International Broadcasting and Its Contested Role in Australian Statecraft: Middle Power, Smart Power

By Geoff Heriot

This book offers an insightful reappraisal of international broadcasting as discursive rather than ‘soft’ power in service of democratic statecraft. This at a time when issues of transnational media, the credibility of news and the perils of disinformation and information warfare, figure worryingly in public discourse. Reflecting the perspective of middle power Australia, author Geoff Heriot locates the strategic utility of multiplatform international broadcasting with reference to contemporary theories of soft/hard/smart power projection and intercultural communication. He applies a fresh model of strategic analysis to the political history of Radio Australia, examining the various external and internal variables that resulted in its flawed success in political communication during the late Cold War period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839985065

Book preview

International Broadcasting and its Contested Role in Australian Statecraft

International Broadcasting and its Contested Role in Australian Statecraft

Middle Power, Smart Power

Geoff Heriot

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2023 Geoff Heriot

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022919872

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-504-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-504-6 (Hbk)

Cover image: A Radio Australia promotional image from the 1980s, featuring two kookaburras (a type of bird known colloquially as the ‘laughing jackass’). Copyright, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Rosemary, Kiron and Kim

Contents

List of Figures

Foreword by Geoffrey Wiseman

Acknowledgements

Index

Figures

Foreword by Geoffrey Wiseman

Since the end of the Cold War, few foreign-policy concepts have drawn as much attention as soft power – the ability to influence the behaviour of others through the power of culture, political ideals and sound foreign policies. The normative underpinning was that a soft power–minded foreign policy could strengthen a country’s reputation and hence its ability to shape and influence its international environment. When Joseph Nye Jr. published Bound to Lead in 1990, coining the soft-power term as a conceptual rebuttal to Paul Kennedy’s American-decline thesis in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, he could hardly have predicted the worldwide scholarly and policy debates that it has generated in the decades since. Nye himself has been an active and generous participant in those debates, engaging his critics – from leading scholars and practitioners to students at the School of Marxism at Peking University – with several books and many articles. Geoff Heriot joins these debates at an auspicious time.

In its simplest and most intuitive form, soft power is the opposite of hard power, the latter usually associated with the use or threatened use of military force and coercive economic measures. A key question of the many that were raised in both policy and scholarly debates was how to find a balance between hard and soft power. A conceptual compromise was developed as smart power, devised and promoted in a 2007 independent commission report co-authored by Nye under the auspices of the influential Washington DC-based Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS). Smart power was seen as ‘the successful combination of hard and soft power resources into effective strategy’. For Nye, smart power, more so than soft power, ‘was deliberately prescriptive rather than just analytical’.

The smart power term was subsequently used by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration and in many other countries as well, tellingly in China. If a weakness of soft power was its perception as a blunt instrument largely out of reach from governmental facilitation in democracies, then smart power honed it. This refinement allowed for a more judicious balance between ‘measured national self-interest’ (to paraphrase Princeton University’s John Ikenberry) and ‘good international citizenship’ (in the words of former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans). As a sophisticated interpretation of smart power, this book re-shapes consideration of the soft power–hard power dichotomy, obliging us to focus less on a stark choice between one or the other but more on the symbiotic relationship between them.

With the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the impact of global terrorism in the early 2000s, soft power became linked inextricably to the extraordinary rise of public diplomacy as state practice and as a field of academic study. The surge of interest in public diplomacy was in good part facilitated by its ability to ride the soft-power wave. Heriot’s analysis of Australia’s ‘middle power, smart power’ challenge fits neatly into Nicholas J. Cull’s influential five essentials of public diplomacy practice: listening, advocacy, culture, exchange and education, and international broadcasting. His focus on international broadcasting as an instrument of ‘discursive power’, with properties distinguishing it from other forms of state outreach, contributes to key insights emerging in the literature of the last two decades: that good public diplomacy cannot compensate for bad foreign policy, that a country’s image or brand must closely resemble the reality, and that public diplomacy should not be seen as a one-way monologue, but as a two-way, long-term dialogue. At the same time, Heriot artfully incorporates all of Cull’s other essentials.

