ABSTRACT
Australian content rules are legitimated on the basis that domestically produced television supports national culture. Television is important to national cultural projects because—along with other mass media and education—it is an important agency of 'popular socialisation'. Television's local and regional levels produce their own programming orientations and imagined communities of viewers. In being transnational in programming and program concepts, Australian television is definitely international. The different cultural levels coexist in television, and audiences, the program schedule, and television institutions typically move between them. The co-presence of these identities in television ensures that television is a site in which the different levels and projects associated with them both compete against and complement each other. The conjunction of television and national culture in these contexts is always political. The appreciation of imports and the persistent and necessarily structural frustration with local television production destabilise and force changes upon locally produced programming and local identities.
