 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the Australian National University for Provocations, a live interactive academic event which seeks to shed light on competing visions of future sustainabilities. My name is Catherine Daniel, I'm a professor here at the ANU in the School of Cybernetics and the Fenness School of Environment and Society and your facilitator for today's event. Before I welcome our distinguished guest for our provocation I would like to acknowledge and celebrate the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, today the Ngunnawal and Nambri peoples and pay our respects to their elders past and present. These are lands that have never been seeded and will always remain sacred and we acknowledge that sustainable futures have been built here for millennia and that this knowledge and practice remains enormously important to the futures we continue to create here together. For the second iteration of our provocation series I'm delighted to welcome Professor Peter Grest who is an academic filmmaker, journalist and author. Peter is currently professor of journalism at Macquarie University and came to academia in 2018 after a 30-year career as an award-winning foreign correspondent for the BBC, Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera, working in some of the world's most volatile places. He was based in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Latin America and Africa and covered conflicts across those regions and in the Middle East. In 2011 Peter won a Peabody Award for a documentary on Somalia land of Anarchy for the BBC's flagship current affairs program Panorama. But Peter is perhaps best known for himself for becoming a headline when he and two of his colleagues were arrested in Cairo while working for Al Jazeera and charged with terrorism offences. In letters smuggled from prison Peter described their incarceration as an attack on press freedom. His campaign for freedom earned him numerous awards including the British Royal Television Society, from the British Royal Television Society, from the Walkley Foundation, the RSL, the Human Rights Commission and the International Association of Press Clubs. In 2017 with two colleagues he established the advocacy group The Alliance for Journalists Freedom which actively campaigns for media freedom across Australia and the Asia Pacific region. Peter is also author of the first casualty, a book about his experiences in Egypt and the wider war on journalism and as an academic he leads a research program investigating the impact of national security legislation on public interest journalism and we are very excited to have Peter joining us today for a discussion about these vitally important topics. Now in terms of our format today the event will begin with a provocation from Peter discussing the need to reconsider the news as a public good, the flaws of the business model of journalism, the policy mechanisms which might be able to bring about change and this positive future. This will be followed by responses from and discussion between our provocateurs. Dr Rebecca Pierce and Andrew Mears whose backgrounds I will briefly introduce later and of course with Peter. Finally there will be a live Q&A session in which the audience has the opportunity to engage with Peter's vision for a sustainable journalistic future and I would like to note that today's proceedings are being recorded for public distribution and single cast on Zoom so please keep that in mind should you wish to engage in the discussion and so now with those brief introductions I'd like to invite Peter to give your provocation to us. Thank you very much it's fantastic to be here and talking in this forum which I think is really really important and I'm very honored to be able to give this provocation. So the basic thesis is that our policies around news assumes that news should be treated as a business. We've ring fenced news from government interference. We've tried to establish ways in which news organisations should be supported in their pursuit of being able to make money from news. But that forgets the fundamental problem with news and that it has never been a business in its own right. News in the old days before the digital disruption was always paid for by revenue that was ring fenced or separate from news from the classified advertising in the case of print journalism and from the broadcast advertising that wrapped around the commercial entertainment whether it was on radio or television and that subsidised news. Any journalists that worked in the newsrooms prior to the digital disruption will remember. I certainly remember times when the whole newsrooms would threaten to walk out on strike if someone from the advertising department merely happened to step foot inside the newsroom that allowed a very clear separation between the source of revenue and the journalism. That was known in the old days as the rivers of gold and it really created that sense of editorial independence and a source of finance of revenue. To pay for journalism the journalists often described as worthy that means the kind of stuff that's important even if it's not that interesting. The kind of things that we knew needed to be investigated we knew needed to be covered even if we knew not that many people would actually pay attention to it because as journalists we had a responsibility to cover a lot of these stories regardless of the public interest. The problem now though is that the digital disruption has removed those rivers of gold and it's tied news directly to the source of revenue. Earlier on it was directly connected to clicks nowadays it's more about generating subscriptions. The subscription model is slightly better because it is over a longer term it means that supporters and readers of newspapers are able to engage or to finance over the course of a subscription. But I was talking to an editor or a former editor of news corp regional publications a few days ago who said to me that at the moment journalists in their regional newsrooms have their KPIs and those KPIs are based around the numbers of subscriptions that they generate. Those journalists when they're writing their headlines have artificial intelligence which will calculate how many subscriptions any given headline will help to generate. It's not a guarantee of course but the point is that those journalists are always nudged to producing headlines and stories that are going to generate subscriptions and that means that you tweet things in a way that because you needed to make money you need to cover your job you're producing journalism that is going to be shoutier that's going to be triggering to your audience that's going to inspire them to reach into their pockets and start pining up hard cash. I don't think that's good journalism it tends to produce content that appeals to our more base instincts it tends to produce content that's more polarizing it tends to prioritize polemic over serious analysis speed over accuracy and I don't think that's a healthy way of sustaining the kind of news environment that we need to have. So that's a really solid argument I hope for not thinking of news as a business and start instead I think or at least I think we should be reconsidering news as a public good. Now that means that if we think of news as a public good if we think that if we accept that it's a part of the way our democracy works if we accept that we need a class of professional individuals who have the skills the time the resources and the energy to focus on investigating government of doing deep inquiries of having the background knowledge to seriously question and challenge the way that our politicians and our civil service are running their various departments. If we have people that have an understanding of the way business works then we need to find a way of paying for that that is independent from commercial pressure or public government or government pressure and I think there is a good there is a solid case to argue that there needs to be public funds not just into a public broadcaster but also into commercial news organizations and this isn't a particularly radical idea we already do something similar in health care and education and education for example we all as a community accept that there needs to be a basic level of service provided by the government and that the government needs to establish a set of standards that run throughout the private sector as well as the public sector that some money also flows to the public sector to make sure that we've got those basic standards but that there is still a role for the public sector to top up what public money the basic service the public money provides and if conceptually we accept that for health care and education then I also think there is a case to argue that we should be accepting it for our information ecosystem our news ecosystem there are all sorts of models and we can discuss how that works what that might look like but fundamentally I still think that unless we're prepared to reconceptualize or rethink the way that news operates we're going to be headed for a very difficult future that's not to say that I think that journalists should then therefore be taking loads of public money and we should be giving loads of extra cash to Rupert Murdoch I think there are responsibilities that come with it one of the