Adding to the conceptual complexities has been the emergence of the notion of ‘sharp power’, a term coined by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig in 2017 to describe techniques deployed by countries such as Russia and China to manipulate open political and digital information environments in democracies. In this regard, I see Heriot’s book lining up with Nye’s warning to liberal democracies not to overreact to Chinese and Russian sharp-power disinformation and to steer clear of the same methods which would only serve to undercut democracies’ soft-power advantage.

Using Australia as a consequential middle-power case study, Heriot presents a sophisticated political history of the country’s contested use of international broadcasting as public interest media. He takes us back to the late Cold War era, setting the stage for an intermingled future of both traditional and new media. In a bold, yet persuasive, move Heriot makes a nice Back to the Future argument for the continued use – in a social-media obsessed world – of the term international broadcasting to encapsulate state-funded media as a multi-platform instrument of statecraft covering all media.

Stylistically, the book is a highly polished piece of work written in a fluent and accessible style – a style that reveals a long career in journalism and broadcasting capped by the academic work that led to this book. The book displays a wonderful mix of formal and informal turns of phrase, superb word choice and a variety of pace between conceptual analysis and storytelling. Heriot engages with a range of academic literatures, including media studies, public diplomacy, Asian history, and business administration and law. The book’s intellectual and practical breadth are impressive. On the one hand, we are drawn by personal and harrowing stories from Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea and then, on the other hand, by astute interpretations of major thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas and Pierre Bourdieu.

Substantively, this career-spanning book argues that a core strategic function of international broadcasting is to reconcile and represent both interests and values, to engage with intercultural audiences and to do so competently. An effective model of international broadcasting requires continuous, not spasmodic, bargaining with audiences for their attention and engagement. The emphasis on sustained ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ is key. Seeing Australia as a democratic, middle-power international broadcaster, Heriot’s account of the late Cold War history of Radio Australia is finely grained and critically balanced. His case studies of Australia’s often-fraught relations with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and the story of Radio Australia’s out-of-area role in the 1990–1991 Gulf War are riveting.

When Australia’s coalition government undertook to develop new approaches to soft power in the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper – subsequently launching a Soft Power Review in 2018 – it seemed that Australia was about to have a much-needed national conversation about its soft-power assets and reputational vulnerabilities. I had the pleasure of working on the review in its early stages as a consultant for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). There were some 130 submissions to the review, including a detailed one on international broadcasting from Heriot. DFAT officers conducted consultations in state and territory capitals and several regional centres in late 2018. However, the review lost steam with a change of prime minister and foreign minister the same year, reflecting governmental and bureaucratic ambivalence towards the concept. It came as no great surprise when the Morrison government abandoned the review in 2020. As former Australian ambassador John McCarthy wrote in a 2021 opinion article in the Australian Financial Review, ‘This was a bad decision’. While the coalition government did not necessarily disavow interest in soft power itself, there was little doubt about its clear preference for a hard-power grand strategy based, to borrow Allan Gyngell’s phrase, on a traditional ‘Fear of Abandonment’. This fear privileges military alliances and strategic partnerships over smart power’s more nuanced blend of soft and hard power.

The election of a Labor government in 2022 offered a respite of sorts for soft-power thinking, arguably with a new smart power orientation that should appeal both to Australians’ perpetual quest for security and their more recent pursuit of self-confidence about their relationship to the region. Heriot’s final chapter brings the contested story of Australian middle-power international broadcasting up to the 2022 elections. Incoming foreign minister Penny Wong committed the government to developing an Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Strategy and providing additional funding for the Australian broadcasting services, in Wong’s words, ‘to ensure more Australian voices are heard across the region’. As much as Heriot welcomes these developments, his update is done not for the sake of keeping up with the news, but rather to highlight his thesis and decades-long concerns about Australia’s continuing cycle of policy reversals and inconsistent commitment to international broadcasting. Smart power requires a high degree of consistency which is achieved, as Nye has pointed out relentlessly, over the long term. It is not a short-term policy fix.

Any professional practitioner in the global broadcasting, public diplomacy and nation-branding fields will appreciate the quantitative data that are used to explicate the book’s arguments. This book is also ex post facto participant observation at its best, what I would call retrospective ethnography. Strikingly, there is critical reflection, synthesis and evaluation that spare no institution or actor from criticism, including himself.

