Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

These amending bills—the Communications Legislation Amendment (Enforcement Powers) Bill 2006 and the Television Licence Fees Amendment Bill 2006are fairly routine matters but they raise issues that I am anxious to address in this House. The member for Oxley has given a clear and fairly precise description of their meaning, and I will not necessarily touch on that. I think it is interesting in consulting the explanatory memorandum under the heading ‘background’ to look firstly at the objects of the Broadcasting Services Act. These are of course integral to these issues, which relate to the rights of, in particular, the ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, in conducting its supervision of our broadcasting services and imposing penalties on those who do not comply. It is pretty interesting to look at what it needs to do in this regard. The objects of the BSA, the Broadcasting Services Act, are contained in section 3 and include:

(a)

to promote the availability to audiences throughout Australia of a diverse range of radio and television services offering entertainment, education and information ...

Sometimes one might wonder just what diversity we do get. It goes on:

(b)

to provide a regulatory environment that will facilitate the development of a broadcasting industry in Australia that is efficient, competitive and responsive to audience needs ...

It is quite interesting, and I will come back to it, that not everything in this regulatory arrangement and the potential to prosecute in civil proceedings really pays attention to the audience. It goes on:

(c)

to encourage diversity in control of the more influential broadcasting services; and

(d)

to ensure that Australians have effective control of the more influential broadcasting services; and

(e)

to promote the role of broadcasting services in developing and reflecting a sense of Australian identity, character and cultural diversity; and

(f)

to promote the provision of high quality and innovative programming by providers of broadcasting services; and…    …    …

(g)

to encourage providers of commercial and community broadcasting services to be responsive to the need for a fair and accurate coverage of matters of public interest and for an appropriate coverage of matters of local significance; and

(h)

to encourage providers of broadcasting services to respect community standards in the provision of program material; and

(i)

to encourage the provision of means for addressing complaints about broadcasting services ...

The second last of those provisions is of some interest to me. It is, typically, why we will not have full-frontal nudity and we will not have this and we will not have that. As I raised in our party forums this morning and as I have stated in press releases, it amazes me that these television stations are still prepared to promote sportsmen who have a drug problem, but, because it is with recreational drugs, by some means or other it is okay.

One reads of Channel 7 and its partner Channel 10 paying $700 million for the rights to broadcast AFL football, yet if you are an AFL footballer you know that the first time you are tested—yes, you get tested—and show a positive to one of these so-called recreational drugs, even if you are a minor, a 17-year-old that has been drafted to an AFL club, the only persons that will know outside of the testing authority are you and the club doctor. Your parents will not get told. If you offend again, things get really tough! The only persons that will then know are you, the club doctor and the AFL doctor. So, if on the law of averages you are unlucky enough—considering this is random testing—to get caught a third time, something is going to happen. We do not know what, but something will happen. This only happens in the AFL; some of the other codes have demonstrated recently a much more zero tolerance approach. I think a rugby league footballer was just told not to come back. In other words, he lost his living.

Might I add, as a one time administrator and chairman of the West Australian Turf Club, that is also the attitude of the racing industry. They do not have a lifetime measure but certainly a very substantial suspension away from your income if you test positive. It is three months the first time and six months on the second occasion. With one offence of which I am aware the offender was relicensed on the grounds that they submitted a monthly urine test—remembering that cannabis, for instance, as with some of these other drugs, will show up for that period of time. AFL is the sport whose grand final attracted the biggest viewing audience of any elite sport. Yet the players, the very recipients of all this money through their players league, have threatened to strike if those rules are changed.

I think it is time that somewhere in the section of the Broadcasting Services Act that talks about respecting community standards there is included a prohibition on the broadcasting of elite football clubs that fail to have, police and prosecute a zero drug tolerance system. As I said, the racing industry, which I think quite unfairly is occasionally portrayed as a bit dodgy, has a tougher zero tolerance policy on drugs than does the AFL, and it extends to all licensed personnel in that industry, including track riders and anybody who needs a licence. And what did we see in Perth the other day? The Eagles come back and 20,000 people are there to welcome them, a large number of whom are teenagers. And isn’t it a nice example we give through our broadcasting medium? I sincerely hope that other members of the House might think about a policy that stops this sort of abuse. Again, as a person with some knowledge of the racing industry, I think I could quote a very long shade of odds on someone getting caught three times in a random testing system of probably a thousand people. So it is an issue for this and for other legislation should it ever come to this parliament.

