Lanna Hill: Obsession with American culture is eroding Aussie identity

Starbucks. The Superbowl. The US presidential election. Halloween. American word pronunciations like “math” instead of maths, or worst of all, the exaggerated, four-syllable, Valley Girl pronunciation of ‘literally’.

No, you’re not imagining it. The Americanisation (that’s with an s, not a z, folks) of Australian culture has accelerated rapidly over the last decade and markedly over the past four years alone. And despite efforts from the Albanese Government to protect and promote local content being streamed by video-on-demand giants Netflix, Disney, Stan and others, an estimated 80 per cent of Australians are getting their content and information from American social media and video streaming services.

Since 1956, free-to-air television content in Australia has had a content quota, ensuring a minimum of 55 per cent of what is content broadcast on its primary channel between 6am and midnight must be local.

This initiative, designed not only to support homegrown talent and the Australian film and television industry, is also intended to protect our cultural identity. And while overseas movies and TV series productions are certainly increasing on our shores, our local production industry is under immense pressure.

There’s a reason Starbucks finally posted profits for the first time last November, after 23 years in Australia. Social media has unquestionably been the primary driver of their 35 per cent revenue resurgence in our market, despite Australians having one of the strongest cafe cultures in the world.

Similarly, a whopping 2.7 million Australians watched the Superbowl LVIII’s live television in February, up 47 per cent on last year’s telecast. Comparatively, the average TV audience for this year’s AFL grand final was over 4 million — half a million viewers shy of viewership levels a decade ago.

Some might say that these cultural shifts were inevitable, given the impact of mainstream internet usage in 2000 and the dominance of social media today. But when we consider the cultural challenges facing Australia right now, and specifically the challenges that still exist for Indigenous Australians, these influences aren’t ones we should take lightly.

Our culture, while dynamic and something we arguably still need to get right as it exists, is something we should be proud of. We are almost twice as culturally diverse as America, with 26 per cent of our population born overseas.

We are one of the most LGBTQIA+ friendly countries globally, and Indigenous Australians are the oldest continuous living culture globally. We have a five-year mortality advantage over our US counterparts, a lower crime rate, and an emphasis on egalitarianism, rather than the more authoritative leadership style we see so clearly demonstrated in America’s newly elected 47th President, Donald Trump. And in my humble opinion, our uniquely Australian sense of humour is better.

So, the question begs: why are we so passively accepting and even enthusiastically adopting the culture of another country?

Perhaps it is a result of our enormous consumption of American pop culture content. Perhaps we need Australian culture to be stronger and better defined, which is something we can more proudly anchor into. We need more visible examples on our TV screens, at the cinema, our social media feeds, and our music streaming platforms — or risk losing our sense of home more permanently.

Lanna Hill is a strategist, speaker and founder of Leverage Media