliers in Western and North Queensland are all on a unity ticket with aspiring fibre pioneers in Hobart, web developers in Fitzroy and the Melbourne and RMIT academics along Swanston Street.

We’re all tech heads now. •

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IT’S JUST over a hundred years since the Commonwealth parliament took a train to Queenscliff. They didn’t just want innovation; they were looking for magic.

It was 1906, a decade after a twenty-two-year-old Italian had been granted a patent for “wireless telegraphy.” Experimenting at his family’s home in Bologna, Guglielmo Marconi had worked out how to transmit Morse code signals across short distances without wires.

People had been doing this with wires for half a century. Doing it without wires was magic. When Marconi claimed to have transmitted a signal across the Atlantic in December 1901, many refused to believe him. They thought nature might have played tricks with his equipment, or bravado with his results. But the man who a few years later shared the Nobel Prize in Physics was not deceived.

By 1906, when the Commonwealth parliament took a train to Queenscliff, the Italian was a global celebrity. Though his London-based company had still not turned a profit, it had a global network of subsidiaries and affiliates and some prestigious customers – the Royal Navy, Lloyd’s and Cunard.

Marconi was not going to be in Queenscliff himself. In his place came a representative, Captain Louis Walker, and two technical assistants. Walker spent a year-and-a-half in Australia trying to sell three things: the idea of wireless, the Marconi wireless system, and shares in Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company. He had very little success.

The timing seemed good. The Commonwealth parliament had passed the first Wireless Telegraphy Act the previous year, 1905. A demonstration of wireless communication across Bass Strait seemed a politically savvy pitch to the politicians of the young Australian federation. The distance, around 200 miles, was comfortably within the capacity of Marconi’s technology by then.

The twelfth of July was supposed to be a sitting day for the House of Representatives, which met in Melbourne. But three-quarters of the members and all but two of the cabinet told Prime Minister Alfred Deakin they were accepting Captain Walker’s invitation to attend the demonstration. So much for the new Australian parliamentary democracy. Politicians prefer a new communications infrastructure project any day.

The House adjourned for most of the day, though not without dissent. The member for Corangamite complained that the invitation was “merely to attend a picnic.” There had already been “a great many picnics” in the five-year life of the national parliament, he said. And this one was “a picnic to support a monopoly” – the Marconi system, which the company was trying to make the sole world wireless standard. “Worse than that,” he said, “it is a foreign monopoly.”

What the member for Corangamite thought particularly offensive was that, to make way for the Marconi picnic, parliament had to adjourn debate on the Australian Industries Preservation Bill. This “Anti-Combine Bill” was based on the Sherman anti-trust legislation, passed in the United States in 1890, which outlawed restrictive trade practices. It was eventually passed by the Australian parliament, but the High Court interpreted it so narrowly in a case a few years later that Australia was left without effective trade practices law until the 1970s.

So debate on the Australian Industries Preservation Bill was set aside and a specially organised train took the politicians from Melbourne to Queenscliff station. The governor-general, the prime minister and the governor of Victoria were the stars of a large and luminous cast. They were greeted by 200 schoolchildren who sang the national anthem, a small price to pay for the half-day holiday they had been granted.

Cobb and Co coaches took the party past the flags, strung between the post office and the Grand Hotel, to The Springs, just before Point Lonsdale. There, the Age thought there was “little for the eye to see – nothing of ostentatious display.” In fact, there were two masts 162 feet high. Wires strung between them provided the aerial, which was connected by cable to equipment housed in three buildings.

The 250 guests were treated to a luncheon and speeches. Prime Minister Deakin joked that, since the Anti-Combine Bill had not yet passed, he had entered into a conspiracy with the Victorian attorney-general to replace the toast to parliament with one to the success of Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company.

Contemplating future uses of the technology, the Victorian attorney-general favoured what he called pocket Marconi installations. These devices, he imagined, could be used to transmit photographs to the wives of politicians, letting them know where their husbands were. Deakin thought federal members would have nothing to fear from such mobile applications, though he was less confident about the members of the Victorian parliament.

Governor-General Northcote worried that wireless may make it harder for him to travel beyond the control of the prime minister.

As the cigars arrived, the exchange of official messages between the Point Lonsdale and Devonport stations began. Deakin sent a message to the People of Tasmania: “Australia tirelessly pursuing her great distances by rail and wire, to-day enlists the waves of the ether in perfecting the union between her people in Tasmania and upon the mainland.” Senator Keating – no relation, a member of the Liberal Party and, like Tony Abbott, a graduate of St Ignatius’ College, Riverview, in Sydney – also emphasised the federal theme: “We narrow the straits as we call across them.”

The Tasmanian governor did not miss his moment, reciprocating the mainland’s greetings on behalf of the “small and beautiful sister, by whom Victoria was founded.” He expressed the hope that the wireless experiment “may accelerate the date at which this state’s contribution towards cable subsidies can be diminished.” The Blame Game would be over soon.

Postmaster-General Chapman – the Stephen Conroy of the day – told the press of Tasmania: “No limits can be set to the beneficent influence of journalism now that the atmosphere has, at the bidding of genius, become its servant.” Somehow, I just can’t hear Senator Conroy expressing that sentiment.

Across Bass Strait in Devonport, things were less rosy. Ministers in the Tasmanian government couldn’t attend the demonstration because the government was facing a no-confidence motion in Hobart. It took forty minutes to get a reply from the governor of Tasmania because there was a bit of a backhaul problem. The wireless messages in Devonport had to be written down and sent by bicycle and ferry to the nearby post office, where they were relayed by cable to Hobart.

Marconi’s Captain Walker got a sheaf of correspondence from aspirant innovators looking for jobs with Marconi’s new medium. One man from the Victorian Railways Audit Office explained that he was a strict teetotaller with nearly four years’ experience as a warder in the Yarra Bend Asylum. He said he was “quick at picking up anything in electricity or machinery.”

Another, from St James, on the railway line between Benalla and Yarrawonga, admitted he hailed from a mere country town, but it was, he said, the home of Jas Carruthers, the Inventor of “Carruthers Electrical Clock… a great thing nearly as great as Marconi’s invention, but they won’t put it on the market I don’t know why.”

Captain Walker helped to sell the idea of wireless communications, but he failed to sell either the Marconi system or shares in Marconi’s companies. The government placed £10,000 on the estimates for a chain of coastal wireless stations, but it had no clear plan for how to spend it. It insisted there must be an open tender for any wireless stations it decided to establish. As to the chances of selling Marconi shares in Australia, Walker said “although there are a large number of rich men, they would prefer to invest their money in things they understand, and they would regard this as rather too speculative.”

Six months after the demonstration, it was clear that Australian communications policy had hit a roadblock. No decisions would be made about wireless in Australasia before the Colonial Conference in London the following year. Walker booked a passage home and, with his technical team, arranged for the storage of the demonstration equipment. Four years later, Marconi’s new Australasian representative had to break in through the window to collect it.

Walker told the secretary to the Postmaster-General’s Department that he feared Australia’s delays would “not be considered by the Public here or the outside world as in keeping with the splendid progressive traditions of the Australian Colonies.” He was frank about the failure of his trip, but he felt the year-and-a-half was not completely wasted. At the very least, he said “if I have failed to obtain a contract by my presence and work here, I have certainly made it very difficult for anybody else to…”

Australia eventually got a national wireless network – an NWN – but not for another five years, once a Labor government, led by a Queenslander, Andrew Fisher, was in office. The NWN was established by the government, not the private sector. The first wireless station was in Melbourne, and it didn’t use Marconi’s technology. The Italian magician responded in Australia as he did around the world, by commencing legal action against the Commonwealth alleging infringement of his patents.

Marconi’s company got a court order allowing it to enter the government stations to inspect the technology, but before the case could be decided the government changed. Joseph Cook’s incoming Liberal administration made a large payment to the company and the matter was settled.

Then the government changed again. The Queenslander was back in charge, though not for long. Brought down from within his own party, he resigned and headed off to an overseas post.

I could tell you a long story about Australian telecommunications, but it may sound like a short story told many times. •

Jock Given works at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research. He is currently researching broadband plans in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Alberta, Canada in conjunction with Catherine Middleton from Ryerson University, Toronto. The project is supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

This is an edited version of a talk given at the 75th anniversary dinner of the Telecommunications Journal of Australia in Melbourne on 2 August. It draws on material held in the Marconi Archive at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford and in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. A longer version, with references, will be published in the journal’s November issue.

A cairn beside the sports field near Point Lonsdale now marks the spot where the Parliament went for the wireless demonstration. One of the original Morse code transmissions across Bass Strait was re-enacted at a centenary celebration in 2006 attended by the governor of Victoria, local politicians, residents and schoolchildren.

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If the picture is not pretty, Auletta will paint it anyway. Corporations with customers, shareholders and valuable brands don’t relish this kind of scrutiny. But Google eventually said yes. They let Auletta make many visits to their headquarters at Mountain View in Silicon Valley outside San Francisco, where he conducted about 150 interviews with staff, including eleven with CEO Eric Schmidt. Only one vice-president declined to be interviewed.

