December, 2003

On Tuesday George Bush restricted the import of certain Chinese textiles. On Wednesday he added to this a 45 percent tariff on semi-conductor computer chips from a particular Chines company. His argument was the Chinese goods were so cheap -- Communists, it seems, run more efficient workplaces than we do -- as to 'unfairly disadvantage' American clothmakers, computer chippers and electric shopkeepers. None of this is too hard to understand. Nor is Bush's political need to keep some jobs and industries in America, north of the border, up Illinois way, whether or not it means the end of Global Free Trade, and it looks pretty much like it does.

What is hard to understand is why we would do any less to protect an industry that has done Australia so much good, making scores of Australians famed and admired worldwide, and making tourists, in millions, want to come here. Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Paul Hogan, Cate Blanchett, Kylie Minogue, Toni Collette, Judy Davis, Frances O'Connor, Hugo Weaving, Baz Luhrman, Peter Weir, Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford, Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong, are famous now and so are the hills and beaches, the bushlands and skylines they helped enhance on the screen, because of the acting schools and film schools and cinemas and festivals and television productions we subsidised with -- yes -- our tax money, and the limits we put on what would otherwise flood our screens and export our spare cash to California.

These limits aren't too onerous. 83 percent of our bums on seats are at overseas films, and 63.4 percent of the TV we watch is foreign made. All we want is to make these numbers no worse and to have a chance, an even money chance, to make them somewhat better in the future -- when, say, 3-D talk-show hosts can sit in our lounge room and first run movies air through the Internet on our dining room wall.

It's not such a big ask. To protect our culture, or as Howard calls it 'the integrity of our borders', we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars threatening, capturing, relocating, imprisoning and watching very vigilantly certain Kurds, Iraqis and Afghans because...well...we will choose who comes here and the circumstances in which they come; because it's better that we have an Australia we know and like than one which others impose on us.

Yet the very same idea when applied to film and TV falls on deaf, and famously deaf, ears, and much less money is spent on it, of course. Why train a new Russell Crowe or a new Jane Campion when for a hundred times the money you can persecute a boatload of refugees and become despised across the world?
Why spend a dollar making others love you when for a hundred dollars you can make them really dislike you? Just asking.

Shakespeare, the greatest glory of England, came out of a subsidised company; it was called the Queen's Players. Dennis Potter, John Mortimer, John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Felicity Kendall, Jeremy Irons attained their fame and honour in a subsidised entity, the BBC. Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, honed their talents in the subsidised Royal Shakespeare Company and the subsidised National Theatre. Were all their careers mistakes? How big a mistake? If Global Free Trade had closed down the Queen's Players in 1595 would this have been a good thing? How good a thing? Really.

John Howard and Mark Vaile are telling us don't worry, we've got muscle, we can talk the Americans through this, Australia will be better off all up, just trust us, we're strong, we can do it, but I don't think this is so. If it were, David Hicks would be on the phone to his mother today, and his lawyer flying to Cuba to talk him through his defence, and our last eight hundred troops in Iraq, or some of them, coming home.

Australia is so disregarded by Bush it hardly rates a mention among 'our loyal allies' when he talks to newsmen off the cuff. We're as big in his mind as Puerto Rico or Madagascar or Baffin Land. We have as much real influence, as much real negotiating weight, as the Iraqi Communist Party (yes, there is one, and its representative sits on the ruling council, twiddling his thumbs), or a bunch of baa-ing sheep in the Gulf in long, sad quest of a slaughterhouse.

So it's not a game you win by surrendering, by trading our soul for a handful of wheat or a few Australian T-bones on a griddle in Crawford, Texas. You win by doing what won before, by being unique, defiant, cluey, courageous, a mouse that roars. By deciding who comes here, and in what circumstances. By behaving like patriots, not quislings. By being comfortable with who we are, and staying that way, and not becoming, like so many colonies do, whores for the visitor, soon forgotten.