points about putting public money into private sector means that the public that has an investment in the private sector that news organizers or that journalists have a responsibility not just to their shareholders of those private news corporations but also to the public in fact we can conceive of the public as a shareholder in those larger organizations and that means that if you accept public money you should also accept that you provide journalism to a certain set of standards that you make yourself open to adjudication from a public ombudsman that you provide journalism that fills the gaps that are left under the current system so you make sure that you provide journalism that covers local courts local councils the kinds of specialist journalism that we're seeing disappearing that you provide a certain amount of journalists who are devoted to investigative journalism if we can manage a system if we can re-engineer a system in its entirety that includes the business model that includes professional standards that includes the technical and the software environment that it operates in then I think we're in a much better position to create an information ecosystem that works not just for us as a community but also works for our democracy as a whole. Excellent well thank you so much Peter I think there's an enormous amount of food for thought there around you know re-engineering an entire system and that whole ecosystem you've just spoken about. I'm now interested in our responses from our two provocateurs to get our discussion started. Our first provocateur is Dr Rebecca Pierce. Beck Pierce is a sociologist at both the ANU's School of Sociology and the Fenner School of Environment and Society. Her teaching and research focuses on inequalities and environmental policy. Beck's current projects investigate renewable energy rollout and natural resource management particularly in rural New South Wales with a particular focus on land and labour relations and her other work also relevant to this discussion focuses on the political economy of climate and energy policy. She is author of Pricing Carbon in Australia and a contributing author to Beyond the Coal Rush. Thank you Beck. Great thanks so much for the opportunity to be here Peter and Catherine and everyone involved. I suppose as a sociologist I've got parallel interest in questions of what makes good politics and how politics can contribute to a more just and equal society. So I'm just going to start if you don't mind with some reflections on how we're defining the public good here particularly in relation to the state's role in our society and the constitution of the policy of Australia. So you know public good is a concept that we actually get out of economics but it's a social science term referring to social collective goods that are usually free to access non-excludable for instance are available if you want to click on that link you should be able to access it and I really appreciate where you're going there Peter with recognizing that there is information out there important to our democracy the people literally can't access because of the failure of this business model. It's also generally important important to the the way we do democracy and the role of the state in our lives and I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the role of the state already in the public sphere and what it as an ensemble of contradictory institutions wants out of the public's fear particularly when it comes to the media it needs to legitimate itself needs to be heard it needs to secure political consent from the community for the way it's governing but more broadly the state has a role in legitimizing the current political and economic order that we live in and the media as that fourth estate kind of model that emerges in modernity is about solving or convening the state's democracy problem giving people a way to air grievance so we've got problems of hegemony you know power and the state having a kind of role to play in some of the bad stuff as well as the good stuff like funding things we want like education and potentially an expanded role in journalism so I suppose I just want to move now to and how I'm thinking about climate change and the reporting and the role of the press they're very briefly and I want to come back to models for getting the state more involved so with climate change we've got a fundamental contradiction a prevailing economic and political order that makes Australia you know we're not we're not narrowly reliant on the fossil fuel sector but we are certainly subservient to it politically and journalism you know I'm thinking about work of the people in the broadsheets like Mary and Wilkinson for Corners and so on has been essential to exposing elite capture in the political process around climate but we've also had a real problem in creating popular support for the state's response to climate and in some ways that's because we had a populist response to a market solution in the red government's carbon pricing scheme led by Tony Abbott bolstered by Murdoch with a kind of axe the tax scepticism of the science and the economic instrument kind of railroad strategy through the media into parliament ruined a piece of legislation that we needed to really work on and arguably with to get reform going so the the media had a real role to play there in exposing the problems and calling the government to account but I do think we ended up being hamstrung by the terms of a very technocratic by the technocratic or populist choice in the public sphere when it came to debating climate policy and and I think the middle of Australia just switched off and the popular opinion polls show us that most people were on reddit on facebook just sort of didn't want a bar of it and stopped really engaging and and I suppose the question I want to end there in terms of the broader equity and bringing in an educated popular polity that's not just people like us but also people from the lower classes in society and lower middle class how do we make journalism relevant to the vast majority of people who ended up switching off when it came to that really important issue what kinds of regulations are going to really hold I think both sides of parliament and and the new independence to account for a kind of policy reform that people understand and can get behind because right now it feels like the media is part of a kind of technocratic process that people have switched off from does that make sense so that's my that's my first sort of question how do we make this relevant to middle Australia and then I'm really keen to talk about the the nitty gritty of funding the public the private entities wonderful back and again lots of common themes emerging there on the kinds of models for journalism the relevance to all in society and I think we're going to have some some interesting conversations in a minute I'd now like to hear from our second provocateur Andrew Mears uh Andrew Mears is the design lead interim at the ANU school of cybernetics he is a Walkley award-winning photojournalist with more than 30 years professional experience working at the Sydney Morning Herald he served as the federal parliamentary press gallery president and from 2017 to 2019 he served in the office of the then leader of the opposition the Honourable Bill Shorten MP Andrew joined ANU as a senior lecturer in 2019 and has held roles within the Masters of Applied Cybernetics Teaching team including convening the program in 2021 as an educational experiences lead he also led the design and delivery of a short course cybernetic boot camp this year and his primary research activities centre around the creation circulation and curation of images and stories we share about and with technology as an ANU industry appointment Andrew is passionate about broadening the opportunity of education and creating meaningful experiences through novel research outputs and he's currently curating an exhibition called Australian cybernetic share which is about sharing perspectives on cybernetic futures from 1968, 1975 and today and that will be showing end of November, December this year. Thank you Andrew. Thank you and can I first just acknowledge that I too am on the unceded land of the Nunawala Nambri people and I pay my respects to elders past and present and any First Nations people joining us today. Can I also thank Peter for a wonderful provocation and launching us with such great insights, awareness and industry practice but with such a level of optimism in the face of you know some really big challenges and I would praise the organisers of this series to be courageous enough to to dream up new worlds. Certainly my practice since joining Academy and isn't around storytelling and it's really lovely to be part of this storytelling moment and thank you too back for bringing your perspectives. Just as Beck did questioning some things there what do we mean by state I kind of enjoyed where you were going with that I said here going what what do we mean by news you know what do we use it news as we know it and certainly I see it as a combination of technical capabilities that are enabled themselves by a social process and my background is in newspapers and certainly the news as I see it is a bit of a late Victorian era where we have a confluence of technologies coming together around encoding and