Recent ABC programming is causing growing disquiet, that quality is giving way to ratings. Is the national public broadcaster short-selling the regions and cutting its coverage of the arts in favour of cheap studio game shows? ABC TV no longer has a primetime arts program, the audio program The Listening Room has been abolished, there is little original music and dance programming on ABC television; the online arts portal, ‘The Space’, is no longer maintained.

Martin Harrison investigates these changes and proposes a radical way forward.

Satirist and broadcaster Jonathan Biggins shows how the history of the Wharf Revue has charted the erosion of the democratic tradition of parliamentary debate in Australia and continues to answer the call for an oppositional viewpoint. The most insidious threat to free speech implied by the recently reinvigorated sedition laws, he asserts, lies in self-censorship.

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What is the culture of our place, of our backyard? Lyndon Terracini, a baritone who spent thirty years in the opera houses of Europe before settling in the NSW town of Lismore, reveals the rich diversity of Australia’s country-town culture and makes a strong plea for its right to the same respect as metropolitan culture. With the rapid demographic changes presently taking place, he writes, our European traditions are fast becoming irrelevant. Preservation of our stories is as essential to our survival as our flora and fauna.

Terracini was director of the Queensland Music Festival 2000–2005 and of the 2006 Brisbane Festival. He has spent many months in the outback and in small towns, building huge collaborative performance works in which whole districts participated. He describes the commissioning of music and texts, the mixing of star practitioners with local workers, and the way the communities took ownership. A creative culture, he argues, can be life-changing.

Australian audiovisual production faces an uncertain future. The recent proliferation of new forms of digital delivery is both a promise and a threat to the screen content business and poses challenges to established forms of government intervention. Many ambitious predictions have been made about the impact on the Australian media landscape and the explosion of sites like YouTube and the investment of media moguls like Murdoch and Packer suggest profound change is taking place. But where does Australian content—our stories—stand? Recent media legislation debate was all about technology; the issue of content was notably absent. This is of serious concern because the fracturing of the media sector and copyright laws, globalisation of production and distribution, have the potential to undermine the existing structure for the creation, production and distribution of Australian material.