How the Camel Got in the Tent: The Canadian Assault on Australia's Foreign Media Ownership Limits
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Before 1991, Australia enforced strict limits on foreign ownership of licensed broadcasters and also limited foreign ownership of newspaper publishers. In the early 1990s, however, a pair of Canadian entrepreneurs succeeded in first raising and then circumventing those limits. Conrad Black bought 15 per cent of the Fairfax newspaper chain in 1992, and shortly before the ensuing national election lobbied to increase his stake to 25 per cent. In his 1993 autobiography, Black described backroom political dealings that resulted in a Senate inquiry. The Australian Broadcasting Authority soon began an investigation into another Canadian challenging the country's foreign media ownership limits. Israel ‘Izzy’ Asper, a former tax lawyer, found a way to legally purchase 57.5 per cent of Network Ten in 1992 by holding 42.5 per cent in the form of non-voting debentures. The ABA absolved his CanWest Global Communications of controlling Network Ten in 1995. Non-voting shares were outlawed in 1997, but CanWest was allowed to retain its debentures. The inquiries into Canadian purchases contributed to a decade-long process of re-evaluating media ownership limits that resulted in restrictions on foreign ownership being eliminated in 2006.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it