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Recent agitation by Australian media pressure groups over New Zealand content on our TV screens represents a mish-mash of rancorous chauvinism, historical ignorance and double standards.
THE scene: Jacobean England, circa 1610. The place: Ye Olde Worlde Star Chamber, where Ye Olde Worlde Luvvie Lobby Groups are once again in session. The defendant: one William Shakespeare, actor, former poacher, and dramatist, who has been summoned to answer the charges of infringing local content regulations in play after play. Instead of doing the decent thing and .sticking to portrayals of the authentic English National Identity, he ransacks writings from Saxo Grammaticus (the 12th-century Danish author who dreamed up Hamlet's storyline), Matteo Bandello (the 16th-century Italian responsible for Romeo and Juliet), Scottish chroniclers (who gave him the idea for Macbeth), Greek chroniclers (Pericles, Timon of Athens), and even, horror of horrors, France (Joan of Arc swashbuckler onstage in Henry VI Part I, where-to add to Shakespeare's'`elitist' sins-she's referred to by her French name of La Pucelle). Incapable of denying these indictments, the Swan of Avon pleads guilty and is sentenced to condign punishment: having to write the next 592 episodes of that classic Jacobean soap, Ye Olde Worlde EastEnders.
Does this scenario strike you as farfetched? It shouldn't. It's no different in principle from, and all too similar in fine detail to, the antics of Australia's True Blue media lobby group. True Blue has been incensed by the High Court's judgement on 28 April, which found that Australia's obligations under the 1988 Closer Economic Relations agreement with New Zealand must take precedence over the Australian Broadcasting Services Act's local content requirements.
Certainly True Blue is running scared, as only a special interest group can-True Blue being an amalgam of the Australian Writers' Guild (which covers authors for TV and the movies), the Screen Producers' Association of Australia (SPAA), the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the Australian Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Commission. From its plenipotentiaries' rage at the High Court's pronouncement, you'd think that the judges involved had advocated paedophilia or something. (On reflection, you wouldn't: paedophilia advocacy would have been much better received in luvvie milieux.)
The MEANs representative, actor [sic] Sonia Todd, proclaimed the arrival of `a black day for...