The result is an absorbing confrontation. In Auletta’s other work, he is a model of journalistic observation. Who Ken Auletta is and what he thinks are not on show. Here, he is more engaged, for The World As We Know It, the one that is being googled, is Auletta’s own. He feels deeply the transformations being wreaked by Google. He’s a journalist; Google’s joint founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are data guys. They may all be searching for answers but they are different species that go about it in fundamentally different ways.

“Google’s founders and many of its executives share a zeal to digitise books,” writes Auletta, “but don’t have much interest in reading them. They worried that cooperating on a book was an ‘inefficient’ use of their time.” This comes at the end of Googled but it has been obvious to the reader from early on. The guys at Mountain View really don’t think or care much about the New Yorker. They may have a use for it – perhaps indexing its copy for their search engine, serving ads into its online spaces, accepting ads from its reps – but the New Yorker is a long way from the centre of The World As They Know It.

At the start, it feels like this might be a book about The Machines (Google and New Media) vs The People (writers, journalists, movie-makers, Old Media). But Auletta is a fairer and more curious inquisitor than this, frustrated with mainstream media’s responses to the Google Machine as well as wary of its consequences for people and information. The Machine also confounds the cliché by turning out to have human qualities.

It builds a bucolic campus for its headquarters, makes good food and massages available to its staff for free, allows them to spend a fifth of their work time developing ideas of their own (“20 per cent time”), and runs a Friday afternoon gathering for staff where anyone can ask the joint CEOs anything. The founders of the Machine draw relatively modest salaries and bonuses (though their shareholdings in Google are worth billions) and want to make the world a better place.

The first time we are shown what could have been The People, it is Mel Karmazin from the huge media conglomerate, Viacom, visiting the Google founders. He clearly doesn’t care at all about making the world a better place. He’s trying to cling to a model of advertising where neither the advertisers nor the media companies have much idea how well the product – the advertising – works.

He likes it that way, just as he’s been doing it for decades. “I was selling twenty-five billion dollars of advertising,” he tells Auletta. “Did I want someone to know what worked and what didn’t?” The data junkies at Mountain View, dedicated to more efficient communication between advertisers and potential customers, are “fucking with the magic.”

Instead of The Machines vs The People, Auletta gives us a book that is really all about people and the machines and institutions that different types of people build. The two at the centre are Brin and Page. They are brilliant, self-confident and born in 1973. Both were educated at Montessori schools where teachers encouraged students to follow their own learning paths. Their fathers were college professors, their mothers worked in science.

Aged twenty-two, the Google founders met each other at Silicon Valley’s university, Stanford, where both were enrolled in computer science PhDs. The one striking difference was that Page hailed from the mid-West – Lansing, Michigan. Brin came from Moscow, arriving in the United States at the age of six with his family, supported by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

The Google story starts, like every Silicon Valley story, in a garage. It’s the mid 1990s, the World Wide Web is young. They get an idea. How about we allow users to search the whole thing? Rather than relying on the number of times the search keywords appear in particular sites as a measure of how useful those sites will be to the searcher, count the number of links to sites, and the links into those linking sites. This “PageRank” (after Larry) will provide a better measure of how useful searchers will find particular sites. Over time, the most useful sites will attract the most links and therefore appear highest in search results.

The search engine is called BackRub but Page and Brin decide to change that. They reject The Whatbox – it’s too like The Wetbox, which sounds like a porn site. They like Googol, 10-to-the-power-of-100, because it suits their goal of building very large search engines, but the domain name is taken. So they settle on Google, incorporating a company of that name in September 1998. Stanford wants them to leave because their work is consuming so much of the university’s computer resources, although a licensing agreement and 1.7 million shares when the company floats ensure the institution benefits if the project is successful. Page and Brin decide not to complete their doctorates. “You guys can always come back and finish your PhDs if you don’t succeed,” a professor tells them.

But they need money. It comes first from four investors tipping in $250,000 each. One is a Silicon Valley “angel,” one a Stanford professor, one an executive at Cisco. The fourth, Jeff Bezos, is Amazon’s founder, Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” he tells Auletta. “There was no business plan. They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.”

They rent the inevitable garage plus two spare bedrooms from friends in Menlo Park, set up a whiteboard on the driveway announcing Google Worldwide Headquarters and tell the landlords the company will be worth billions of dollars. At the end of 1998, there are six employees. Within 400 weeks, annual revenue exceeds US$20 billion.

Around a third of the book follows this story from the garage to the company’s highly successful Initial Public Offering in 2004 and the beginnings of a backlash against its growing power. Another third continues the story from this point until mid 2009, just after Google celebrated its tenth birthday. In the final section of the book, “Googled,” Auletta assesses where the Google “wave” is taking “old media” and where it is taking Google itself.

THERE are now a lot of books about Google. Their titles show the scale of the company’s influence and the level of fascination with it. The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It and What Would Google Do? came out last year, Planet Google: How One Company Is Transforming Our Lives the year before, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture in 2005.

Most readers will be familiar with at least some of what Google does, the development of the idea of search, and the extraordinarily profitable “monetisation” of it through advertising. Like any successful business, it all seems obvious in retrospect. The history is fascinating precisely because it reveals how it wasn’t predestined for the people who did the thinking and building, raised the money, took the risks. Auletta connects the people who founded the company not just to the products they make and profit from, but also to the type of organisation Google became and how this adapted as the company grew so rapidly.

When Google staged its Initial Public Offering, a Letter from the Founders declared “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” It is run by engineers and half the staff are technically trained. They conceptualise things, make things, measure things. Auletta says a lot about this. Page and Brin deplore inefficiency and waste. They love fast, hate slow. If something doesn’t have a purpose, it’s gone. If it does, they want it. They quantify and trust the figures.

But where perfectionist engineers are sometimes caricatured as designers of utopian machines for inhumans, Google’s founders were obsessed from the start with being useful. Rather than being frustrated by the messiness of ordinary human existence, they wanted to draw from it and serve it. The messier it is, the bigger the challenge to make sense of it. Brin explains the company’s mission – “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” –as serving a very simple purpose. “People with the right information make better decisions for themselves. People with the right commercial opportunities will buy things suited to them.”

Throughout the book, various observers note the clarity and constancy of this vision. “Tunnel vision” is common among young entrepreneurs, says Auletta, but Brin and Page stand out from the many smart, focused people in Silicon Valley because of their audacity. From overusing Stanford’s computer resources as students, offering a deal to take over search for AOL that could have bankrupted the young Google in 2002, to the detail of a meeting where a design team’s lack of ambition is lamented, Brin and Page don’t like being told things are impossible. “I named this 3.0 for a reason,” the designers are told. “We wanted something big. Instead you proposed something small. Why are you so resistant?” (Of course, that’s just the kind of meeting a skilled corporate communications executive would have wanted an outsider to observe.)

This ambition was reflected in recruitment processes. Only those with the best grades and SAT scores got a look-in. Page and Brin delighted in testing candidates’ capacity to deal with the unexpected. A young lawyer was asked to draw up a contract for one of them “to sell my soul to the devil.” Having secured smart people prepared to think unconventionally, they then had to get the best out of them. Page and Brin believe their technical expertise is vital for this.

Even in technology companies, Page argues, “typically the management isn’t very technical… If you’re a programmer or an engineer or a computer scientist and you have someone tell you what to do who is not very good at what you do, they tell you the wrong things. And you sort of end up building the wrong things; you end up kind of demoralised. You want to have a culture where the people who are doing the work… are… managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing.”

Central to the company’s culture is “this sense of being connected to something larger.” Many corporate mission statements seem like so much blather – how many organisations think declaring their goal to be the world’s/Asia’s/Australia’s-leading-blah-services-company will get their employees bouncing out of bed each morning? Google’s “search” mission is clearly much less boilerplate than this. “If you can solve search, that means you can answer any question. Which means you can do basically anything,” Page told a Stanford class in 2002.

The problem with connecting to something larger and relentlessly pursuing a vision that “means you can do basically anything” is that Google has increasingly rubbed up against other companies that already do things themselves. Being so rich at a time when many of the sectors they rub up against have been struggling has made the contact particularly traumatic. The CEO of ZelnickMedia says, “There’s really nothing that doesn’t look cool and interesting to a fourteen-year old [twelve actually] with an Amex card and no spending limit.”

Google’s many ambitions are now being tested repeatedly. Other search methodologies are being explored, the Google Books “settlement” has not settled and the relationship with Apple has strained. The company has faced intense criticism and possible legal action for gathering and storing information about wireless network use as part of its global Street View project, and shut down the version of its search engine operating in mainland China in protest over local censorship. (It is reported to have maintained a healthy share of Chinese search revenues by redirecting mainland users to its Hong Kong site, although this may not be a permanent solution that satisfies the Chinese government.) A recent interim ruling from the French anti-trust agency found Google had misused its power in the internet advertising market, and just this week the European Commissioner for Competition Joaquín Almunia said in London that the Commission was in the early stages of examining allegations that Google had unfairly demoted rivals in its search rankings.