decoding and transmission and this certainly sits in and around printing presses ink newspapers and distribution networks pretty much through railways you know questioning these questions of power and geographies and then this all gets challenged with new forms of encoding and decoding and transmissions in the telegraph and this is an area we find interesting in the school of subnetics because we can learn glimpses of the future through glimpses of the past is a research method we use and so I've spent a bit of time thinking around telegraphy and it was fascinating to come across one of the first forms of news regulation in the world for copyright for news was in 1871 in Victoria so we had telegraph in Australia but we hadn't been linked to London yet this is a year away and our politicians and the business interests of the newspaper providers are getting ready for this because it's no one entity elsewhere in the world they know it's very expensive to gather news they know it's very expensive to transmit and distribute news those problems are very familiar to all media providers today and in now we start to see legislation regulation enacted that we see news as property and I think what you're putting to us Peter is to not just leave it there and look for these mechanisms of containing power and commodification but that was their way of addressing the monopolies coming out of news gathering organizations and obviously the telcos you know it was hugely expensive so out of that we get entrenchment of power they formed a Australian Associated Press to get a level of bargaining and that's pretty much shaped the world that I came into in the early 90s and then I just mentioned two other lived experience around regulation legislation in this space and that have shaped our world I think in 1996 we have section 230 in the United States around the Communications Decency Act and these are 23 words that enable the internet today so this is this concept around the public good of containing free speech around some horrendous things that we know play out online and then the Facebooks of the world didn't want to be known as a publisher and so this idea of what is enabling and constraining helped shape the world we're in and then in 1999 in Australia again these power structures and their version of the Copyright Act when we started to see interactive media and putting video over the internet and what we pretty much take as the internet today was meddled with by the politicians at the time entrenching what was television what was print and so I think that really knobbled business potential new growth in these new medias and I always look at the world now that I've joined the school subnetics around enabling and constraining possibilities that certainly my practice as a photographer I couldn't do all the things you absolutely constrained by what's in front of you and then since joining the school the best definition I've come up with to share with the audience because it is vexed is cybernetics is an attitude and I feel like just stopping there because if that's what it is it's an attitude but what it's looking at is and building a politic and attitude to complex and purposeful systems and a host of precise conceptual techniques for dealing with them and I think we could argue the media and politics are absolutely adaptive complex systems and certainly the attitude that cybernetics gives us to me is a level of hope because they're going to argue that the media and technologies our buildings our politics they shape us and then we shape them so through that they're coming through conceptual and theory models around flows of information that informs levels of feedback and regulation through that and then what's really driving the cybernetic conversations is understanding purpose not what you stated is but what it does and so my provocation back to the panel that is if we take it that we want a public good there's going to come a level of accountability and resource allocation so what are the feedback mechanisms new existing they're already here what would we what would we what do we seek it to amplify and suppress to do that enabling constraining that cybernetics is interested in great Andrew and again so many different themes in there for us to explore about how you know the past does shape our present models what we can learn from the past to inform create shape those purposeful futures enabling and constraining I love the couple of terms if I can now turn back to peter and your provocation what do these perspectives from Beck and Andrew bring up for you so one of the things that occurred to me particularly as Beck was talking talking about the relationship between the public and and government and one of the things that struck me is the concept of freedom one of the things that always underpins the discussion around journalism is the concept of media freedom and of course philosophers know there are two ways of defining freedom there's positive freedom and negative freedom in the discussion around journalism it's always been the negative it's freedom in the negative freedom from government interference freedom from government control but if you think about what the point of press freedom has been in the first place it's it's the positive freedom for the public to have access to a wide range of good quality information and in focusing so intently on the negative freedom freedom from government interference what we've got is an environment that is actually damaged that positive freedom to have access to good quality information and I think that cuts to what Beck was saying in two areas first of all you spoke about having journalism that works to or speaks to the communities that at the moment are marginalized or that are just not represented that are switched off and one of the things I think we should be saying is that if you are that you need to provide diversity in your newsrooms you need to engineer diversity into your newsrooms that brings in people from those communities that knows what issues concern those communities who understand those communities and who can speak back to those communities that doesn't happen without the thumb on the scales I mean if we just allow the environment if we allow the business models to work out if we allow the marketplace to sort itself out um well we've been allowing the marketplace plenty of time to work it out and it hasn't right the fact is that we've got those communities that are unrepresented not just the working class and middle class lower middle classes but all sorts of diverse ethnic communities which are completely unrepresented gen various gendered communities that are unrepresented I mean there's a whole raft of people that just don't get to speak through the conventional media and I think that we need to create an environment where we say that if you take public money then you have a responsibility to speak to those communities and that's the quid pro quo here that we need to understand and and emphasize fundamentally that positive freedom of information of access to good quality information um and recognize or make sure that we discuss and that the vital importance of that to the people who are supposed to be receiving this the public rather than that negative freedom from government interference that doesn't mean that we should therefore throw out that the concept of government interference because that does come with risks but but it does mean I think that we need to place guardrails um around both around the limits of government interference but also limits of the way and guardrails around the way in which the media works to make sure that it provides the freedom that I think we we originally wanted when we conceived of press freedom in or freedom of speech in the first place um I think that there's also another issue around the relationship of journalism and politics and I think this cuts also to what you were saying too and that is that um I was I came across a quite a while back from a researcher who argued that journalism and politics are the the the synachronon of one another where the two are intimately interconnected in ways that we don't always see and understand and if we recognize that politics really can't operate without journalism without the way of communicating to the public and as you said generating consent in the way that it requires and at the same time if we accept that every act of journalism is political or at least has political consequences then we recognize the way that these two things are interconnected as as binary stars if you like and we need to make sure that we that if we do violence to one we're seeing journalism itself being undermined and degraded then that will have an effect on the way that our politics operates there are a few other points we can let's let's go from there so back would you like to respond directly to to that one around around the the challenges and the the intermingling of journalism and politics and maybe what you've seen for example with that the transitions in in the climate area yeah I was actually on on the question of the the political and and frankly ideological dimensions to what you're proposing and I think it's incredibly productive proposal I I've been sort of thinking in two tracks and maybe we can't quite touch on both of them so one in terms of the political I started to think