Australian Cultural Policy Unravelled: The Digital Demise of National Television Drama

This book explores the impacts of digitization and sector internationalization on national drama production and their consequences for industry, audiences, and domestic storytelling. Using Australia as a case study, it provides a systematic evaluation of the efficacy of cultural policy intended to support the production and circulation of national drama from 2001-2024.

During the first two decades of the 21st century, new digital distribution technologies transformed the business of television worldwide, bringing conditions of abundance that ended mass media logics grounded in scarcity of content and providers. Digitization upended longstanding norms around the funding, production, and circulation of national television drama radically changing the ecosystem that had shaped Australian screen industry cultural policies.

This book’s analysis of the responses of policymakers, broadcasters, production companies, and screen agencies to television’s transformation evaluates their collective impacts on Australian television drama. It explains how 21st-century dynamics undermined cultural policy supporting the production of Australian drama with cultural value, leading to catastrophic falls in productions hours and titles. This book argues that the scale of disruption caused by digitization causes to transnational and national television urgently requires a bold re-imagining of cultural policy instruments intended to support the production of national drama in Australia.

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

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

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