But the company is also having plenty of wins, completing the acquisition of mobile advertising company AdMob in May and announcing the acquisition of travel technology company ITA Software last week. It won a case in the European Court of Justice against Louis Vuitton about the use of trademarked terms in AdWords searches and defended the long-running copyright action by Viacom against the Google-owned YouTube, successfully arguing that YouTube’s policy of taking down infringing material when alerted to it by rights holders relieved it of liability for infringement under the “safe harbour” provisions of US copyright law. (Viacom is appealing.) Content creators are being wooed through the expansion of YouTube’s “partnership program," allowing more people who upload videos to YouTube to share in the advertising revenue sold against their content. And according to James Fallows in the Atlantic, several schemes are under way at Google aimed at “a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering.”

As he did when writing about Microsoft, Auletta poses large questions about a big corporation’s future at what might prove to be a crucial time for it. He has views of his own but also cites a lot of well-informed observers and participants. Will Google become more conventional, too powerful, Evil? Has it already? Will the goal of “perfecting” search mean computers become more intelligent, eventually thinking just like humans? Or will the humans end up thinking like computers?

Auletta concludes that “if Google maintains its deposit of public trust – continuing to put users first – and if it stays humble and moves with the swiftness of a fox, it will be difficult to catch.” But “if the public or its representatives come to believe Google plays favourites, aims to monopolise knowledge or its customers, invades their privacy…”

Columbia University’s Tim Wu thinks the basic question is whether the company can remain true to the founding philosophy. “Will they stay focused on search… which is really an engineers’ aesthetic of getting you to what you want as fast as you can and then getting out of the way?” Or will it try to be everything, “a source of content, a platform, a destination…? I predict that Google will wind up at war with itself.” •

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David Marr would not have been Kevin Rudd’s first choice for a biographer when he turned up early in 2010 with a Quarterly Essay to write.

If the PM had read Marr’s The High Price of Heaven, published a decade ago, he’d have found out exactly what Marr thought of the God-bothering prime minister at the time, John Howard. Marr describes his own teenage years, spent between taking Christ into his life “on a dark night on the shores of Port Hacking in the summer of 1960” and ditching his faith during an exam at Sydney University half a decade later, while trying to answer the question, “Reconcile the propositions that God is both all powerful and all good.”

He says he “got out the other side with most of myself intact. But it’s left me unable to forgive those Christians who are still at work, inflicting misery on kids… The enemies of films and books and magazines, of sex and music and drugs and television, of drink and dancing are Christians.” Discovering politics by the age of eighteen, Marr found the world “full of disasters God couldn’t fix.”

Or he could have read The Henson Case, published in 2008, and found out what Marr thought of the Kevin Rudd who had been prime minister for just six months when police raided an exhibition of Bill Henson’s photographs in Sydney. “I have a very deep view of this,” Rudd told Karl Stefanovic on Channel Nine’s Today. “For God’s sake, let’s just allow kids to be kids.” Henson’s images, he said, were “absolutely revolting.” With these words, Marr says, the new prime minister “killed Camelot.”

But Rudd gave the Quarterly Essay, as he might say himself, a red-hot go. The same Kevin Rudd who picked himself up after failing to win the federal seat of Griffith at his first attempt in 1996, methodically acquiring new skills to get people to vote for him, went to work on the unsolicited biographer. He invited Marr to spend some hours with him in Mackay.

This trip is recounted in the essay. The prime minister and the biographer walk and talk, then eat together. As dinner is wrapping up, “almost as he is leaving the table,” the PM asks the biographer what he is going to write – “the argument of the essay.”

Marr tells him. The PM blows up. Marr thinks, “I have hurt him and he is angry.” For the biographer, it’s an epiphany. He’s been tracking the prime minister for a few months, but this moment apparently nails the character he has been trying to grasp. “Face to face, it’s so clear. Rudd is driven by anger. It’s the juice in the machine. He’s a hard man to read because the anger is hidden by a public face, a diplomat’s face. Who is the real Kevin Rudd? He is the man you see when the anger vents.”

It’s the Rosebud that Orson Welles warned biographers about in Citizen Kane. “Rosebud” is the newspaper tycoon Kane’s last word. Newspaper story-hounds are dispatched to find out why he said it. Last words must mean something important, perhaps everything, about a life. Get to them, understand them, and you have the real person, the essence. The story-hounds never find out anything about “Rosebud,” though the viewer sees it burning in Kane’s mansion as the movie ends. Rosebud turns out to be nothing much at all in the life of the man, though Welles made it everything in the story of the life of the man.

Welles’s co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz didn’t like William Randolph Hearst, on whose life the film is based. Marr has been here, writing a biography of someone he didn’t much like, Garfield Barwick. The former High Court chief justice provided advice to opposition leader Malcolm Fraser about the legality of dismissing Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, a matter that might have ended up in a case requiring consideration by Barwick’s court. One problem with writing about someone like this is that you can put your readers off too. Citizen Kane shows it needn’t stop memorable portraits emerging (Mankiewicz had Welles and the elasticity of fiction to help). Power Trip, Marr’s Quarterly Essay, is heading best-seller lists this week.

But David Marr’s Rosebud is an odd thing. Did the biographer really have an epiphany at the dinner table in Mackay, like the ones he’d had at Port Hacking and the university exam room? It’s a marvellous moment, but to this reader it doesn’t feel like an epiphany about Rudd at all but about biography.

We get a front row seat behind the one-way glass at the moment when the subject realises this is not a joint enterprise – my life, your words – but a story, the biographer’s story. It’s the moment when the biographer, as he must, betrays the subject, the moment when, to paraphrase Janet Malcolm, The Journalist becomes The Murderer.

Normally, with books, this moment happens in secret, when the subject reads the manuscript. The Murder is not always fatal or even painful. The subject can be happy or flattered, puzzled, depressed, angry, accepting. But there is time to prepare to face The Journalist. The makers and subjects of bio-pics and plays don’t get this time. They usually have to speak, confront each other, the moment the lights come up.

Occasionally, books do give us these moments. Marr has been here before too. In a note to his magnificent biography of Patrick White, the scene is described to us. The aging White has been waiting and waiting for The Journalist to finish his project. Finally, it is ready. The subject reads it, then asks Marr to sit with him while they read it through a second time. This takes nine days. White corrects spelling mistakes in four languages, identifies twenty-five errors of detail, none substantial, and, according to a later interview with Marr, says “Thank you.”

It is an exquisite rendering of the relationship between this subject and this biographer. Marr is both in the scene, waiting for judgement on six years of his own work and life, and observing it on our behalf. Is this a joint enterprise or is White, The Monster of All Time, going to rise up to monster the murderer? White tells Marr “he found the book so painful he often found himself reading through tears.” But he does not ask the biographer to cut or change a line. White picked this journalist and accepts his work.

Rudd didn’t and doesn’t. This time, awaiting judgement, Marr is not just in the scene, he’s driving it. “I have hurt him and he is angry.” But then suddenly, the biographer is back with us readers, behind the one-way glass, describing the scene. A table to be cleared and an angry man. Why is he angry? The reason has changed. Like an air-crash investigator, the biographer has just located the black box of Kevin Rudd’s life. The PM is angry because he’s an angry man. It’s his Rosebud.

It may not be the black-box, but this scene still provides an intriguing box-full of information about the PM. By this stage of the essay, the reader has learned how hard Rudd tried with an unsolicited biographer who thought the PM had “killed Camelot” two years earlier. We now learn that the PM failed and was very, very angry when he realised he had failed. Perhaps it was a busy PM angry that he had wasted his time. Perhaps he suspected the biographer had made up his mind before he came to Mackay, that the trip had been about harvesting colour to flesh out the argument and keep the narrative scooting along, rather than a listening tour. Perhaps, as he said during and after the Copenhagen climate change summit, he felt the “fucker” had “rat-fucked” him. We learn that rather than making light of the moment, Rudd chose to take it on, surely realising this would supply an irresistible image for the essay. We learn that the PM can get really really mad without losing it.

What we don’t learn is what he actually said. The biographer can’t tell us because he has agreed that the moment is off the record. But, Marr tells us, “What he says in these angry twenty minutes informs every corner of this essay.” He also tells us that for these twenty minutes, Rudd is “astonishingly eloquent.” So what did he say? Clearly not “thank you” and probably not “Rosebud.” The reader gets the PM’s anger and the hypothesis about its source, but no words.

Lives are full of snap decisions, actions and events occurring in an instant that have deep and long-lasting consequences, last straws that end all hope, decisive words and deeds that convince us that something or someone matters. But moments, especially moments of anger, that reveal everything about a person, “the juice in the machine”? These things happen in stories more often than in lives, even biographers’ lives. It’s why we love them. •

The post The biographer and the biographee appeared first on Inside Story.

When it’s furniture, it’s less permanent. Get it wrong, you can shift it somewhere else, give it away, leave it on the street.