There is a good deal of empirical and critical observation of the political ecosystem of Canberra and of the organisational cultures of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Radio Australia. In the current political climate, this book should be read closely by the supporters of the ABC as a manual on self-reflection and self-criticism. Equally, the ABC’s critics could do well to read the book for a master class in constructive, historically grounded, evidence-based analysis of an underappreciated national soft-power asset.

Throughout this engrossing book, one senses an author reflecting deeply on Australia’s international performance and reputation as a tentative middle power struggling with its role and responsibilities in the region and world at large. The work reflects both the longevity and breadth of a transprofessional career in journalism, editorial and strategic management, corporate governance and international advisory roles in Asia, the Pacific, Southern Africa and the Arabian Gulf.

Reputation matters. So, when I was invited to examine a University of Tasmania doctoral thesis submitted by Geoff Heriot whom I had ‘known’ vicariously via the air waves, it was too intriguing a request to pass up. That PhD thesis led to this superb book. In any future political and professional consideration of the role of international broadcasting practice in Australia, this book will be a go-to reference for years to come.

Geoffrey Wiseman,

Professor and Inaugural Endowed Chair,

Grace School of Applied Diplomacy,

DePaul University, Chicago

Acknowledgements

This work is adapted from the ‘late career’ doctoral research I undertook as a cross-disciplinary project with the School of Social Sciences and the School of Creative Arts and Media at the University of Tasmania. I record with gratitude the commitment and support of Dr Matt Killingsworth (Head of Politics and International Relations) and Dr Claire Konkes (Head of Media) throughout the PhD endeavour. My thanks also for the support of the School of Social Sciences towards this publication. Emeritus Professor Rodney Tiffen, from the University of Sydney, provided active encouragement of the project and made available primary resource documents that either complemented or replicated those I had otherwise gathered. A mere half-century after Graeme Dobell and I met as cadet reporters at the Melbourne Herald, he volunteered to be a reader of the draft thesis – and did so with the fidelity of a classically trained foreign affairs journo. I acknowledge also the encouragement offered by Professors Geoffrey Wiseman, Nicholas J. Cull and Naren Chitty, who suggested that I make the doctoral research available to a wider audience. Throughout, Rosemary Darragh offered a reader’s critical eye and support as she has so often done over more than 40 years. To all, my thanks.

Chapter One

Introduction

Once, but no longer, Australia figured prominently in a ‘Great Game of the Airwaves’ (British Council 2013) played by nation states in an increasingly media-dense – though asymmetric – world. It is a game not only for great powers but also for lesser ones, executed via broadcasting and associated digital media platforms. The great states have the military and economic power to impose their will and shape the world order. By inverse proportion to their military and economic status, all others represent and defend their legitimacy and vital interests through influence and persuasion. They seek ‘virtual enlargement’ (Chong 2010, p. 384) by shaping and influencing the beliefs and conduct of other actors. Resorting to various forms of organised persuasive communication (Bakir et al. 2019), they have engaged not just other government entities and multilateral institutions but also politically significant publics and private persons.

Australia has operated state-funded international broadcasting platforms since 1939 – at first radio, later television and digital media – principally through the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Radio Australia at one time rivalled the audience reach and reputation of global behemoths, the BBC World Service (BBCWS) and the Voice of America (VOA). Radio Australia could reach audiences and prosecute Australian narratives even in jurisdictions where it was not wanted by local authorities. Despite Radio Australia’s reputed informality and its editorial independence from the government of the day, its core purpose remained intensely political. In the present state of disarray, where conflict is as much ideational as material, the diminished status of international broadcasting as an instrument of Australia’s discursive power warrants reconsideration.

Usage of the term ‘international broadcasting’ survives from the twentieth century when, as early as 1917, text-based messaging through Morse code and, later, voice radio transmissions (Nelson 1997, p. 1) demonstrated the capacity of state (and well-resourced non-state) actors to reach audiences regardless of geographic or political frontiers. The practice evolved to encompass the provision of state-sponsored news, information and entertainment, directed to publics outside the boundaries of the sponsoring state and delivered via electronic media (Price, Haas & Margolin 2008, pp. 152-153). I apply the term ‘international broadcasting’ to include multi-platform means of delivery, which comprise the more traditional forms (terrestrial, cable and satellite radio and television transmissions) as well as the distribution of online content via internet communication services (DoCA 2018, p. 7). To these must be added transmission via mobile telephony – also, ancillary activities, such as capacity development and collaboration with local counterparts, which involve the appropriate deployment of international broadcasting assets and expertise to achieve related objectives in the marketplace of ideas.

