What time is it there?!

Before I go on I should point out that we thoroughly enjoyed our time in Australia, and met nothing but friendly people wherever we went. Also, as we all know, the British media are hardly angelic most of the time, but somehow the Aussie media still managed to irritate us.....

Oh, where shall we start..... First of all, our opinions are based largely on watching TV, so the newspapers may be significantly better (although I think the ownership is spread amongst just as few people).

Having already spent 4 or 5 weeks in the USA we thought we'd been subjected to the worst the TV advertising world could throw at us, but I think we were wrong. They seem to be able to fit far more adverts into a 60 minute show than you would think possible, and they have one really great trick... Imagine this, having already had 473 advert breaks in the show, you are nearing the very end and there is yet another ad break. Then, when you come back from the break, there is only ONE line of dialogue left before the credits!!!

Then there was the problem with Channel 9's sports coverage during the Commonwealth games. Basically, if there wasn't an Australian in it with a chance of a medal, then it seemed that an event wasn't really worth showing. So, Dean Macey won gold in the Decathlon and what did we get to see of the event? Well, of course we got to see the very end of the 1500m and then the Aussie guy getting his bronze medal!! It's great that they really get behind their teams (as opposed to the British media just trying to knock them down), but it all gets a bit much after a while. Even the Australians themselves were complaining about it by the end!

And finally....... We arrived in December in the days following the 'race' riots on Cronulla Beach in Sydney. The newspapers were full of the story, and ever since then 'Australian Society' (i.e. the media) has been grappling with how it really feels about what it likes to call 'Multi-Culturalism' (although nobody really seems to know what they mean by this phrase). In the first few days the articles in the paper seemed to be debating whether or not Australian Society was racist (and reaching many conclusions).

However, from our experience of many parts of the country the problem is not with the people (in general they just seem to get on with each other) but with the media itself. It sometimes seems as if the shows are actually being produced and edited by Alf Garnett himself. On one 'Watchdog' type show we saw three films in the same episode, there was one about botched cosmetic surgery in Thailand, another about cheap labour being brought in from abroad, and a third about dodgy fish from polluted Vietnamese rivers being passed off as Aussie Barramundi in local fishmongers. The underlying message of the whole show appeared to be "you can't trust the Asians". A few weeks later another show (a kind of 6:30pm local news show) managed to give several minutes airtime to a shopkeeper who was refusing to serve people who could not speak English as they "aren't trying hard enough" to learn the language.

In fact, a couple of 'phone-in show' radio DJ's have been accused of virtually inciting the riots with the content their programs in the week before. I'm not certain how this story ended, but at one point we saw a TV show which suggested that at least one of them was "on leave" pending further investigation. More details on this story here and here.

However, just so you know it isn't all bad, they also have another channel (SBS) which seems the complete opposite. It doesn't actually seem to produce a great deal of its own programming, but it shows hour long news programs in a dozen or more languages throughout the day (bought in from the national broadcasters in the other countries). So, if you wish, you can spend the morning watching the news from France, Spain, Germany and Russia (they also have radio channels). And of course, when you just have to have your fix of DIY, gardening or cookery shows then you can always return to the regular channels!