about all the news outlets that I engage with and you know peripherally and and intimately and one of them that came to mind was Friendly Geordies the YouTube comedian slash investigative journalist that is literally in the courts with a politician who has been allegedly engaged in corrupt behavior in the New South Wales state and I you know the question is is Friendly Geordies a legitimate recipient of public funding and on what terms would you prioritize that kind of journalism okay so this this also answers an issue that Andrew raised and that's around the definition of of journalist or journalism for such a long time we've become obsessed with what Brett Walker I think very astutely described once as the Assange problem and everyone defines journalist depending on whether they think Julian Assange should be or should not be considered as a journalist and ultimately I think that's a full there and we're never going to get there you're never going to be able to to come up with a meaningful definition that doesn't create a whole host of other problems around who is a journalist which is why I'm interested in taking a completely different approach I think we should be looking at defining journalism as a process and in fact this is not a particularly radical idea it already exists in Australian law the Victorian Evidence Act section 126k which defines which says it starts out in the usual way that a journalist is someone who is in the business or profession of producing news but then it goes on to say that the the publisher of that news should be accountable in brackets through a complaints process to an industry to a generally accepted code of conduct or set of standards and I think that's the key that if we decide that journalism what matters isn't the who but it's the it's the function that journalism plays and that function is defined by the by the way in which information is gathered organized and processed and then presented and it's done to a generally understood set of standards the MEAA has a code of conduct the press council that I sit on has its general principles and all of these define what journalism looks like and what the standards should be now I'm not going to say whether friendly George is sure or should not is or is not what I would say is that journalism should meet those standards and it should be accountable to those standards if you're if you want to be described or defined as a journalist and if you want public money then at the very least you have to say here are the standards that I adhere to and if you think I deviate from those standards here is a complaints process that will hold me to account I think that will separate out a lot of real journalism from a lot of stuff that looks like journalism that pretends to be journalism but just isn't produced to those standards I think there's something really nice in that comment in that when we look at that process and and take it away from the person it means that it's also technology agnostic and Andrew you were talking about the importance of those sort of technological transformations and that move from you know the idea of cybernetics moving from the what to the how it moves from the what the person to the how and crucially what it does also is it doesn't rule anybody out okay it doesn't say that if you are not working for News Corp then you can't be a journalist but if you work for the ABC then you are it doesn't say that it simply says that as long as you're producing work to this standard and you're accountable to those standards you're fine Andrew what have you seen in terms of intentions in terms of making those standards and who makes them and then maybe going back to that higher level politic that Bec was talking about in in whether it's you know elite or or middle australia and how how that all flows out you look at that I think we're some of what we're discussing here certainly having someone such as myself who's been in those exclusive newsrooms right so back in the telegraph a newsroom was a place you went to the telegraph station and you pay this subscription and you went to the news and you read it in a room and that's how you got this subscription model closed access and obviously the telegraph and the distribution models flip that and the news goes to you and I think we're looking again you're talking here around you know the incentives now to build those subscription models and I'm thinking oh we're going back to a closed room and you're speaking to how do we reach new and interesting audiences and for me the key here is around participation so I've sort of come to this somewhat through studies of the fake news which I know it's not this discussion but I've the best description of that world the conspiracy world oh it's participatory fiction you get to be part of it and then it's two other threads I've pulled together here I'd say the popularity of apps such as TikTok allow you to participate and distribute and have a level of creativity so I think there's now an awareness of how these things are made so therefore there's an opportunity to express yourself but there's also a critique going on because you understand some of the process and the other is the Ikea effect and this is you know academic studies in around that if you build it yourself you sort of it has more value although it's cheap furniture it's fabulous I have some but the fact that you did something to bring that into the world and so I'd be picking up on these these points here and I agree with the accountability and responsibility framework and where that threshold sits you know it's never going to be perfect but at least there's something's being asserted here but I just love tying this together around how do we have a more participatory democracy right and so I know that happens with a democracy sausage once every three years this goes back to a high court implied freedom of political communication I've certainly an argument I use to improve media access in parliament house was I have a role to inform the public so they can vote on the way you've behaved the policies you have and so I've been looking at with this framework you're putting forward is to actively increasing participation and I don't think what I'm proposing particularly around a definition actually limits anything and one of the keys and one of the things that we've really been struggling to come up with is a model that doesn't inhibit freedom of speech that doesn't say to anybody that you can't participate in some way what we're simply saying is that if you are produced our community our democracy our public debate really depends on access on the flow of information that we can the base done to produce to a basic standard that we know and understand and that we can rely on and all I'm trying to do is is to is to ring fence that information anybody who is capable of producing who understands those systems and processes and is countable prepared to make themselves accountable to them can I think be defined as producing journalism and get the benefits whether it's public money or other legal protections but that doesn't mean that if you're not up to those standards you can't produce content you know you can still do it there's nothing that says that you can't it's just about saying that working out a way in which we can say that this is journalism and this is everything else and you can again still be producing factual content I'm not saying that you can't I'm simply saying that we we need to work out a way of recognizing acknowledging and supporting the role that journalism plays and we do that by defining the way in which information is processed to a particular standard and I think that gives us a really solid starting point that doesn't rule anybody out doesn't live and inhibit anybody else's freedom of speech but does help create a kind of professionalized class of information that we that we can at least place a bit more stocking than we currently do and so I think you know that's a it's a it's a very solid proposal you know one part of the puzzle but it's only one part of the puzzle you talked about in in the provocation I wonder whether we also talk about some of the the other challenges in terms of the conflict that arises through that which perspectives are put on show you know how how that public good is defined how broad is it is public good in Australia also public good in the whole age of Pacific region is it global public good where does that where are the challenges of that model what have you seen through your practice in the past I might actually put this to all panelists what kind of conflicts do you see in the past that have been really important that you think need to be managed in this in this new model which ones need to thrive oh gosh I think back had some thoughts on this yeah I could start us off it's a habit of mine do I have to excuse you you know sort of another angle I have on this is if you like thinking about the political economy of market goods that also public goods like carbon credits trees in the ground on rural land renewable energy credits and so on but but thinking about the the current state's role in another public good we call education I think one of the challenges we've seen in the education sector in Australia is that it's clearly a public good but it's delivered on an extremely marketized basis and in a profoundly