Renovation is for keeps. The future. Decisions that can’t be turned back, choices requiring assessments about where everything is headed. Power – solar heating, solar everything, or stay with the mains? Water – how much to store? Tanks all over the backyard or bladders under verandahs? Broadband – re-cable the place so fibre-to-the-home can pump ethernet into every room, or leave it to wireless?

Get these decisions wrong and you’re stuck, not just with the stuff you built but with the whole picture you had of how the world would be.

It’s the books that are killing me. The place is bursting with them. Some I’ve never read, but will, next holiday, definitely. Some I’ve never stopped reading. Others read just the other week, resting now, reminding me of what it was like to be inside them. Others still, mined over and over, reference points for whole universes of facts and ways of thinking.

Do I build them in, remake the home now for these beauties, work them into the walls, the way I am now and have been? Or will that lead to some grim day when the place is for sale, crawling with strangers, and the serious ones ask, “Are the bookshelves original?” as though they were fireplaces, relics once used for a purpose now performed more cleanly and efficiently by something invisible, and I have to answer, No, I had them all custom-built in 2010, about the time the iPad came out.

And they avoid each other’s eyes and chuckle as if your bookshelves were a gramophone or a sailing ship launched the day steam took over, or worse, much worse, they don’t ask at all, but puzzle, silently, “Whatever can they have done with these?”

Print Is Dead, says Jeff Gomez. Sometimes.

“In terms of Print Is Dead,” he writes, “what I’ve tried to do is lay out my arguments in a concise, three-part structure that first shows how publishing needs to change. I then describe the current conditions in terms of what’s happening in other industries… Finally, I discuss the issues going forward in terms of what life will be like in a digital world…”

Actually, Gomez doesn’t think print is dead but he’s worried about the state of some things we have come to think are inseparable from the physical print media of books, magazines and newspapers, things like words and stories, ideas and culture. If the people who write and produce these media don’t wake up to the digital world, Gomez thinks there might not be too many readers left.

Senior director of online consumer sales and marketing for Penguin Group USA, Gomez gives his own readers a useful, quick tour of the current state of books, magazines and newspapers and the changing ways people are using them and emerging media forms. He explains why predictions about the dominance of electronic books have not yet come true, but “Just because the digital tide stopped at the feet of publishing doesn’t mean the flood’s not coming; it only means that the water’s getting close.”

Print Is Dead is rich with the clichés of the genre – “The biggest change in the past fifty years, in terms of life on Earth, has been the introduction of the internet and the abundance of gadgets that have arrived along with it”… “nothing can bring us back to the era of Grub Street”… “Whether or not you think this is utopia or dystopia depends on your viewpoint, but one cannot possibly argue that things are staying the same.”

Gomez acknowledges the obvious question: why a physical book about the end of printed publications? His answer is oblique, a reference to a Simpsons episode when Sideshow Bob appears on television to decry the cultural destruction caused by television. It’s not really enough. Anyone who reads the voluminous mainstream media and blogosphere coverage of the future of print media will probably want more than Print Is Dead’s digestible overview of familiar trends and hypotheses. If you are not persuaded already that something big is under way, this book is probably not going to change your mind.

Ted Striphas is a more subtle analyst of print media’s present and future. He’s neither as gloomy as the readers and writers that John Updike has called “holdouts, surly hermits refusing to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village,” nor as warm in that sunshine as Gomez. This chapter in book history, Striphas thinks, is one “in which books remain a vital if slippery and perhaps not quite as central a force in the shaping of dominant and emergent ways of life.” Borrowing Jay David Bolter’s term, he calls it “The Late Age of Print.”

Books, says Striphas, “were integral to the making of a modern, connected consumer culture in the twentieth century.” Today, they are part of consumer capitalism’s slide into what Henri Lefebvre called a “society of controlled consumption.” He is not interested in making a fetish of books, but in “the prevalent and pedestrian character of books today.” This takes him to intriguing places – bookshelves, ISBN numbers, Barnes and Noble, Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and Harry Potter.

Built-in bookshelves were a “growing fad” in the United States in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Writing in Publishers Weekly in November 1929, the president of the National Association of Book Publishers implored his industry to get behind this trend. “The problem is twofold: how to get all those who build new houses and who own old houses, to understand the value and ease of putting in as many as possible of these modern conveniences; and how to bring the consequent business into the bookstore.” Building bookshelves was, according to Striphas, “less about the content of books than about the appearance of respectability and plenitude the presence of books could confer on homeowners.”

Installing bookshelves in private middle-class homes “signalled the home’s passage from a site dedicated primarily to strengthening one’s moral and spiritual fibre to one increasingly suffused with worldly pleasures.” There might even be a danger from too much of this pleasure. An article in the New York Times two years earlier said some homeowners “build their bookshelves to the ceiling in the ambition some day to fill them up,” but then found “they are sometimes book lovers with an eye for a bigger display than their purses can afford.”

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos chose books to found his online retailing giant not because he loved them but because the industry was more “meticulously organised” than almost any other consumer good. The ISBN numbering system, adopted in the 1970s, was ideal for the kind of highly automated inventory-control and distribution systems he thought would be possible online. Integrating this system with the barcoding developed for other consumer products provided an intriguing challenge for the book and wider retail sectors at a time when non-specialist outlets like supermarkets and department stores became much more important sellers of books.

Oprah Winfrey has created a phenomenon, a televised Book Club whose selection of a title for discussion reliably adds 500,000 to a million copies to its sales. Striphas tries to get inside its informal rules by contrasting Winfrey’s response to two potential crises. When The Corrections was selected, its author Jonathan Franzen agonised publicly about the company it would be keeping on Oprah’s show, the Oprah badging his happy publisher slapped on the covers of a new edition, the risk that male readers would be turned off, and the show’s need for a homely Manhattanite-author-returns-to-his-roots segment filmed in his mid-western hometown. After a few weeks of this, Winfrey withdrew Franzen’s invitation.

But when James Frey’s “autobiography” A Million Little Pieces turned out to be a fake, Winfrey got him back on the show twice to fess up. Frey’s story of drug addiction and recovery was discussed on the show in October 2005 and became the bestselling trade paperback of the year. Franzen could be ignored “precisely because the trope around which so much of the controversy had turned – the distinction between high and low culture – was more or less irrelevant to the book club’s worldview and ways of operating.” Frey’s dishonesty had to be confronted, partly because he had already been on the show, but also because it “contravened what is probably the core value of Oprah’s Book Club: the grounding of books in actual events… Truth is an inviolable category and lying constitutes a serious moral breach.”

The Harry Potter books give Striphas a foundation to explore contemporary ideas about the ancient notion of originality. While English language publishers took astonishing security measures to try to ensure the simultaneous global release of the latest instalments of Harry’s official adventures – or, at least, astonishing media coverage of the release – and while many who unwittingly found themselves with pre-release copies volunteered to respect the embargo, Chinese readers were absorbing Harry Potter and Leopard Walk Up to Dragon and Indians were reading of Harry Potter in Calcutta sharing the stage with classic characters from Bengali literature. Harry’s Russian sister, Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass, was selling well in Moscow and Porri Gater and the Stone Philosopher was shifting copies in Belarus.

Harry Potter is an exceptional case, Striphas acknowledges, not the entire book industry, but it is not a mere anomaly. “You don’t know much about mass culture unless you come to grips with the intricate imbrications of legitimacy and illegitimacy prevalent throughout the entire circuit of production, distribution, exchange and consumption.”

The Late Age of Print is no simple celebration of this era. Striphas understands, for example, the distance between the nature of work in a hip inner-city independent bookstore and an Amazon warehouse in Coffeyville, Kansas. He’s with Raymond Williams, believing that “Dismissing the value of an industrial society may be an exercise in futility,” but also that “Embracing an industrial society’s excesses may be an even more damaging exercise in servility.”

The day back in January when Steve Jobs went on stage in California to launch Apple’s entry into the book business, the iPad, J.D. Salinger died at home in New Hampshire. Salinger’s most successful mobile reading device, The Catcher in the Rye, is reported to have sold sixty-five million copies since it was first published in 1951. It still sells about 250,000 a year in the United States alone. There’s a fair chance some of these devices will never be read right through, but a good chance also that many have already been read more than once by borrowers and dedicated fans.

Salinger’s novel didn’t do much for me when it was supposed to, as a teenager. Too much self-absorbed angst, too cool for a reader who wasn’t, but his death made me want to try it again. I had a copy, easy to locate in those temporary bookshelves, but I was travelling a long way from them. One bookshop said sorry, our stock has been cleaned out, but the publisher is reprinting. A day later, another store had a pile of them. I read it on a plane, the 180 pages perfectly filling the hours from take-off to touchdown. This time it caught me from the first line, one of those perfectly crafted stories that finds a voice and holds it, note-perfect, to the end, telling me something about my teen self that I had not known then or now.

I was still inside it, standing in a queue for coffee at the airport. Overloaded, as always, with one too many bags to keep an eye on, I collected the Tall Americano and the plain water, swung one bag on one shoulder, another on the other, grabbed the handle of the Samsonite tagged “Heavy – Bend Your Knees,” and realised I was a bag short.