Apart from the international broadcaster’s function as a transmission channel for information, it operates as an agenda-setter representing the host nation’s key strategic narratives and a gatekeeper responsible for reflecting selective points of view and political or commercial interests (Norris & Odugbemi 2010, p. 15). As such, the international broadcaster can offer utilitarian value and an information lifeline to underserved or politically oppressed foreign communities, consistent with the right to freedom of speech and information proclaimed in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR 1948). To some people, it represents ‘ideological warfare more bizarre than the world wars’, a form of cultural imperialism exercised through a domineering process of technology, economic and political beliefs (Godsgift & Obukoadata 2017, p. 126). It may be deployed to harass or intimidate audiences in a campaign of information warfare that complements military deployments and policies of economic coercion. As Janice Bially Mattern (2005, p. 586) argues, by sociolinguistic means, political actors may apply ‘representational force’ to persuade or threaten an audience. Commonly, though, the aim is to establish a relationship of trust with target audiences to help frame what those audiences think about and how they think about them. Historically, that has been the function of the ABC’s international broadcasting platforms.

Originally constituted as the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the ABC is the older and larger of Australia’s two public service media organisations, funded largely from parliamentary appropriations. As stipulated in the ABC Act ( 1983 ), the corporation is obliged to provide not only ‘comprehensive’ national–domestic services but also services intended for foreign publics and Australian citizens abroad. These are intended to promote awareness and understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs (ABC Act 1983, (s6(1)(b)), that is, to influence the attitudes or behaviour of foreign persons. In that respect, the ABC forms part of Australia’s sovereign infrastructure even though the Act does not provide specific guidance as to the character or enterprise model to be adopted: whether ABC international services should simply mirror the cultural profile of the corporation’s national–domestic networks (assuming their transnational relevance) or tailor services to address intercultural audiences on their own sociolinguistic terms and with regard to their lived experience. Moreover, international services have been subject to erratic government policies and inconsistency on the part of the ABC – a phenomenon that, understood with today’s international perspective, presents as lacking reasonable foresight.

This book reappraises the concept and utility of state-funded international broadcasting as an instrument of discursive power, which offers cultural representation with political purpose. Its scope is broad and the analysis multidisciplinary. Analysis requires an appreciation of how, and to what end, the processes of intercultural political communication are applied in context. Through a strategic rather than cultural lens, the book distinguishes the purpose and utility of international broadcasting in statecraft, situating it with reference to government-aligned public diplomacy practices and the soft–hard–smart power trilogy popularised by Joseph Nye (2009). It goes beyond abstracted notions of soft power and public diplomacy to identify specific functional capabilities of an international broadcaster; it canvasses varying influences from the external environment and the internal organisational and professional variables that determine character and performance. The second half of the book examines how these variable factors, under pressure, affected the performance of multilingual Radio Australia and its relationship with government and other agencies of statecraft during the late Cold War period.

My contention is that the Australian cycle of investment and disinvestment at least partially occurs through lack of clarity of purpose or comprehension of the functional properties and prerequisites of media in communicating across cultural and political territories. Equally facile is the tendency of a broadcaster to rely on abstracted concepts of soft power or ‘universal’ values without acknowledgement of political or ideological purpose, and of a government treating international broadcasting as an instrument of controlled brand promotion. For example, when defending the Liberal–National Party government’s 2014 decision to disinvest in Australia Network international television, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop questioned whether there was an inherent conflict in the ABC, as an independent news organisation, also having a soft power contract to deliver government messages intended to project ‘a positive image of Australia into the region’ (Bishop 2014). As I shall demonstrate, the application of international broadcasting as discursive power involves much more than government-aligned image promotion and message control, more so when seeking to reach and engage culturally and socio-economically unlike audiences across the disparate Indo-Pacific region.