unequal way we put per capita far too much money into private schools and into the selective state schools compared to the the vast amount of need in the public system so there's a kind of segregation along not just class but also racialized domestic lines when you think about the education system from childcare all the way up to universities and and the way marketization is played out there has a long complex story depending on which part of our education and let's include TAFE here in post high school training sector you're looking at one of the worries I have in my head about this proposal in the real politic of a let's face it labor party and teal coalition that might get this up is that it would become it would start to widen the case for the SPS and the ABC that it would actually be read by our current government's tendencies in this area to deregulate and already establish public good that does have those content and quality regulations around it in the TAFE sector we've seen you know deregulation of vocational training dramatically atrophy access for working class people into an enormously important education institution there and we've got problems in the user pay system in higher ed for instance so I'm so behind this but I wonder you know what strategy would be needed to make sure that this is actually an expansionary budget line that doesn't accidentally deregulate existing public broadcast for a start I don't think it should be a budget line what I'd like to see I think the the British license fee model the BBC's license fee model is actually a fantastic way to go for those of you don't know the license fee British anybody who owns a television in in the UK pays a license for that that TV and that license fee money goes directly to the BBC it's independent it's collected by an independent license fee commission and it goes directly to the BBC the government doesn't touch it it doesn't go anywhere near the Chancellor's pockets now I'm not suggesting we should introduce a license fee into Australia but if you can think about it conceptually what it does is it creates a source of revenue for the BBC that is independent of commercial pressure or government influence it's also completely transparent it's tied to the way that people consume the news and it's entertainment and it's premised on a public understanding that we need to pay for this for the for the broader public good I think conceptually there are other ways I'm not a tax expert but I think there are there would be ways in which we can create a levy a form of taxation that can be collected by an independent commission and distribute it the vast bulk of it can go to the ABC and SBS we can still recognize and support and fund that but if we can also gather enough extra money to also underwrite a certain amount of the production costs of commercial news so that we've got a public investment in those newsrooms then I think you have a model that works because that also creates a line of accountability from the from those commercial newsrooms directly back to the public but they also serve rather than as it stands at the moment which is a line of accountability up to their shareholders and company directors. I was just going to jump in and to where the cost of not building on a democracy and these information flows and you mentioned models for us to consider around public funds going to health and education and I'm sitting here thinking possibly two of the most wonderful things in my life and my family's life to be involved in have been sport and so community sport to go to your point you know there's so many sports do and don't get funding and I'm also mindful that the big sports that we know and love the AFL, the NRLs get significant stadium and other funding flows to them but then there's a community cohesion the spectacle the health benefits flow through something you know add those to your list and the second one I think is something around those times of crisis we're certainly seeing that with you know the work you're speaking here around we know we're going to increasingly get frequent and severe floods at the moment fires are very much always been part of our increasing life and so we have invested significant funds of mitigation and we're going to have to do a whole lot more and certainly within that I think there's that community sense of cohesion that comes out of that through Ruify Service, CFA and those moments and so I think there's like what's the tapping into those communities and I think I live in a rural part of New South Wales and we sort of talk to each other and to notify where the speed cameras are but we could absolutely extend through chat doesn't have to be published model but it's not necessarily subscription model but it's a community model and how would that be enabled through training success models and again to get that whole diversity of you know me playing footy with the kids through to you know my journalistic heroes such as you Peter and many others who are the Olympic level elites right and so I think your model allows for this participation and the many plurality of voices that we were speaking to and so if we take that point Andrew you know working right from the community level we're talking about the you know what happens at the grassroots we've been talking very much about what happens at sort of the government level but one of the challenges we have is that the people in those grassroots communities will often be say connecting through Facebook or Twitter or other types of social media they may not be going through the traditional media the algorithms that they use for their search to see do I have a pothole in my road or is it going to flood maybe giving them other information so how do we move up you know when we're now in a global news ecosystem what are the kinds of challenges and issues that we need to to bring to the table to support this kind of proposal to make sure it actually functions because we we're not cut off we're not just in Australia how do we make that part of this function maybe Peter and and Andrew to start with all right well the one thing I would say is that again I think we need to acknowledge the genius of the software engineers who've created the social media systems they have been incredibly efficient incredibly good at doing what they were paid to do and that's to monetize our attention for the profits of their shareholders and I mean that sincerely I think we do need to tip our tip our hats to to the work that they've done but we also need to recognize that those systems those platforms have become so ubiquitous that they now take on the status of of utilities in our country they're the means by which we communicate you know and we like it or not that's how we that's how we find out about the world and that's how we communicate and talk to one another but they're not designed and engineered for us or for our community they're designed and engineered for those those platform those companies those tech companies in Silicon Valley and nobody I think has seriously grasped the net and said if they if that's the case it's not useful to us it's not helpful to our community it's not helpful to public discussion it's not helpful to the healthy flow of information to have the algorithms designed in that way we need to place regulations guardrails around the way in which those algorithms work so that they function for us because they are so ubiquitous because we are so dependent on them that's not an easy discussion to have it's not a discussion that I'm seeing happening at any serious level but I don't think we're going to solve this problem without that and to go to your point Andrew too one of the reasons I'm really happy to be here as a host of the School of Cybernetics as a sorry as a guest of the School of Cybernetics is because I think the cybernetics approach that takes into account not just the financing or the business model for journalism or the standards of journalism but the whole the whole kitten caboodle the way in which information flows and feeds back to its back into the system the whole system itself is fundamental to the way in which we should tackle this problem and ultimately solve it I think we have to re-engineer reconfigure and frankly provide a degree of regulation around the way in which the algorithms operate I know there'll be a whole load of libertarians who'll scream up and down and say but you're just giving an excuse for government interference I disagree and I think you know we need to place road rules we need to stick regulations you know we told the car companies that they had to build in seatbelts and speed and we had to have speed regulations and we had to give them breaking standards and emissions controls and so on automotive companies all screamed and said oh that's going to produce cars that are too expensive and no one's going to buy them well guess what we all accepted that we need these things for the public benefit and I think we should take the same approach to the way in which social media operates yeah I mean I do sit here when I hear algorithms sometimes I just to make my life easier to swap it out for a recipe and yeah that recipe is not you know I don't want to eat that I don't feel for that and so and I also sit here squirming a little bit because the world we live in is partly because of the conversations around