The little one, the one with the books, had gone. I looked quickly at the obvious suspects behind me in the queue but they were chatting or concentrating on their own coffee choices. Had I left the bag in the toilets? Maybe, but it wasn’t there now. I thought quickly and desperately about what was in it. Wallet? No. Passport? No. Mobile phone and MP3 player? No. Laptop? No. Flash drives? No. Digital camera? No. All still with me, stored and monitored much more securely in one of the other bags. It was just the books that had gone, my travelling companion The Catcher, a hardback about a river and the first book of poems I’d bought in a while.

I wondered about the thief, discovering the contents of the stolen bag. No wallet, no passport, no mobile phone, no laptop, no iPod, no digital camera. Just books. Books! The Catcher in the Rye.

Next time there’ll be an iPad and no extra book bag. It’ll hold all the books invisibly and I’ll be more inclined to keep an eye on it. The Samsonite will have no books either. I might even be able to lift it.

The bookshelves? I’ve finally decided. They’re going in too. High, wide and deep. The past is coming with us into this future. •

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FIBRE-TO-THE-HOME is supposed to let you do pretty much anything. Anything except look into it. Side-on is okay, but peering down a live optical fibre cable is like staring into a tiny, focused sun. A lot of light bores straight into your eyeball. Definitely not a good look.

Staring at fibre is what consultants McKinsey & Company and accountants KPMG have been doing for the last several months. The federal government paid them around $25 million; broadband minister Stephen Conroy got a 534-page Implementation Study. Value for money? That depends on what you were looking for.

In April last year, prime minister Kevin Rudd, finance minister Lindsay Tanner and Senator Conroy announced that the plan they took to the 2007 election for a fibre-to-the-node national broadband network, or NBN, was being superseded by a much more ambitious plan to take fibre all the way to 90 per cent of Australia’s residential and business premises. It would take eight years and cost $43 billion. Work would begin almost immediately in Tasmania, and there would be an eight to nine month Implementation Study “to determine the operating arrangements, detailed network design, ways to attract private investment… and ways to provide procurement opportunities for local businesses.”

McKinsey and KPMG got the gig, and about a week ago Conroy released their work. “Study confirms NBN vision,” his website headlined it. “The National Broadband Network is achievable, financially viable and will transform life and business in Australia.” It was a nice, clear message, tight enough to tweet if you took out the full-stop, and a potent implement to wield against the NBN’s critics.

A CYNIC would expect the government to have got exactly what it wanted for $25 million. It didn’t. McKinsey and KPMG skilfully crafted a study that sticks to some of the critical parameters specified by the government a year ago but modifies others in quite fundamental ways. It proposes fibre to a bigger proportion of premises but suggests an entry-level service much slower than the 100 Mbps promised. It has a lot to say about retail prices, where the government was silent. And the study says that although it can all be done for $43 billion as promised, the private investors that were also promised will not go near it.

The government said it would connect 90 per cent of homes, schools and workplaces with speeds up to 100 Mbps via fibre and the other 10 per cent with 12 Mbps using wireless technologies, but explicitly made those estimates a matter for the Implementation Study to investigate. McKinsey and KPMG estimated costs in much more detail than the government’s quick-and-dirty effort that came up with the $43 billion a year ago. They claim to have analysed down to the level of every address in the country with a cost model using “fact-based… bottom-up… geo-spatial modelling” and “granular data.”

Crucially, unlike the revenue estimates, these cost estimates haven’t been seriously challenged by the many analysts who have scrutinised them in the week since the study’s release. But what they really show is not what it costs to build an FTTP (fibre-to-the-premises) network, because there are different kinds of FTTP network and different ways of building them. What they show is how much of a particular kind of FTTP network you can build for everyone who already gets ADSL and still have enough change out of $43 billion to get the promised 12 Mbps to the rest. The new cost estimate is actually $42.8 billion, a sure sign that the quick-and-dirty $43 billion that started out on the back of an envelope a year ago became one of the policy bedrocks.

The study recommends that the kind of fibre network it prefers should be built to 93 per cent of the twelve million premises Australia will have in 2018 – up from 10.7 million today. This is 3 per cent more than the government promised. It acknowledges the political reality that the 92 per cent of premises that can already receive fixed-line broadband over the copper network via ADSL will have to get fixed-line broadband under the NBN. A fixed-wireless network should serve a further 4 per cent and specially designed satellites the remaining 3 per cent, though these satellites should be engineered to provide services across all areas not reached by fibre.

Many factors influence the estimated cost, but the most important are the “topologies” recommended for the network. The kind of network McKinsey and KPMG prefer uses a so-called “home run” topology in which dedicated fibre lines run all the way from exchanges to homes and business premises, rather than sharing fibre from exchanges to kerb-side splitters serving thirty-two premises, with dedicated fibre lines from there to individual premises. “Home run” topology is more expensive and might use more electricity, but McKinsey/KPMG think it will eventually allow stronger competition among retail service providers. They think this “home run” topology could be used for half of all premises without blowing the original cost estimate, but suggest further investigation. There’s a strong hint that they think it would be a good idea to spend what it takes to get “home run” to the whole 93 per cent.

Costs are also heavily influenced by whether the fibre is strung overhead from poles or buried underground. The study proposes that 55 per cent of premises are served by aerial deployment, but notes “significant uncertainty” about this figure. This arises because local communities might resist it, as they did when Optus and Telstra built new cable networks in the mid 1990s. To overcome this, the study recommends easing the rules painfully re-negotiated at that time to allow NBN facilities to be regarded as “low impact,” and thus harder for local councils to resist. The uncertainty also arises because more detailed assessments are still needed to determine the exact proportion of existing poles that can actually do the fibre job.

Cooperation with the power utilities that own pole and duct networks of their own could be very productive, as is occurring in Tasmania, but the study notes that this has not been successfully managed anywhere in the world. For example, there has been talk about coordinating the fibre network construction with the installation of “smart” electricity meters, but the mainland power companies are moving well ahead of the NBN timetable.

When the FTTP network was announced, much was made of the proposed headline 100 Mbps download speed. McKinsey and KPMG don’t believe this makes sense as a minimum speed for all users in the near-term. Internet service providers have struggled to “upsell” advanced broadband services purely on the basis of higher speed, especially because of the wide variations between speeds advertised and those actually experienced in typical use. Customers are reluctant to pay premiums for higher speeds because they are not sure they’ll get them in practice.

The study says: “Demand for top speeds on the network is likely to evolve slowly over time. Although trends indicate demand for 100 Mbps and higher will be inevitable, it will take some time for a range of services that consume this level of bandwidth to become widespread.” The initial NBN experience for a majority of end users will be defined by an “entry-level” broadband service. It recommends one “in the range of 20 Mbps” for downloads. It also thinks “government can afford to be less prescriptive about minimum upload specifications.”

Even for these slower proposed speeds, “The actual broadband speeds experienced by end users will be impacted by bottlenecks upstream in the network, such as limited capacity in international transport links and the speed of content-hosting servers. These bottlenecks are outside the control of NBN Co, but will be resolved by market forces over time.”

For the 7 per cent of premises beyond the reach of fibre, the study has bad news. The promised 12 Mbps cannot realistically be an average download speed, merely a peak download speed experienced by individual users during periods of high demand. If there is more than one individual user in an area at a time, each will only get a fraction of the peak capacity of the network there. It is just too expensive to promise anything better though the study stresses it should still be a lot better than present services.

The government’s announcement last year was vague about retail prices. It said, “Every person and business in Australia, no matter where they are located, will have access to affordable, fast broadband at their fingertips.” Because NBN Co will only provide wholesale services it is hard to be too prescriptive about the prices retail providers will charge, but the study deals with them because they are so critical to consumer take-up. Clearly, the authors do not subscribe to the “build it and they will come” philosophy.

Sceptical about the willingness of consumers to pay premiums for higher speeds before the widespread emergence of applications to take advantage of this capacity, the study recommends that NBN Co “price for affordability and take-up in the near term.” While convinced there is “strong demand for superfast broadband services which will increase as an applications eco-system emerges to take advantage of the high available bandwidth per user,” it wants the initial deployment of retail services using the NBN to deliver improvements that are impressive enough for users to notice a “step-change” in their online experience, without a step-change in the amounts they pay.

Even pricing for affordability, McKinsey and KPMG think incentives may be required to encourage users to switch to fibre services, especially because of the costs involved in acquiring new equipment in homes that will work with it, such as new wiring. It proposes a “migration payment” of $300 per premises – a total of $3.3 billion for all premises served by fibre by 2018.

With cheap wholesale prices and this incentive payment, the study suggests NBN Co can achieve an annual take-up rate of 6–12 per cent of premises passed by fibre. This is similar to rates in Japan, South Korea and the United States over the last four years, although the study notes the bigger challenge in Australia because of the near ubiquity of the proposed network. By not giving priority to the most commercially attractive areas – good politics, bad economics – it will be harder to match take-up rates achieved by overseas companies that took this approach.