This analysis reflects the perspective of Australia as a democratic middle (or regional) power. Self-evidently, the circumstances, resources and prerogatives of such a power differ from those of a great power. While a great power may use cultural and ideational resources to help legitimise or soften the impact of its hard power footprint, a lesser power with a smaller international footprint strives to ensure its strategic narrative forms part of the global or regional discourse.

The Context of Decline and Revisionism

Australia was by no means alone in its wavering commitment to international broadcasting in the decades following the end of the Cold War. On 26 December 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Soviet Union) officially dissolved, breaking into 15 separate nations, suspending the four-and-a-half-decade-long confrontation between Moscow’s Eastern Bloc and Washington’s Western alliance. That event, which seemed to portend a New World Order as characterised by US president George H. W. Bush (1990), thrust international broadcasting into a ‘deep crisis of purpose and credibility’ by the mid-1990s (Price 2001). In Australia, a government inquiry (Mansfield 1997) recommended the sale or closure of international television and radio services operated by the ABC. Subsequently, the ABC divested itself of the television channel and effectively halved the staff and reduced the multilingual capacity of Radio Australia. The logic of closure rested on assumptions about the West’s Cold War victory centred on the Atlantic theatre. Of the remaining five communist states, four were Asian (China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos) and the fifth Cuba. Much was yet to play out, not least through the revisionist ambitions of Russia under President Vladimir Putin.

The immediate post–Cold War years coincided with historically good relationships between the world’s major powers, distinguishing the period from most others of the modern era (Haass 2017, pp. 77-78). Emboldened by the West ‘winning’ the Cold War, and guaranteed by the uncontested supremacy of American military power, governments began to assume that, henceforth, other nation states could only challenge the West by adopting the principles of liberal capitalism (Mead 2014). Policymakers scrutinised the value and purpose of Cold War institutions and practices. Private media proprietors and their political counterparts argued that international broadcasters were no longer needed in the ‘age of CNN’ (Price 2001). A former senior Australian diplomat, Duncan Campbell, questioned the post–Cold War purpose of Radio Australia when appearing before a Senate committee (quoted in Senate 1997, pp. 5.108, 166). At what point did the service cease being intrusive, with elements of cultural superiority? Campbell asked. And why should it not be jettisoned (Senate 1997, pp. 5.107, 166)? Funding of international broadcasting could be retracted as part of Australia’s peace dividend.¹

Even then, however, government rhetoric expressed a tension between shorter- and longer-term assumptions. In 1997, the conservative Liberal–National Party government published a Foreign Policy White Paper that argued Australia would become relatively weaker in relation to the ascendant economic and military powers of Asia; Australians would need to marshal their economic, cultural and other assets to meet the challenge (DFAT 1997). A quarter of a century later, Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison called for ‘advocacy and agency’ in support of open societies, open economies, the rules-based international order, cooperation on global challenges and a demonstration that ‘liberal democracies work’ (Morrison 2021).

At the time of disinvestment in Australia Network TV, the international environment displayed increasing evidence of disarray. Cooperation between great powers had declined and, every day, the liberal international order appeared to become less liberal, less international and less orderly (Fullilove 2015, p. 4). Former diplomat and intelligence head of the Office of National Assessments, Allan Gyngell (2017), writes that ‘Australian foreign policy has never had to deal with a world like this’. Unlike the Middle East, where strife centres on weak or failing states, in Asia, strong states jostle (Fullilove 2015, p. 11). These include China, the United States, Russia, Japan, India and South Korea (while, militarily, North Korea poses an ongoing and significant security risk). Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which had only reluctantly accepted the combined free market and democracy model of development, shifted to one based on semi-free markets and illiberal political systems (Wibowo 2009, pp. 207, 220). The Russian invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, in February 2022, jolted governments of democracies and like-minded others. In extremis, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict spotlit the interwoven strategic and tactical issues associated with cybersecurity and disinformation campaigns, the virality of misinformation and the anarchic realm of social media. Little scope remained for arbitrary distinctions between soft and hard power relevance. Regardless of whether conditions of the twenty-first century would result in a recurrence of major armed conflicts, a second cold war or a ‘hot peace’ (McFaul 2018), Australian policymakers faced the challenge of ideational competition in a volatile and highly asymmetric region of the world.