cybernetics so yeah there's coming together of information theory control theory and automation and it's somewhat those conversations come together and help inspire computing but it did sit at a time of a politic after world war two and weapons manufacturing and they're worried about the automation of weapons you know something we still talk around today and it came out of a crisis and it was trying to challenge that around the purpose and what are we optimizing for you know we're just seeing you know horrendous genocide at that time and like really do we really want to make better weapons to do that more efficiently and in some of those conversations drift and become artificial intelligence because that bit they can do and they wanted to you know build better effectively surveillance tools for cold war and then now those those tools developed in 1956 you know many decades of workers sitting on my kitchen bench listening to my family and so I do shift awkwardly saying cybernics help create that but I also am optimistic to say you thank you for your generosity here Peter because that's certainly what we believe in the school that by changing the boundaries looking at what is actually happening and asking some as you have today asked some tricky questions to open up new possibilities will create those possibilities and so in doing that at the school we'll look at people technology environment absolutely intersected and and involved and I think this question around I sort of view the world a little bit through maintenance high maintenance and low maintenance and I think what you're asking for here is with a little bit of a catalyst around a new attitude a new way of thinking and yes there's probably some funding and opportunity there new things will emerge and then it will become a lower maintenance and a better polity and democracy is kind of the optimism that cybernics had back post-war and I applaud you for being brave enough to to bring it to us but to be clear that none of this is easy you know I recognize and again I think Beck might have some thoughts on this you know you talk about hegemony you talk about the way that power structures work and I recognize that there are all sorts of deeply difficult challenges to this which is why actually I think it's great to be able to sit here in a session called provocations and just chuck ideas out there that I know are going to get end up with a whole load of resistance but at least we need to stick them out there but back you know again you might have some some thoughts on yeah it's not from the resident Nellie negative but it's not because I'm not on board I think I think that there are some big political dilemmas ahead if this were to become a popular idea but I but if I can just reflect like what where I think we've landed here so you know we're talking about an issue that's too important not to do something about and I really appreciate that you've started us off with that sort of flavour of claim that we are looking at the fourth estate atrophying before our eyes in terms of its capacity and the capacity of the polity to hear it and and I think in the really positive sense there's a kind of vision that you're offering us that's saying you know this is this is the classic economist argument in some ways the the market for journalism has failed to provide a quality product and we've got all these other goals for the polity in terms of participation creating new institutions to bring new people in dealing with questions of diversity and representation and I think you know we need a more internationalist media scape as well we're so parochial in so many ways I think the one thing that I'm still sticking with me is that question of political scrutiny and ideology in all of this I'm thinking about the forms of journalism that we want to help make we want to make sure they maintain their place in this order and if you got your way would they be undermined I'm thinking of the crikey's and maybe not the friendly jordies but maybe the smaller places that do that important political education on the left and sometimes on the right that might you know what do we what do we do about them but I really hear a very positive vision for a range of things that could be achieved with this model thank you Beck and I realize that you know we've we've got about half an hour left and I'm really keen to also open up this discussion you talked about participation back and I think it would be great to get our audience both in the room and online to participate a little bit in in this debate so in terms of moving to our Q&A if you can raise your hand or submit your question through the online I believe we had someone who will read our online questions is that correct great and we'll we'll open it up to questions so we've got there we go so we've got an online question so we'll start with that one and this goes to just literally what we're just talking about so with changing media landscapes it's not just media calls or big publications creating content but small and big influences who use free media platforms to create content they have a lot of influence in society and can swing people's perception in either way on one side we have freedom of expression on the other side we have the idea of control of content for public good so who decides what is in the public good politicians corporations or people that's a great question it's a really really curly one I'd prefer to dodge the issue altogether because I think again if we go back to because there will always be and I think they're necessarily has to be a debate a conversation around what a dynamic conversation and by conversation I mean between consumers and producers of content around what constitutes information in the public good what I'd prefer to do as I said is set a set of parameters a set of standards of the way in which information is processed and if we accept that journalism is by definition has a commitment to accuracy to fairness to balance that it has it works within certain legal parameters around defamation then I think we can allow that debate to play out between that sort of dialogue between consumers and producers but fundamentally if you're holding to those basic principles that that occur that you know that are on countless news organizations websites that is part of the MEAA those codes of conduct are well known well understood and the key is is not just that you that you adhere to those codes of conduct but there is a system of accountability to that then I think you're in the place that you need us to be I think there will be I think it's very difficult for anybody to preset those parameters to say that this is what the public good really is I think we need to be able to say this is how you need to be able to process information and as long as you're doing it in that way according to those standards and you're accountable to those standards then we should let the system work as it will anything more than that starts to get I think a little bit too prescriptive dangerously prescriptive and in fact it comes back to your comment about the interaction between democracy and media and that that feedback plays out and to just let that particular feedback do its job it's I think a really interesting one did either of you have any comments on that question as well sometimes I draw on the phrase two turntables and a microphone and what I mean by that is you know in studying that history of hip hop you know you have a confluence of things coming together again to create a new emergence so to be so optimistic here but um you know there's a part of a song that's really well that's a good bit to dance to and then they found with a certain type of particular type of turntable from japan that happened to be on sale at that at that time enabled you to extend the break with two records so you can dance for a little bit longer you have to scratch down to get an mc but then sitting all around there there's a whole lot of politics going by violence riots which mean turntables are now widely available and you know there's a whole history social history that's enabling that but where I'm going with that is that you know we get a new genre we get a new form of political expression and opportunity for some of the things we've been talking around who has voice who has influence and that was a distribution of a set of tools but more than that it's a it's a it's a feeling of vibe and a connecting to an audience that wanted something so part of my optimism sitting here today is you know how do we open up the two turntables and a microphone in this and there's not necessarily I know there's clear definitions around public good but it's not good or bad it's it's fact is their human endeavor and people connecting and building networks of trust to do with the misinformation and enabling that and I think to this point that you know we we index the platforms at the moment but I'm mindful of those things emerge and evolve and change and so I guess it's looking at increase in participation barriers of entry and skill development I think a lot of what you're speaking to if these are accountability mechanisms well there's a whole education piece and and um do better yes yeah yeah I I really appreciate the question and when this is gone because um my my sense is that the parameters of public good journalism model is will