THIS MODELLING of costs and revenues leads to the big bottom line: is the NBN “viable”? The study calculates internal rates of return based on various scenarios of the costs and revenues. On the cost side, it considers the impact of outcomes at the low or high ends of the plausible range as well as an Opera House “cost blowout” scenario. It also factors in potential savings from sharing some of the infrastructure with, for example, Telstra. On the revenue side, it considers different wholesale prices for a basic service ($30 or $35 a month) and low, medium and high take-up rates for all forms of fixed line broadband. These range from 70 per cent of premises to 90 per cent. The mid-range, 80 per cent, doesn’t seem hard when 72 per cent of households already have internet connections, until you remember that only 78 per cent currently have a computer.

Rates of return come out at 3.6 per cent for low demand, low price, a cost blowout and no sharing of ducts and poles, or 8.3 per cent if it all goes swimmingly. McKinsey and KPMG think 6–7 per cent is a reasonable estimate. When the long-term bond rate is around 6 per cent, that’s enough for the government to declare it “viable” – though it’s plainly not for the private sector, from which “significant investment” was anticipated when the policy was announced a year ago. McKinsey and KPMG deliver this message unflinchingly, though they are only stating what most observers knew from the outset. Despite a lot of talk about spirited investors taking a stake in the country’s broadband future and particular companies “vending in” certain assets in exchange for equity in NBN Co, this is not even close to a commercial proposition given the level of risk.

As anyone who walks past a bank knows, you can get 7.05 per cent today for leaving $5000 with Westpac for five years or the Bank of Queensland for three. And you wouldn’t have to build a broadband network. If you rocked up with $43 billion, or even the peak proposed drawdown of $26 billion, you could probably wangle an extra few basis points.

It is these estimates of take-up and revenue, especially in the face of surging wireless broadband subscriptions, plus the methodology for estimating the rate of return and the appropriate rate to compare it with, that have produced some scathing responses. The benchmark rate of return needs to take into account a project’s risk and what else could be done with the money. A persistent critic of the NBN, economist Henry Ergas, pointed out that the government’s own Department of Finance Handbook of Cost Benefit Appraisal says “the government’s borrowing rate does not reflect the true opportunity cost of the use of capital funds.” You could tweet that too, but it struggles to compete with “Financially Viable.”

Analysts have particularly focused on the study’s assumptions about what Telstra will do. The costs of the network have been estimated initially as if Telstra plays no part. If a deal is done with NBN Co for sharing some of Telstra’s assets like poles and ducts, the costs could come down by $5 billion. But the take-up and revenue assumptions, especially under the “high” scenario, seem to assume already that there is a deal under which Telstra migrates its fixed-line traffic across to the FTTP NBN.

If there is no deal between Telstra and NBN Co, and Telstra chooses to fight to keep its traffic on its own copper and cable TV networks, 7.05 per cent at Westpac or the Bank of Queensland could be looking very much more attractive places for the taxpayers’ billions than NBN Co. The long-term worry is that a government responsible for an investment of this scale will be tempted to shape the activities of its wholly owned NBN Co and the regulation of the industry to shore up its returns. It could penalise companies that tried to offer fixed-line competition, allow the monopoly-like NBN to ratchet up its prices (the study considers both these), allow NBN Co to provide retail services as well as wholesale (legislation introduced into parliament gives the minister the power to approve this) or, perhaps particularly troublingly, hasten slowly on matters that would stimulate mobile broadband, and so take or keep customers away from the fixed-line NBN access network.

WHAT McKinsey and KPMG have delivered is the most substantial public analysis of an Australian communications infrastructure project since the domestic satellite system in the 1980s. This is a major benefit, though not necessarily a good omen. AUSSAT racked up $800 million in debt within a few years. Voluminous public documentation doesn’t always lead to great decisions.

Indeed, in Australian communications, the size of the study is generally indirectly proportional to its influence. The bulky Davidson Inquiry recommending competition in telecommunications and the multi-volume Broadcasting Tribunal inquiry recommending the introduction of cable TV, both in the early 1980s, achieved close to zero. The Productivity Commission’s year-long inquiry into broadcasting in 2000 was largely ignored. But Kim Beazley’s few-page statement about telecommunications competition in 1990 blew the industry apart. By this standard, the two-and-a-half-page media release announcing the NBN in April 2009 was bound to change the world.

The McKinsey/KPMG study is testimony to the sea-change in telecommunications policy in the last two and a half years. For twenty years, both sides of politics have been getting the government out of the telecommunications business, first by allowing private competitors to take on the state-owned monopoly that ran the country’s telecoms for ninety years, then selling down the state’s ownership of it. When new mobile and fixed-line networks were built in the 1990s and 2000s, communications ministers didn’t pour over technology choices, costs, revenues, capital allocation and geographic priorities the way Postmasters-General used to do. Parliament had decided that governments made lousy decisions about those kinds of things.

At least, they weren’t supposed to be pouring over these things the way Postmasters-General used to do. The truth was they still did quite a lot of it. The Coalition government crawled all over Telstra’s timetable for shutting down its analogue mobile phone network and applied immense pressure on its plans to build and later close a CDMA network. In his book Wired Brown Land?, Paul Fletcher, chief of staff to long-term Howard government communications minister Richard Alston and now the Liberal member for Bradfield on Sydney’s north shore, says Ziggy Switkowski was not even on the shortlist of candidates for CEO until Alston insisted he be there. This was at a time when Howard and Alston were pushing their reluctant backbench to support privatisation. The government, they said, had no business controlling a telecommunications company.

But out in the new marketplace, the cable TV and eventually broadband network built in the mid 1990s by the new wholly private telco, Optus, didn’t work very well. The still-public Telstra proved more nimble and ruthless than some expected, building a similar network down many of the same streets. Both companies had to write off billions of dollars. It seemed telcos in commercial markets, even privately owned ones, could make lousy decisions too. Optus’s subsequent caution about investment in fixed-line networks and the curiously widespread, renewed enthusiasm for monopoly is the deep legacy of that time.

The government’s response has been to get back to controlling a telecommunications company. It is not the vertically integrated Telstra, it’s the wholesale-only NBN Co. McKinsey/KPMG’s Implementation Study contains a set of recommendations that are not yet government policy, but it tells us a great deal about this new, old world.

We have a good idea – the best yet – about how much it might cost. We have lots of data and discussion about what it might earn in revenue. We have an argument about “viability,” but this is really an argument about whether the now fairly well-articulated financial returns that can be expected from the project are justified by the economic and social benefits that might not be captured by the financial modelling.

This is where faith and politics take over. For some, the scale of the benefits that will come from universal access to superfast fixed-line broadband are immense. Many studies attest to the productivity gains or savings across industry sectors like electricity, education, health and transport that the authors believe will flow, or show how small such gains or savings would need to be, relative to the size of the sectors, to justify the cost of building all-fibre networks. If the benefits can be secured through a process that can be reasonably expected to earn 6–7 per cent on funds borrowed at 6 per cent, you should leap at it.

For others, the benefits of superfast broadband are not so abstruse that household and especially business customers can’t make up their own minds whether they need it. This means their preparedness to buy it, reflected in the prices they’ll pay and hence the financial modelling, offers a pretty good proxy for the total economic and social benefits that will flow. A carefully-worked through estimate of only 6–7 per cent suggests the faith could be a bit overblown, especially given some optimistic assumptions.

When an interdepartmental committee examined the AUSSAT proposal over thirty years ago there was one dissenter from the recommendation to proceed. The representative from the Department of Finance pointed out that the numbers didn’t really add up. There were other ways of getting more or less the same benefits more cheaply. Mesmerised by the prospect of transformative communications infrastructure, all the other officials signed off on what became a financial debacle for the government.

But this financial debacle became the trigger for the complete overhaul of the structure of the telecommunications industry in Australia, finally breaking Telecom Australia’s monopoly. Many think that was a good thing. One aspect of this new structure, however, the vertical and horizontal integration of Telecom’s successor Telstra, became the butt of blame for failing to deliver a truly competitive telecommunications industry.

It is hard to predict these kinds of twists in the outcomes from major telecommunications projects and policy shifts. Given their history, however, it is essential that we take a long, hard look down the line at new ones.

McKinsey and KPMG don’t say Do It or Don’t Do It – that’s the government’s decision and it was elected, in part, to fix broadband in Australia. They don’t revisit all the debates about the productivity gains and savings that might result – they weren’t asked to.

They just take that long, hard stare down the line at what will be required to deliver on the ambition to lead the world in building a state-owned, open access fibre network across a big, wide country in eight years.

It is not easy on the eyeball. Even at $25 million, Senator Conroy’s Implement seems like money well spent. •

The post Inside Conroy’s Implement appeared first on Inside Story.

ROGER FEDERER might win more Wimbledons but the analogue TV viewers of Mildura will not see them. Next year, they’ll see him in digital or they won’t see him at all.