Throughout these years, Liberal–National Party governments displayed little commitment to the notion of grand strategy – that is, a whole-of-government policy outlook aimed at the integration of all pertinent elements of national influence into a plan or approach to statecraft (Wesley 2016b, p. 21). From the mid-1990s, governments variously invested and disinvested in international media services, almost to the point of terminal decline of ABC multilingual international broadcasting. This yo-yoing of public policy resulted from short-term swings in threat perceptions and domestic priorities, and in reflection of philosophical differences according to which political party held office at points in time (the centre-right Liberal–National Party coalition or the centre-left Australian Labor Party). Each policy cycle has been costly, either resulting in the loss of corporate memory, expertise and long-established audience reach, or requiring new investment to rebuild capacity, reclaim audience reach and trust, and repair brand reputation as a precondition for political influence.

Until 2014, when the Liberal–National Party government announced it would disinvest in international television broadcasting, the ABC operated Australia Network international TV, under contract to the Foreign Affairs department, as well as the diminished Radio Australia. Australia Network represented the third iteration of international television. Under a Labor government, the ABC launched the first iteration in 1993. Urged by a successor Liberal–National Party government, the corporation sold the service to the commercial Seven network in 1997. After operating the channel leanly and unsuccessfully for several years, Seven announced it would cease the operation, prompting the government to reconsider its position in light of the prevailing geopolitics of Southeast Asia. In 2001, the ABC won a competitive tender process² to establish the third iteration of the television (and multimedia) service. Of note, the recommendation to Cabinet said the ABC submission had recognised the ‘strategic dimensions’ of the proposed service with an ‘innovative’ concept that was 11 per cent more costly than the nearest rival bid (NAA 2021, paras 9, 11). Little more than a decade later, anticipating the Liberal–National Party government’s decision to disinvest in international broadcasting, an ad hoc National Commission of Audit (NCoA 2014, p. 178) reported that it could not identify a clear relationship between the funding of services such as international TV and the government’s foreign policy goals. Yet, within four years of the decision to disinvest, Liberal prime minister Morrison initiated a three-year funding scheme to provide Australian commercial television programming to cash-strapped Pacific broadcasters. This he did as part of the government’s so-called ‘Pacific step-up’ to counter growing Chinese influence in the region. According to Morrison, ‘what better way of staying connected […] than our Pacific family switching on the same stories, news, drama and sports we are watching at home?’ (Morrison 2018).

By 2022, signifying yet another policy turn, an incoming Labor government declared it would ‘increase’ – that is, partially restore – funding to the ABC’s international services and develop an ‘Indo-Pacific Broadcasting Strategy’ as a ‘prudent investment in (Australia’s) security and national interest’ (Albanese 2022). Prior to the election, in response to a fast-deteriorating international security environment, Labor’s foreign minister-designate, Senator Penny Wong, identified three drivers for expanding the nation’s power and influence: projecting modern Australia to the (Indo-Pacific) region and the world; fostering partnerships grounded in trust; and enhancing the nation’s capacity to navigate international relations, including in the grey zone (Wong 2021). Viewed through that big picture frame, the political purpose and the functional properties of state-sponsored international media warrant more rigorous analysis. Necessarily, the projection of ‘modern Australia’ needs both to embody the interests of the state and to model the embedded social values of democracy; both are required for national representation to claim authenticity and moral legitimacy. But a state of perpetual tension exists because a nation’s foreign policy generally accords priority to the interests, rather than the values, of the state. Gyngell (2017) writes: ‘[…] values are almost always easiest to support in circumstances where national interests are less intense’. Any mitigation of the perpetual state of tension requires clarity of purpose, principled leadership and organisational arrangements fit-for-purpose.

The ABC, ‘Soft Power’ and Public Policy

The ABC claimed the loss of Australia Network deprived it of 60 per cent of the funding it had applied to international services in total (Spigelman 2014). Responding to budgetary constraints affecting the corporation overall, the ABC Board imposed swingeing cuts to the already-depleted Radio Australia. Later, the ABC unilaterally decided to cease all radio broadcasting to the Pacific by high-frequency (HF) or shortwave transmission, from 31 January 2017. Instead, it would rely on FM radio relay stations in various urban centres, as well as online delivery. Justified on grounds of cost and a general decline in usage of shortwave, this decision drew attention to a fundamental issue concerning the efficacy of international broadcasting as an instrument of discursive power.