necessarily be set politically there's no avoiding it even the independent bureaucratic body is political right and it's basically the best model we have for managing the allocation of public funds to public goods usually in a market setting these days to give us age care give us um disability care give us higher ed and and so on and I think that um the task is to build a like a popular hegemony for this kind of model that that is defensive on the question of the ways those political decisions can end up hamstringing the new institutions and depoliticize them that's been the problem in the charity sector I think to some extent it's been the problem in the university sector looking at the way the education minister has done captain's calls on ARC grants so there you know if you take this to parliament and I hope you do and I'll be part of it right it needs to be popular there will be some thinking to do about that juggle that our question has thrown up between freedom of expression and having to make allocated decisions that are basically political um and I'm interested in the outcomes excellent if it gets through to channel 10 and nine jump in I say that's the other thing I'm sitting here as you know the the debate so I had to sit over as president of the press gallery it was about keeping that wall very high for other entrants and we're talking major players who are part of our ecosystem now there was a lot of internal resistance from my associates around not letting people get access because they're protecting business models and vested interests so yes that's a very real point to put forward here it's a it's a tough market getting tougher and they're going to defend it and I think that goes very nicely to some of the things also in Peter's book but we can come to that I'm I'm aware that we we should be asking our audience more questions so do we have others up there yes we have one in the in the floor if you'd like to hand the microphone Hi Andrew Podger former press council member I in a sense Peter you're putting forward as a provocation a radical change but in a sense you could get there through a series of incremental changes and so I'm wondering whether you might talk about on both the issue of the public interest journalism that's lacking funding what things have been in play recently that could be built upon further to open that up with more money from from government and secondly on the standard side we've seen some moves on this a long time ago and is it an opportunity to reopen those about a platform neutral professional standards framework that might be a single national body of some sort so thanks Andrew for those questions I think they're really important but the question of funding I think we've there was the news media bargaining code which we saw introduced a few years ago which compelled Google and Facebook to negotiate directly with news organizations to pay for the services that they provide I think that model was deeply flawed because I think it entrenched the status quo it did nothing really to change the fundamentals of our media environment it was also deeply unstable it only those agreements only existed for a couple of years for a relatively short period and I think that's having to renegotiate that and Facebook is now talking about moving away from away from news excuse me and I think we and so I think we need to recognize that that system needs to be rethought there was also the regional news fund that was supposed to provide finance or to regional news publications that would give them a longer runway to develop business models again I think that was deeply flawed because it assumed that all we had to do was to give those news organizations time to figure it out and ultimately that work out a business model my feeling is that we haven't seen that work pretty much anywhere in the world a proper business model for journalism that's both scalable and reproducible in a way that that gives me any serious hope there are a few sort of small examples around the world isolated examples but nothing that says that here is a sustainable viable model for the way forward but what those experiments have done is is started with the assumption that we have a crisis that we need to find ways of putting money back into journalism that isn't connected to the traditional way of tying it to advertising and so that presumption that started that that fundamental acknowledgement of the problem I think is a very good place to start it's a recognition that actually the system's broken and we've got to figure out a way of getting more money into it and that's why I think if we start looking at a license fee model that applies or that can be distributed across all of the news industries according to formula that we can thrash out of a public and political debate then I think we might be getting closer to a model that's viable and also curiously the Scandinavians have a model too of public funding for for regional news that I think is also worth looking at we don't need to go into those that level of detail here you also raise the question of standards and like you I'm a member of the Australian press council and there are two standards associations that's a press council that deals with print and there's the and there's ACMA the Australian communications and media authority which deals with broadcasting and I think we've understood that both of those are frankly dysfunctional the press council itself is going through all sorts of internal inquiries and reviews to figure out how it can be better and more relevant again I think those reviews haven't really been working but they do it does acknowledge that there's a problem these days having two separate standards for print and broadcasting is meaningless when news publications are are running video and and you know when we're getting convergence I mean that distinction is ridiculous so what my organization the Alliance for Journalists Freedom has come up with is a model of voluntary certification and the emphasis has to be on voluntary it cannot be compulsory what we are saying is that and again this is not a radical idea there are all sorts of professional associations out there whether it's the Australian Institute of Company Directors or the Institute of Chartered Accountants or the Institute of the Royal College of Australian where Australian College of Surgeons or the Institute of Engineers or whatever where you have a professional organization organized by the industry that sets standards that has a membership and that says that if you want to if you go through tests if you go through professional development and we are prepared to give you a badge that says or a label that says that you are a certified member of a professional working to our standards and I think it's way over time for journalism to do the same and I can see several ways in which that would provide real benefits if you could use that set of standards and allow certified journalists to stick something like Twitter's blue tick next to their next to their byline then you've got a way for the public to recognize or to make a distinction between work that is produced according to those standards and work that is not and also in the way that the blue tick works that you give the social media companies a way of identifying journalism that is produced to those standards and boosting that content up the rankings in a way that allows greater engagement but also potentially greater revenue and I also think there's a third potential benefit in our country we do not have any explicit protection for media freedom anywhere in our legal code it's implied there are all sorts of areas where it's understood or it's hinted at but there's nowhere where it's explicitly says that we have that there is a vital role for free media in our in our in our democracy I think that there is time for a media freedom act that gives us that protection but the act can be defined according to the process of journalism that I've described to you already and if that process is the same process that a certification system uses then you can have a way in which those certified journalists enjoy a rebuttable presumption under the law that they are working as journalists so in other words if you find yourself in court and you have a certification then it's up to the opposition sorry to the prosecution to demonstrate why you have failed in your professional obligations and under the law and therefore you don't deserve the protection or the benefit of the law now that's not to say that journalists who are not certified can't get the benefit of the law they just got a bit more work to do to demonstrate that they are working so the burden of proof rests on them to show that they're working to those standards what I'm proposing here is a system that of that gives media the the protection the kind of legal top cover that recognizes the principle of a free press the importance of a free press I'm proposing a system of voluntary certification that gives journalism a way of defining and professionalizing its standards and allowing the public to identify that and a way of connecting those to a media freedom act and certification in a way that has real benefits and I think if we can tie that model with a coherent system for financing journalism through a system of public funding then I think you've got a coherent ecosystem