On 30 June 2010, probably in the middle of one of the Gentlemen’s Singles Quarter-Finals, analogue TV transmissions will cease for households in and around the Murray River town in north-western Victoria.

The moment is termed “digital switchover” or “analogue shutdown,” depending on whether you are excited or traumatised by the prospect. It has been coming since the previous federal government decided to require the commercial networks, the ABC and the SBS to introduce digital TV from 2001.

Each was given a second channel to simulcast in analogue and digital until enough viewers had bought set top converters or integrated digital TVs to receive the digital transmissions. The analogue signals could then be turned off and the frequencies they occupied would be reallocated for other purposes.

The initial switchover deadline was deferred and it will now happen progressively, starting next year and ending in the biggest metropolitan markets in December 2013.

Mildura is going first because it has the biggest take-up of digital TV in the country. Around 70 per cent of households already have access to digital services, much higher than the average of just under 50 per cent across the whole country. Mildura therefore has the smallest proportion of analogue-only households likely to be left with blank screens wondering who made it through to the semi-finals.

Digital TV has been especially popular here and in Tasmania because the third commercial TV network that major cities got in the 1960s was only made available in the last few years, and only on digital.

In some other parts of the world, analogue TV has been switched off already. Berlin, where most people got their television by cable, shut down over-the-air analogue TV transmissions in 2003. The Netherlands and Luxembourg shut down in 2006 and Sweden in 2007.

Then on 12 June this year, the biggest TV market in the OECD, the United States, switched off completely. This step, more than any other, showed that digital switchover is not just a clever-sounding, big picture aspiration for policy wonks, or a side issue for small countries with mainly cable TV. It decisively shifted the policy debate elsewhere, from what digital TV could provide to what else might be done with the vacated analogue spectrum.

In the United States, most of it was acquired at auction by the big telecommunications companies, Verizon and AT&T. They are planning to use it to expand mobile broadband services greatly, offering much faster access speeds to people with laptops and mobile handheld devices like iPhones, Blackberries and the new Nokias.

In Australia, the fight for the spectrum that will become available after 2013 is moving quickly.

On one side are the local mobile phone companies, Telstra, Singtel/Optus and the newly merged Vodafone/Hutchison. For them, the future is broadband and the broadband future is increasingly mobile. A fifth of Australia’s broadband subscribers are already mobile wireless subscribers. More are signing up for mobile broadband and they want faster access speeds to download more data more quickly.

On New Year’s Eve last year, sixty-four million text messages were sent by Telstra’s customers, around four times the number sent five years earlier, according to the company’s acting executive director of regulatory affairs, Jane van Beelen. But SMS is now less than half the mobile data story. In 2008, for the first time, Telstra earned more revenue from other mobile data applications than from SMS. These include email, downloading and uploading photos, music and videoclips, and accessing social networking sites like Facebook, which now counts more than one in four Australians as a member.

Growth like this, say the phone companies, means they need more spectrum to keep up, although the broadcasters complain they are not using all the spectrum they already have. The particular frequencies being vacated when analogue TV shuts down are especially attractive. Signals travel a relatively long way and penetrate inside buildings – the same reasons TV broadcasters like them.

TV broadcasters acknowledge the growth in mobile broadband but they disagree about how much spectrum will be freed up when they turn off their analogue signals – the so-called “digital dividend.” They also disagree about what should be done with it, because they have plans of their own.

The size of the digital dividend depends on how comprehensively we want digital TV services to replicate the coverage of analogue TV. It also depends on the extent to which we are prepared to change the frequencies now used by some broadcasters for their digital services, to achieve more efficient use of spectrum – a process known as “restacking.”

We can leave some people who are now able to watch over-the-air analogue TV to get digital TV only by satellite or perhaps the new, fibre National Broadband Network. That would mean fewer frequencies would need to be used for digital TV and more could be made available for mobile broadband and other purposes.

But this would require consumers to have more complex and expensive TV receiving equipment and internal connections, and perhaps pay ongoing subscriptions. Even if they do that, the domestic satellite currently doesn’t carry all the dozens of local TV services offered in every market. The national broadband network has not even started and won’t be finished for eight years, although the proposed early start in Tasmania might mean there’s infrastructure in place in time there to help the digital switchover planned for the first half of 2013, as well as fill in some mainland metropolitan reception black-spots.

So forcing some viewers into satellite or fibre reception is unlikely to be popular with those who have got used to the simplicity of buying a TV, plugging it in, turning it on and watching signals from a nearby, over-the-air transmitter. Restacking is also potentially disruptive to viewers in some areas who may need new aerials.

Neither is likely to be popular with the politicians who represent the electorates where these people live.

The gains from more efficient use of spectrum, however, might be considerable. A lot of frequencies are used to reach only small numbers of people across Australia’s sparsely settled country areas or in pockets of bad reception in cities. The ABC, for example, reaches 92 per cent of the population with 50 per cent of its transmitters and only an extra 6 per cent with the remaining 50 per cent of its transmitters. A large amount of spectrum could be reallocated for other purposes if a little less of the population got its television over-the-air.

Any digital dividend won’t be reaped until after 2013, but the big decisions need to happen much earlier than that. Any inconvenience to viewers will be minimised if “restacking” occurs at the same time as analogue TV is switched off, region by region. That means the whole national plan for spectrum allocations that will apply after 2013 really needs to be settled well before the first market, Mildura, switches off in the middle of next year. The government has promised a green paper, but they have very little time to colour it white.

WILL TV or mobile broadband and other wireless services matter more to people after 2013? Or will it be something else altogether, given the uncertainty about future technology developments? In the United States, more than a fifth of the vacated spectrum has been allocated for public safety purposes, to remedy deficiencies exposed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina in the communications systems used by firefighters, police and ambulance services.

TV broadcasters, not surprisingly, think TV will still matter a lot. They have plans for more services of their own, beyond the new ones they have already introduced – ABC-2, SBS-2 and the Ten Network’s OneHD sports channel. Generally, they are being quiet about the detail, but ABC managing director Mark Scott made clear at a Network Insight seminar in Sydney on 8 July that he would like to be able to offer a news and public affairs channel – a twenty-four hour version of the ABC News Breakfast show launched recently on ABC-2.

He makes the same argument as the corporation did, successfully, for the government to fund ABC-3, the new, free-to-air children’s TV channel that will be on air in December: “If there are going to be fifteen channels in this new free-to-air landscape, shouldn’t there be one channel for Australian children?”

Former Queensland premier Wayne Goss, the head of Free TV Australia, the organisation representing Australia’s commercial TV stations, emphasises free-to-air TV’s vital role as a producer of Australian programs and host of the country’s “common conversation.” A medium that still pulls audiences of over a million people to programs every night of the week generates a lot of talk. A significant amount of broadband use is actually a kind of TV, catching-up on programs or highlights of them.

TV broadcasters generally stress the scale of the engineering and consumer awareness challenge ahead in switching off analogue TV and the risks to good quality digital reception if the more aggressive restacking proposals are adopted. Although there are now more mobile phone services than people in Australia, each household still has an average of 2.2 TV sets. No one doubts the political perils for a government that has to take the blame for turning some of them black and silent. It was no accident that shutdown in the United States was initially scheduled for February this year, three months after a presidential election and a few weeks after the Super Bowl.

The phone companies and pay TV operators think the broadcasters are making too much of the complexities. They’ve done switch-offs themselves, including the analogue AMPS and CDMA mobile phone networks. Foxtel converted all its analogue pay TV customers to digital. Britain, where television started much earlier than Australia, switched off the 405-line transmission system it used for its first, pre-war service. As digital switchover progresses around the world, service providers and perhaps consumers as well will increasingly ask not why it should occur in Australia, but why it hasn’t.

While these other switch-offs prove it is possible, they also demonstrate how contentious it can be. Australia’s one experience with switching off a television service was a long way away from metropolitan media interest, but extremely controversial for those affected. These were the remote area viewers who had to replace their satellite receiving equipment when a new satellite took over from the one that had been transmitting their TV services for several years.

When the policy about digital TV was first considered in the mid-1990s, TV was the colossus of popular media and the people who ran it were giants in the political process. Mobile telephony was growing fast but the internet was only just beginning to hit public and political consciousness. The iMac was not yet launched and the iPod was years away, let alone the iPhone.

Nearly fifteen years on, the government is more excited about the $43 billion it is spending on a national broadband network. It is also going to be a major investor in this network with a direct financial interest in how it gets used. TV is not the medium and TV broadcasters are not the people they were.

Their audiences remain large and politicians still care a lot about the nightly TV news and live free-to-air coverage of major sporting events, but audiences for most regular programs have been in gentle decline for a long time. After foreign ownership limits were abolished in 2006, an overseas private equity firm took over the Nine Network, the ailing Canadian CanWest took full control of the Ten Network and another overseas private equity firm took a half share in the top-rating Seven Network. Kerry Packer, such a dominant influence in media policy under successive governments, is no longer around.

