The Proposed UNESCO Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions

September 1, 2005

The Music Council has made this submission to relevant Federal Ministers and their opposition counterparts, prior to a vote by the General Assembly of UNESCO in October 2005.

The Australian government has recognized the value of the arts to Australian society and has acknowledged that, especially in Australia’s demographic and geographic circumstances, government support through subsidy, regulation and tax concessions is necessary to sustain Australian creative resources.

This policy has guided Australian negotiations under GATS and in, for instance, its Free Trade Agreement with Singapore, where culture has been excluded from trade liberalisation initiatives. However, the policy did not survive in the context of the FTA with the USA, where serious limitations were imposed on the Australian government’s right to support Australian culture, especially in the area of new media.

Of particular concern is the reservation which (in theory) allows Australia to regulate new (literally ‘interactive’) media to ensure adequate access to Australian content. The reservation imposes so many constraints and conditions that it may preclude any attempt by an Australian government to implement it.

The threat extends beyond AUSFTA and new media. It is an objective of the WTO to phase out all subsidies. If realised, this would be a disastrous blow to Australian culture.

An Australian government truly committed to the protection and development of Australian culture will support the proposed UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The Convention presents a normative instrument which will give some shelter to governments that seek to retain the right to support their own cultures even while giving energetic support to the liberalisation of trade in other sectors.

The obligations imposed by the Convention are not onerous. For the most part, it reserves the right for governments to act, or encourages various types of action in support of cultural diversity. The entire document seems to sit comfortably with current practices in the cultural realm by the Australian government.

There are abundant reasons for Australia to support the Convention and no apparent substantive reasons for its opposition.

Read the submission