Although a legacy technology from the twentieth century, shortwave radio retained strategic relevance due to its capacity for long-distance transmissions to remote and underserved audiences – or to reach listeners in closed societies or those subject to local censorship or government information control. That is, shortwave enabled Radio Australia to access media jurisdictions even where it was not wanted by local authorities. Notably, the ABC ‘briefed’ the Foreign Affairs department about its intention but took the decision ‘independently’, notwithstanding the department’s ‘encouragement’ that the ABC maintain broadcasts throughout the Pacific region (DFAT 2020b). The ABC made no public comment about the strategic consequence of ceasing shortwave transmissions or about alternative means it would employ to guarantee access during periods of hostility or stress.

The ABC’s unilateral decision provoked renewed public debate about its charter obligations as an international broadcaster. Responding to concerns raised during a Senate inquiry (ECLC 2017), in which ‘all sides of politics’ criticised the ABC for its decision to cease shortwave transmissions (SBS 2017), the government of then-Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull agreed to establish a Review of Australian Broadcasting Services in the Asia Pacific (DCA 2018). Following publication of a Foreign Policy White Paper (DFAT 2017), it also commissioned the Foreign Affairs department to conduct a whole-of-government Soft Power Review (DFAT 2018). The report of the broadcasting review, published in October 2019, took the form of a market-oriented survey of all forms of the Australian media presence in Asia and the Pacific (including econometric analysis) but made no substantive policy recommendations regarding the regional political context or the future of the ABC’s international services. Publicly, at least, the government took no follow-up action.

In October 2020, under Prime Minister Morrison as Turnbull’s successor, the government discontinued the Soft Power Review. A statement by Foreign Affairs said the government determined the review was ‘no longer relevant to the significantly changed global environment’ (DFAT 2020a), leaving unanswered the question of how the government understood the concept or its utility as an integral component of statecraft. Despite this, fear of China has spurred government – and the ABC by extension – to refocus on media engagement with Pacific audiences. In 2022, the ABC claimed that its multi-platform/multi-channel approach attracted a higher rate of usage and audience interaction than for any other international provider focused on Pacific island territories (Gorman 2022). Still lacking at the time of this modest uplift in international broadcasting engagement was evidence of a policy doctrine to situate its place in Australian statecraft.

Viewed strategically, the core function of an international broadcaster of the liberal tradition is to reach and establish a trusted form of engagement with target audiences, influencing agendas and framing discourse to provide a space in which power relations are contested. In establishing this facility, by design, the broadcaster mirrors or models certain values and norms, and represents core strategic narratives on behalf of the state; in Australia’s case, these narratives include the plurality of democratic discourse. The practice of international broadcasting involves transmission channels of information, sociolinguistic processes and production norms applied in competition with other international actors and national–domestic media.

International broadcasting complements rather than mimics other forms of persuasive communication, such as advertising and marketing, public relations, psychological operations and strategic communication (Bakir et al. 2019, p. 312). When considering the instrumental efficacy of international broadcasting, especially when espousing democratic principles, political purpose must be distinguished from public performance. The division is needed because of the inevitable tension involved when representing both the interests of the state and the espoused or tacit values of the host society. State interests determine what sphere(s) of influence the international broadcaster seeks to achieve, the audience segments and territories to be reached and investment priorities necessary to achieve agreed goals. The broadcaster’s performance is intended to engage target audiences on their terms of relevance and lived experience. That is straightforward if the target is the Australian diaspora but requires much more intellectual and cultural investment otherwise. Performance is normative insofar as it draws on the mores of the broadcaster’s host society in its organising principles and norms of production and presentation; it is affective insofar as it strives to attract the attention of and engage with designated intercultural audiences. These features have always applied to international broadcasting, if sometimes acknowledged only tacitly.