Almost everyone has a mobile phone and many have more than one. A new study appears almost every day celebrating the “digital natives” who say they never watch TV. By 2013, there’ll probably be a few in cabinet. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that mobile media already matters at least as much to many people as television, although tastes vary greatly across different age groups and predicting what “mobile media” and “television” might be in 2014 is a fraught exercise.

The size of the “digital dividend” and what should be done with it are where the two collide. In public there’s a lot of soft talk about win–win outcomes and the need for balance. Wayne Goss told the Network Insight seminar, “it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘either and or.’”

Away from the conferences, where the engineering rubber hits the political road, the talk is going to get a whole lot tougher. •

The post This time it’s serious appeared first on Inside Story.

DIGITAL RADIO, as an evolving technology, has been around for over twenty years. Now, after much plotting, planning, tests and delays, it will start up in Australia in the middle of 2009. It comes with a joint promise: better audio quality and potentially more diversity of audio content. But since serious discussions about its introduction here first took place about fifteen years ago, the digital media world, and the audio aspects of it specifically, have changed dramatically. The internet has blossomed. MP3 players and other mobile digital devices have proliferated. Podcasts in their various forms are now commonplace. Our listening habits and options have shifted and multiplied. And digital radio in Britain has struggled. It is into this ever-mutating media environment, where much audio content has been decoupled from its broadcast origins or actually starts as a digital non-broadcast creation, that digital radio launches itself with all the high hopes of a new medium or a very old one with new credentials. But will it succeed? Will consumers buy a digital radio receiver? Why would they? How will broadcast radio in its digital form make its mark in the jungle of competing hybrids? Jock Given from the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology gives Peter Clarke an unvarnished look at the odds for this digital latecomer.

Listen here

The post Has radio’s future passed? appeared first on Inside Story.

KEVIN RUDD might not like the comparison.

Nearly ninety years ago, prime minister Billy Hughes returned triumphant from an overseas trip and announced a public private partnership to construct a nation-building communications network.

He urged the members of parliament “to take their courage in both hands, and to have a little faith in the future of this country. It was not in any timid, shirking spirit that our pioneers went out and made Australia what it is. They had faith though they had far less reason for its exercise than we have.”

The plan, then, was for the Commonwealth to take a bare majority stake in a company that would build and operate a direct wireless telegraph service between Australia and Britain. This service would compete with the undersea cables that had been the only form of electronic communication between Australia and the rest of the world since the opening of the Overland Telegraph Line in 1872 that linked to a cable from Java.

It was a huge risk. No commercial wireless service was operating over anything like the distance between Britain and south-eastern Australia, two places almost as far apart on the earth’s surface as two places can be. After commitments were made but before construction started, new short wave wireless technology was developed offering faster transmission speeds but lower capital and operating costs than the long wave technology initially proposed. The Marconi Company that developed it was an aggressive multinational that had sued the Commonwealth for patent infringement a few years earlier.

But the potential benefits seemed immense. Wireless promised lower prices for telegrams because of its lower costs. This was particularly attractive to the newspapers that depended on cables for their overseas news. A direct link with London that could not be severed by hostile powers promised deeper political engagement and resonated strongly in a Dominion distant from the heart of the British Empire.

A public private partnership was chosen rather than a wholly public or private entity for several reasons. The Commonwealth could afford a big capital injection that might otherwise have been hard to raise solely from private investors. The private Marconi Company and its Australian affiliate Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia), AWA, controlled the patents for the technology. Hughes had little time for the bureaucrats at the Post Office who were the most likely operator of a state-owned service, preferring the businessmen at Marconi and AWA. It didn’t hurt that they’d contributed £500 to the controversial £25,000 payment made to Hughes in November 1920 “in recognition of his services to Australia and the Empire during the war and at the Peace Conference.”

The partnership was consummated in 1922 when the Commonwealth took a bare majority stake in a recapitalised AWA. It held onto it until 1951, when the shares were sold by the Menzies government, although the international wireless services had been nationalised into the new Overseas Telecommunications Commission soon after the war.

WHILE THIS HISTORY does not offer neat lessons for Kevin Rudd’s proposed public private communications partnership, it does provide some clues about how such an arrangement might succeed, stretch and strain. Indeed, there are striking similarities between the political and industrial origins of the two schemes – a political, technical and fiscal opportunity, a prime minister with freshly endorsed power, a perception of complacency or crisis in Australia’s uptake of a new technology with big economic and social implications and dissatisfaction about the process used to award a large public subsidy to fix the problem.

Those clues lie in the technology, the market power of the institution created and its financial performance, the duration of the arrangement and the level of political support for it.

Technology is always a risk, even apparently “future-proof” technology like fibre-to-the-premises. Finance minister Lindsay Tanner and industry analyst Paul Budde both call it “the final destination,” but in telecommunications networks there is no such thing. Networks extending fibre closer or all the way to customers’ premises are already being deployed on a small scale in parts of Australia and on a large scale overseas, so they may not seem to require the kind of bold technical gamble taken on Marconi’s untried short-wave technology in the 1920s.

But the particular equipment and network architecture chosen and the speeds and user experiences they deliver are no less capable of embarrassing the broadband partners. Data released on Monday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows it is mobile, not fixed broadband that is booming in Australia, though most observers believe the two will complement each other rather than fight to the death. In 2008, the number of DSL broadband subscribers increased by about 400,000, but the number of wireless broadband subscribers increased by nearly a million. Nearly one in five Australian broadband subscribers is now a mobile wireless subscriber.

The voice telephone market shows how attractive mobility can be to consumers. Mobile phones hardly existed two decades ago. Now there are more services than people in Australia, and more than twice as many as fixed line telephone services.

Market power is another challenge. This new network is likely to be an immensely powerful force in fixed line communications, including the backhaul network outside capital cities that feeds mobile as well as fixed services (the backhaul network will get its own urgent $250 million kick under Rudd’s new plan). How the government-majority-controlled partnership uses that power will be just as sensitive as the way Telstra used its power over the last decade when, like AWA, it was government-majority-controlled. Will the public private partnership be any less fierce in defending its investment than Telstra, any more enthusiastic about still newer technologies that threaten the ones in which the taxpayer has a half-share?

Financial performance is a complicated risk for public private partnerships. Perform well and they are criticised for milking their privileged positions. Perform badly and they are belted for wasting taxpayers’ money. The government’s announcement commits only to more discussion about the regulation that will determine the price of access to the network. The delight about the plan expressed by the companies likely to be seeking that access suggests they expect the government-as-price-setter to be a soft touch.

AWA was no soft touch. One witness at a royal commission called it “the most hated firm in Australia,” adept at milking revenue from patent-licensing, while arguing this was nothing less than the taxpayers that received half its dividends would expect. The company performed well financially after the barren early years when it was building the infrastructure for the wireless services and paying no dividends. The market value of its shares more than trebled from the time of the recapitalisation in 1922 to January 1945. This was better than Australian stock prices generally, but it is impossible to tell from the available data whether this performance was generated by the international wireless services that motivated the original Commonwealth investment, or the new areas of the wireless business that opened up soon after it, especially radio broadcasting, which boomed in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Political support for the partnership was never universal or even widespread. Prime Minister Hughes got his way, but not without a massive fight in the parliament and inside his own party. A public–private partnership, argued his critics, was a “half-breed,” a “cross-breed,” a “hybrid,” like Hughes’ own party-hopping politics. “The people will find the money and the company will run the show,” predicted the leader of the Labor Party that Hughes had led himself just a few years earlier.

Within a year of its consummation, Hughes was forced to stand down as prime minister. But before he did, he took a crucial decision. The board of directors of the recapitalised AWA had to comprise three representatives of the Commonwealth, three representatives of the private shareholders and a tie-breaking seventh. Things started badly when the Commonwealth and the private shareholders couldn’t agree on the identity of the seventh director. The matter went to arbitration.

To resolve the deadlock Hughes decided to take the job himself. He kept it for the rest of his long life, even, briefly, after the Commonwealth sold its shares. Resisting all efforts to remove him, including a spirited one by John Curtin during the war, the political architect of this intensely political arrangement took it upon himself to keep it together for as long as he could. It turned out to be a very, very long time.

The global financial crisis has given Kevin Rudd the rationale and the opportunity to overturn the liberalisation-and-privatisation consensus that has dominated telecommunications policy around the world for the last two decades. In his recent essay for the Monthly, Rudd cited with approval Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s definition of a political economy cycle as “a continuing shift in national involvement between public purpose and private interest.” The coming new age, Rudd argues, will be neither the Keynesian model that dominated from the 1940s to the 1970s nor the neo-liberal one that followed, but a system of “open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will eventually generate.”

This shift provides the rationale for a public private partnership in telecommunications rather than a wholly public or wholly private one that would have suited the first and second post-war ages. The global financial crisis has provided the opportunity for such a partnership by making it impossible for the private companies of the neo-liberal age to finance the kind of broadband network that Australians voted for back before the scale of the crisis became clear.

It is not yet known who the private partners in this relationship will be. But the identity of its public architect is very clear. Like Billy Hughes, Kevin Rudd has got himself a partner for life. •

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