An audience, an audience, my kingdom for an audience

“The Canberra press gallery has reported for decades - at a comfortable distance - on industries under which various evolutionary banana skins have been slipped.

We covered the Australian automotive industry as it grappled with global trade liberalisation, and the consequent removal of its protections in the form of tariffs.

We have engaged in dispassionate conjecture about the sorts of retraining forestry workers could undertake (whittling clothes pegs out of naturally-fallen sassafras? Artisan cheese-making?) as wholesale logging staged its slow-motion collapse in the face of the sustainability argument.

And now, it’s happening to us. It turns out we’ve been operating in a protectionist paradise too - we just never thought about it that way.

Just think of the monopolistic advantages we enjoyed. The possession of the means to convey information to a large audience - be it vast clanking printing presses or the bristling array of dishes, cables, satellites, OB vans and countless other machines that go “Bing” on which television networks rely to make broadcasting look so deceptively easy - generated all sorts of market advantages. They cost a bomb, but it was worth it. Technology and infrastructure were our tariff walls.”

- Annabel Crabb, in a piece written after her Eisenhower Fellowship in the US.