or an architecture of what good journalism looks like how it's paid for and its connection to the law it's a really big vision but it is a kind of I hope that it presents a vision of a kind of comprehensive coherent system that deals with all of these different elements and it is indeed a big vision I don't know how many questions we have online at the moment I think we've probably only got time for one additional quick question and then I'd love to move to our our final wrap up sure and this actually goes just to exactly what we were just talking about as well so they have said is public funding the state putting its thumb on the scale to fully or partially determine the outcome in markets do we really want the state to determine what is journalism and what is just mere public comment have we the democratic institutions in place to ensure this won't just entrench the existing power structures in the media and exclude the type of innovation that Andrew was talking about before. Andrew would you like to have a bit of a go quickly? Yeah I mean I was just reflecting on the answer from Peter there and his very comprehensive model and to the question before was around we turned to a science fiction writer William Gibson and he said in an interview once the future is already here it's just unevenly distributed so I think although this provocation is bold and wonderful I would like to say that the future is sort of you know endlessly deferred and we never arrive it's certainly that the journalistic tone is often that some sort of hypothetical may happen if only these set of conditions come and my political friends are always talking about a future that never arrives but I want to go beyond that with with this provocation and this question to say that I think Peter's model will form in whatever is iterative or even just accepting the idea it will form a level of change that wouldn't in a cybernetic sense absolutely influence and change those power structures because you've already you've changed the environment and in cybernetics is always in this adapt adaptiveness to responding to that environment but also changing that environment so this is the fact we've been having this discussion and realizing that there are other possibilities and in questioning those information flows with new ways of being and seeing in the world new attitudes some will come of it so I'd say rather than it arriving fully formed and perfect and impervious to change it's no change is gonna it's it's gonna happen anyway because of the the economic models we've discussed but I also have spent so much time in parliament looked at that's an institution and a politic that's been around for a long time you too as you articulated needs this press I think there's an there's an interest here around these political decision makers they're going to pick what's cozy for them and so I think addressing that in your model to both be provocative and supportive of an ongoing democracy I'd like to think that that happens because yeah you know it's in the voters interests great well in that case then I think what I'd like to if we just close with a few final perspectives so I might actually go in reverse order um Andrew would you like to give a few closing remarks something that's come to you through this maybe even you know if there was one thing that we could potentially a change or go out and do today what might that be uh I've just really enjoyed the fact that this is actually possible right like the last provocateur guest was Catherine McGowan who before the election spoke around the possibilities there being 10 or more independence and well that came true and so I'd like to think that by just by talking about it it comes into existence so well done you Peter um so I think yeah the fact that we had we're attentive to it and it is now in our studies we're talking about a system of interest right we're paying attention to it so if it somewhat manifests itself um through that so I think you know I think I've really enjoyed the fact that there is an opportunity here to participate not just in media creation but uh in in that whole system that Peter has put forward here and I think you know together we there is possibilities here excellent thank you so much Andrew Beck yeah um yeah thanks so much for this conversation um and for the hope I think just just think about the future like we in in the context of climate change the future's here we're in an unstable world and there's lots of opportunity actually to bring Peter's ideas I think into the problems that are just I think felt top to toe by everyone in Australian society right now people are you know they really did look to public institute public broadcasters like the ABC during the pandemic crisis the bushfire crises the floods um people know that those big media corporates aren't serving them that they're basically addicted and anxious in the online um media escape that they're logged into so I think that this is a really timely forward looking um path to a future that's here in terms of having a set of ideas that the state will need at its fingertips when it's dealing with some pretty turbulent times unfolding so thank you for bringing a very timely set of positive public good ideas because we only need more of them in this point in history well thank you and thanks for having me once again and I just want to very briefly address the question that we had a moment ago and that's that I don't necessarily think it again as I said earlier we give be too prescriptive around what counts as public interest and comment and so on the point about government again I'm not a government expert here but my understanding it's to establish the guardrails to establish the limits of behavior and to allow space within this stuff in which we're in which we can have this kind of comment and debate but I'm just very keen to establish a degree of professionalism around that journalism um in a way that sets it apart and distinguishes it and provides upward pressure um in a way that we don't currently have I'm under no illusions that any of this is easy one of my my partner um is a communications consultant and an expert and she keeps reminding me the journalists are on the nose you know the public uh view of journalists is right down in in the toilet um and I recognize that that's that's a very serious problem because we don't have at the moment the political pressure from the bottom to create the kind of changes that I think we need to create and that's where I think um the news industry itself um has a responsibility to up its game to improve its relationship with the community that it needs if it's going to get the kind of regulatory change to help it survive I think that's absolutely vital um but having said that I also think we recognize that the system fundamentally isn't working all of the the fact that I'm here as you said is a recognition that we need to be having these conversations the fact that we've had inquiries in the past um after the AFP raid in 2018 or 2019 rather um which made a whole host of recommendations for sweeping reform even though most of those recommendations weren't implemented acknowledges the problem is that the system is broken and is in need of fixing the fact that we've there's discussion now about parliamentary inquiries into the concentration of media ownership in this country suggests that people acknowledge the system is broken the fact that people are cynical of journalists and the media news corporations generally is I think again a very explicit acknowledgement that the system isn't working so if we can at least acknowledge that and then I think we're in the path and if we acknowledge the fundamental importance of this system to the way in which we work not just in the news business or political business but in the way in which our community operates then I think we are at least taking those first steps towards the kind of radical change that I think ultimately um is is in the ideas that I've been proposing. Well thank you so much uh to all of our our fabulous presenters um these events do not run themselves and I have a range of people to thank at the conclusion of this event firstly Flynn Shaw and Kate Andrews for the development and management of the event many thanks to the school of cybernetics engagement team McCoy, Cherise, Jackie and the Fenercoms team Rosie and Pete for promoting and helping to run this event. Thank you to Elite Event Technology for their help in filming and recording the event and a big thank you to the ANU School of Cybernetics and Fener School of Environment and Society for the ANU Future Scheme grant which this event series had its genesis. Finally and of course the biggest thanks must go to Peter for his time and enthusiasm and provocation sharing these amazing models with us and to Beck and Andrew for playing the role of our provocatis. Thank you to the audience both in person and online for your questions participation and being part of this conversation. As Peter has outlined journalism has played and continues to play a vital role in so many aspects of our lives and political lives and democracy and it's really important that we continue to consider how to best maximize the value of the unique position that it holds in our society and how it can help us to create more responsible, safer and sustainable futures. Thank you.