Radio Broadcasting: Private Interests, Public Interest

Changing Stations:

The Story of Australian Commercial Radio

By Bridget Griffen-Foley, University of New South Wales Press, 530pp.

Reviewed: 19 December 2009

The 80-year story of commercial radio in Australia is a remarkable one. Britain stuck for decades to state-owned broadcasting, and America left all domestic broadcasting to the private sector, but Australia, since the 1930s, has maintained a rare hybrid of public and private broadcasting, maintained by a moving kaleidoscope of government regulation.

“Wireless” broadcasting, beginning in the 1920s, was the most significant development in public communication in six centuries since the printing press. There was no precedent for a technology that allowed whole populations to be addressed both simultaneously and individually in their own homes and workplaces.

This new power generated both excitement and alarm. Governments quickly realised that some form of regulation would be required. The British model was for the state to monopolise broadcasting “for the public good”. The American model developed more in the way that traffic regulation follows accidents: an initial free-for-all phase had resulted in the chaos of competing private stations trying to shout each other down on the same tuning frequencies.

By the early 1930s the established arbiters of public communication – politicians, churches, social activists and the press – all began insisting on degrees of access and control of the new medium. Electronic media had arrived as a key vector of Australian social and cultural discourse. Its history has always been political.

Griffen-Foley is a professional historian who has assiduously mined the archives of commercial radio operators, networks, regulators and especially the records of the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters (more recently known as Commercial Radio Australia).

Vested interest groups have tussled repeatedly across the decades. Station owners always fought against any increase in the number of stations sharing market revenue, or any increase in government regulation. FARB’s intense lobbying was successful in delaying for decades the introduction of additional AM licences, then FM radio, and then digital radio.

Program content producers (sheet music publishers, record companies, drama producers, newsagencies, sports organisations and individual “stars”) have battled to increase their shares of the revenue pie and to limit cannibalisation of their other revenue sources. Advertising agencies’ control over the direction of advertising revenue enabled them often to dictate program policies to suit their clients. For commercial radio, the bottom line had to rule.

Politicians have rarely dared to face down the private interests of commercial broadcasters, preferring to make overt or tacit deals that will protect the politicians of the day from the hostility of this most intimate and persuasive of the mass media.

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Richard Thwaites has worked variously with ABC radio, community radio, and for several years heading the departmental branch advising federal Ministers on commercial broadcasting.