Today, as in the twentieth century, international broadcasting operates in a contested zone. Analysts increasingly focus their concern on the ‘geopolitics of platforms’ (Van Dijck, De Waal & Poell 2018) when debating the power and influence of technology titans and the social media they control. Authoritarian regimes such as in China and Russia block their citizens from accessing global information flows ‘while weaponizing information to attack and destabilize democracies’ (Rosenbach & Mansted 2019, p. 1). It is common also for less extreme illiberal regimes across the Indo-Pacific to block access to media platforms if only temporarily. The perceived threats come not only from state and non-state political actors but also market-driven disinformation. Chief strategy officer with the US Agency for Global Media, Shawn Powers, warns of a possible independent media ‘extinction event’ with dire implications for the future of democracy around the world (USACPD 2021). Doubts remain as to whether democracies are sufficiently prepared to deal with the increasingly aggressive geopolitics of information. In addition to the techno-political facets of cyber security, the viability of democratic order rests on its capacity to uphold and promote a reputation for moral and normative legitimacy in what is commonly described as the post-truth era. To that end, inoculation theory (Crompton et al. 2021) suggests it is more effective to ‘prebunk’ intentional disinformation and misinformation than it is to debunk a narrative once it has taken hold in a community. For that reason, the political history of international broadcasting has contemporary relevance, notwithstanding the profoundly different communications technology environment of today.

It follows that my first task is to dissect and evaluate the political purpose and efficacy of international broadcasting, its means as an instrument of intercultural communication and the variables that enable or impede its effectiveness. From this, I propose an analytical model with which to locate and evaluate the performance of international broadcasting in statecraft. I then apply the model to the political history and contentious performance of multilingual Radio Australia during the late Cold War decades – the previous era of great power confrontation and tumult in Asia and the Pacific.

Personal Perspective

This book developed through doctoral research and with reference to my long professional experience – indeed, as an actor in some of the situations discussed in later chapters. It is appropriate, therefore, to declare relevant aspects of my professional background as a journalist, editorial and corporate executive, and strategist in Australia and internationally. I worked as a journalist/producer and Canberra correspondent for Radio Australia (1974–1977); an ABC foreign correspondent (1978–1981); an executive producer of specialist talk programmes for the ABC’s national radio network (1983–1985); head of news and current affairs at Radio Australia and, later, the executive responsible for all news and programming output in nine languages (1985–1991); strategic adviser to the post-Apartheid board chairperson and the group chief executive of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (1994–1996); and general manager of ABC corporate strategy during the conversion from analogue to digital television broadcasting (1996–1998). Lastly, I returned to a relevant role as the ABC’s chief of corporate planning and governance (2000–2008), leading a strategic support unit for successive managing directors and the board, a role that included development and advocacy of the integrated television/multimedia service that became Australia Network. For part of that latter period, I had concurrent responsibility for the ABC international development unit providing technical and capacity development assistance to counterparts in Asia, the Pacific and the Arabian Gulf. From 2009, I worked independently as an adviser to government sector and media organisations in Asia and the Pacific.

One result of that professional experience is an awareness that the practice of international broadcasting should be understood as an open-ended negotiation between the interests of the state, the values and processes of communicative exchange with target audiences, and a range of institutional and professional biases that help determine the extent to which state interests and values are congruent.

Structure and Approach

The chapters of the book broadly fall into two parts. The first six chapters, including this introduction, culminate in an analytical framework with which to examine the Australian experience of international broadcasting. The second group of six chapters applies that framework to the political history of Radio Australia from the late Cold War period to 1990. The decade of the 1980s is significant for four reasons. First, a series of government reviews led to the reconstitution of the ABC and inclusion of international broadcasting as a charter obligation. The legislation has since been amended but remains substantially unchanged four decades later. Second, the 1980s constituted the last decade of the Cold War after which international broadcasting suffered its ‘deep crisis of purpose and credibility’ (Price 2001). Third, this was the last decade in which Radio Australia retained its capacity as a significant multilingual broadcaster. Subsequent iterations of an Australian international television service, with one qualified exception, operated only in English and therefore as a different sociolinguistic model. The fourth reason for focusing on the last years of the Cold War was to show that, despite the ABC’s modernising legislation of 1983, its dual national and international functions continued to exist in a state of tension. All such internal and external tensions likely would be magnified in situations where state interests and interstate relations were stressed or conflicted.

The narrative flow