Keneally fights for Aussie culture

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - Thomas Keneally's brow furrows as he ponders another round of negotiations due later in the year between Australian and American officials hammering out a free-trade deal between the two countries.

"I think [for] we little places in the South Pacific that are subject to cultural invasion - [New Zealand] by us and the Americans and the Brits and we by the Americans in particular - these issues of a local record industry, local book publishing, territorial publishing that makes New Zealand publishing possible, these are going to be potential tokens of trade," said Keneally, among Australia's most distinguished novelists.

Keneally's own success in the US market through such works as Schindler's Ark - filmed as the hit Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg - has provided reasonable insulation from the feared chill of free trade.

But, like many others in Australia, Keneally fears for the future.

Many joined the campaign against the inclusion of New Zealand television programmes in Australian local content quotas under CER.

Now the US looms as an infinitely larger threat.

Washington has long taken aim at Canberra's protection of local artists through such devices as local content rules on radio and television and a subsidised film industry that continues to struggle to survive.

Australian musicians also worry about total exposure to America's vast and already dominant recording industry, and writers and publishers live in similar trepidation for their industry.

Canberra continues to try to calm such fears, mirrored in such areas as the subsidised drugs provided under the health care system, and insists that social and cultural policy will never be traded away.

"The Government has made it clear many times that cultural policy objectives will be taken into account in trade negotiations," a position paper by the Foreign Affairs and Trade Department says.

"A high priority is placed on these objectives, and Australia has taken a strong stand in World Trade Organisation negotiations on their legitimacy ... Rather than intending to prevent trade in audiovisual services, the Government measures are designed to ensure that there is a place for Australian creative endeavour, reflecting Australian society, on our screens."

Keneally remains cynical.

"This is going to be a big issue for us," he told the Business Herald.

Keneally's concerns were fuelled by a conversation with Professor Alan Fels, shortly before he announced his retirement as chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

"You could see that he didn't get it, that [he considered] a book is not more than a toothbrush. A book is a product to him.

"Now some books are of less value than a toothbrush, but many are of value.

"But he said, 'What about the consumer? You've got to maximise the benefit to the consumer'.

"I said to him that Australian consumers will, say, buy a folk disc of the [Australian traditional band] the Bushwhackers, even though it's going to cost more.

"All children as they develop want to know where they came from, they want to know their grandparents, they want to know the past and I see a native film industry, record industry and a native literature as merely being that.

"Alan Fels seemed to find that fanciful."

Keneally believes that unless protection is written into a free-trade agreement with the US, the Australian publishing industry will die, with local film and television production.

"It's not the Americans' fault," he said. "It is more convenient for the American film industry to use New Zealand and Australia primarily as a set.

"It is only through energy and determination that they get used for more than the provision of technicians and a set.

"Our pasts are going to be obliterated unless someone in the dominant culture wants to make a mini-series or whatever about it, unless they attract someone who is not in the regional stream but who is in the mainstream."

Keneally said it was a mistake to view American imperial culture as an evil force, that Australian films were the forces of light and their films were the forces of darkness.

"But in the words of Gandhi, we want to live with open windows - not windows that are taped up with someone else's newspaper."