The Convergence Review enters a new phase in August, conducting public consultations in all capital cities except Darwin, but including Alice Springs and Bendigo, in the first half of the month.

Meanwhile there is much meat in the 74 submissions received by the committee in response to the Convergence Review framing paper. Several were joint submissions and they are all on the convergence Review website here.

Professor Lesley Hitchens, associate dean in the faculty of law at the University of Technology Sydney, makes a valid point in his personal submission. While the review documentation uses terms such as “Australians”,   “Australian public”,  “consumer and citizen rights” and  “consumers”, Professor Hitchens says the review must grapple with a more nuanced understanding of the Australian people. We each have many facets: we can be media content creators as well as consumers; we are citizens with the need to access unbiased information so we can be responsible voters; and we are customers in the marketplace for entertainments and diversions.

Another short submission, this time from a Blake Preston, cuts to the chase (while going forward):

“One of the biggest issues to keep in mind is that now, everyone is producing content. For instance anyone with a phone can make a movie and broadcast it on YouTube for all to see. Creating movies, stories and games will become easier each year, and as the general populace become content providers we shouldn’t be spending time and money classifying and sorting through the potentially millions of articles produced each day. Self regulation across all media will be a requirement going forward.”

The Treasury was feeling particularly in favour of deregulation, too, when it told the committee:

“Where convergence provides consumers with more choice and a greater variety of media content, it should be encouraged, provided it meets community standards. A regulatory environment that promotes a competitive media and communications market is more likely to produce a wider variety of the content desired by consumers at lower prices. Regulation that interferes with competition is likely to have the opposite effect and instead stifle innovation and make it less responsive to consumer needs.”

And:

“In this context, Treasury notes that the existing cross media ownership laws are limited to defined mediums, such as, broadcasting and print media. The committee might like to consider the extent to which medium based restrictions remain appropriate.”

And:

“Currently, demand for Australian content is high, with the 40 highest rating programs in 2010, including sports broadcasts (which are regulated separately), all produced in Australia. In this environment, Treasury would encourage the committee to examine the ongoing necessity for Australian content quotas.”

It must be something in the water in Canberra these days. But the spirit of deregulation was not on every mind. The Australian Council on Children and the Media expressed concern that:

“If anything, parents are even less well equipped now to go it alone in protecting their children. The content and carriage environments are so much more complex, and ever-changing; and parents have more competing demands on them than ever.”

And:

“The ultimate question is what responsibility society has for those children whose parents cannot or will not take responsibility to protect their children against harmful communications experiences. Do we simply throw those children to the wolves? Hopefully we do not; hopefully we realise that the raising of healthy, happy children is a matter of public interest and one in which the community should be involved, including through the government.”

But the big issue with many was intellectual property rights. The Evolution Media Group put it thus:

“As a producer of original Australian content, evoTV believes that intellectual property rights in an online environment are also critical to maximising innovation, business confidence and growth. While the protection of intellectual property may not come within the scope of this review it is important that the planned reviews announced by the federal Attorney-General consider these issues in parallel to the issues raised by the Convergence Review Committee.”

The same issue was central to submissions a number of lobby groups including the Australian Coalition against Copyright Theft.  In decidedly robust terms it said:

“The framing paper does not sufficiently recognise the necessity of protecting intellectual property within the digital economy or the importance of Australia meeting its international commitments in this and related fields. It is constrained by the artificial boundary of ‘the Minister’s portfolio’.

“We request that the committee recognises ‘the existing intellectual property framework and Australia’s international obligations’ as an explicit and standalone principle underlying Australia’s existing regulatory environment and the committee ensure that any new regulatory framework expressly acknowledges intellectual property rights.”

Their submission also strongly favours a “Platform Agnostic Regulatory Framework” so that in the words of the review committee “as far as possible the policy framework should apply consistently to like services regardless of the platform or technology used to deliver the service”. Such an approach helps to future-proof the regulations so, unlike the Copyright Act of 1968, each new technology does not have to be legislated for.

In a personal submission, a Luke Roberts expressed concern for erratic program classification standards on free-to-air television:

“The current laws are not rigid enough and they need to be tightened up. It disturbs me that many parents revolve [sic]what they children watch based on the classifications if channels sometimes change the classifications of programs so they can show something in a more convenient timeslot.  Defeats the purpose as to why TV is regulated.”

But the Convergence Review Committee seems to have won at least one heart in the very organisation the work of whose members Roberts faults. The Media Classifiers’ Association of Australia, “the leading professional classification organisation in this country” whose “membership includes all classifiers working in free-to-air television, both public and commercial broadcasting, as well as representatives from subscription television, and radio” is rock-solid behind the review:

“This submission by the MCAA registers support for all of the principles included in the framing paper. The MCAA does not advocate any amendment to the proposed principles.”

If one thing in particular crystallised in your correspondent’s mind on reading the submission, it was this: the issues to be dealt with by the Convergence Review Committee are bigger than the boundaries imposed by the present system of ministerial responsibility.

The Attorney-General and the Australian Law Reform Commission are working on classification issues; copyright, especially in the online environment is a big issue, and is also a responsibility of the Attorney-General.  Another issue is the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement and it’s imposition on our sovereign right to program our own television. That’s an issue for the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade. And then there’s the privacy issues raised by the News of the World scandal. That’s another administrative jurisdiction.

And then there is spectrum management.  A huge swag of spectrum must be found if mobile applications are to grow as forecast.

Convergence needs a whole-of-government approach, and while this review is timely, it has to be only the first step in a root-and-branches review of media regulation in Australia.

*Dr Vincent O’Donnell is a historian who produces Arts Alive, the national arts and culture current affairs radio program, an honorary fellow of RMIT University School of Media & Communication and the University of Melbourne’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. The full version of this article appeared on Screen Hub.