A great deal of ink and tears has already been spilt about the troubles of crash-through Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy and his surprise $250 million gift to free-to-air commercial television.

But surely the real question is: what has happened to media policy? The minister’s office has been giving out confusing signals for months on what it intends to do with broadcasting regulation. If they had a clear strategic plan, then the present mess would not have occurred, or at least the Government would not be looking quite so bereft of explanations for its conduct.

Most commentators are treating the licence free rebate as akin to a bribe. Just one, Roger Colman, claims it was deserved and indeed necessary.

But rather than add to that debate, I’d like to reflect on what the Government might be doing if it actually had a media policy — something that was promised more than a year before the Rudd Government took office, but never emerged.

More recently, there has been confusion about whether the Government will or will not bring forward its planned thorough-going review of broadcasting regulation, presently scheduled for 2011. I have reported on this confusion previously.

Meanwhile, media content was all but ignored in recent important bunfests such as the Cutler inquiry into innovation

The justification for giving hand-outs to free-to-air channels is that they are important to the commissioning of Australian content. And this is true. It is also true that as their business models collapse, they have been lobbying to be let out of these obligations, and those pressures are building.

Indeed, this was one of the few things that Freeview chairman Kim Dalton and Foxtel boss Kim Williams agreed on late last year, when each of them gave speeches addressing the need for a review of television regulation.

Dalton was arguing for more regulation — with Australian content rules to be extended to pay television, mobile phones and television delivered over the internet. Williams made a powerful case for deregulation, saying that broadcasting is presently one of the last bastions of the pre-1980s protected Australian economy.

But both men agreed that some of the money the government will gain from selling spectrum should be used to bolster Australian content — a “culture fund”.

Williams said this funding should be made available on a contestable basis, so that Foxtel could compete side by side with the ABC and SBS for government largesse. Dalton had rather different ideas.

This is surely an idea worthy of consideration, but I gather it isn’t anywhere on the Government’s radar? Why not? Getting cogent explanations from the Government is close to impossible.

Surely, surely, it is time Conroy and his department took a deep breath, sat back and actually tried to come up with a media policy. One with a coherent philosophy and clear aims. Until we have that, we can expect more ad hoc and on-the-run decision making.