The other factor that comes out in those statements of what is a proper broadcasting facility is a common theme of the rights of the listener or the viewer. That is fair enough, except that when we get into the second reading speech of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Transport and Regional Services it is quite interesting that she said:

The bill will enable ACMA to seek injunctions to prevent the operation of unlicensed broadcasting services. The provision of unlicensed commercial broadcasting services—usually by broadcasters in other licence categories, such as narrowcasting—is potentially highly damaging to the commercial viability of licensed commercial broadcasters.

Isn’t it amazing that this parliament, and most state parliaments equally so, considers regulation as a requirement that people make profits. I quoted this morning in our party forum how enraged I am every time I sit in a taxi in a capital city—and more particularly the biggest ones—to think that I am paying a dividend through the fare to a foreign investor who in many cases has paid $300,000 for a licence so that I can sit in a $30,000 vehicle and be driven around by somebody who typically is not in the higher income tax brackets. But that is our system. We should be restricting access to taxi licences on the grounds of the quality of the vehicle and, of course, the integrity of the driver, but instead we have to see that people make a profit and we now have taxis worth virtually half a million dollars running around the countryside, expecting and receiving a fee from some battling worker running late for work which represents that investment.

This is what we have done collectively in this parliament with broadcasting licences. We encourage obscene payments—millions—for a licence. People fight over them. Why? Because we restrict the number—not in the interests of listeners, not to guarantee a diversity of product, but because it seemed a good idea at the time and, of course, we like the revenue. Who pays for that? The consumer does. The listener does. You might say the advertiser does. If you thought they did not include advertising costs in their balance sheet you would be pretty silly. Of course, when Mr or Mrs Worker—whoever happens to be doing the shopping—goes down to the supermarket they pay part of the price to pay off the fee paid to the government for a licence.

Why do we do that? Surely the test is based on the quality of the equipment. The member for Oxley said, ‘Oh, it is all too tough for these television stations to have to run both analog and digital transmissions.’ There are some very good reasons why we should be forcing digital on the community. One of these was pointed out to me years ago and it is probably even more the case today. A single analog television station requires as much of the spectrum as 100,000 mobile telephones. Today a mobile telephone is virtually something you cannot do without—more’s the pity I think, particularly as every journalist has discovered my number. But the fact is that we have this situation where we need to clear the spectrum of analog.

I am one of those in this town fortunate enough to remember when suddenly colour television turned up, and it was obscenely expensive also. We all bought it and the more of us who lined up to buy it the cheaper it got. I would disagree with the member for Oxley on his casual remark. People quote the percentage of people who have taken up digital and, more particularly, high-definition digital. I do not think Harvey Norman or, in my state, some of the other retailers—Rick Hart, Retravision and others—would be running two-page ads nearly full of a variety of LCD or plasma broad-screen television sets if the sets were not going out the door at a particularly fast rate. The price has dropped from virtually $10,000 to $2,000 for the equivalent set. As that happens, more and more people will take up digital. I am not entirely across the technology, but I think you can purchase a digital set-top box that will run your old analog TV anyway and I do not think a pretty basic outfit is any more than a couple of hundred dollars. I have made the shift. I am probably a bit financially better off than others who might go into that shop, but I think HDTV is amazing and, as your eyesight dims a little, it gives you a point of clarity that you would not otherwise realise. I am sure some people who might be sight challenged because of some personal disability would find the service of those brilliant screens well and truly worth it.

My concern is that whilst we quite properly and sensibly resort to commercial penalties for breaches of the legislation—and some of those could be a failure to provide a service that meets community standards—if that failure were sufficiently bad, I would say that a criminal penalty might be the appropriate answer. But for most of the activities of a licensed broadcaster I think that the legislation and its capacity to impose enforceable undertakings is a sensible move. The legislation in that regard is sensible and necessary, as the second reading speech on the other piece of legislation relating to fees indicates. It simply extends the right of government to collect licence fees for other forms of broadcasting that are now imminent, particularly digital technology.

So both pieces of legislation are sensible. But I am concerned that we continue to have this view that government should collect very substantial ingoing fees and restrict the number of licences that can be issued. I was in the hotel industry and I thought it was pretty good that nobody else could get in. That protected my profits. That is not a common view today, and the Labor state government in Western Australia is attempting to relax those conditions quite substantially. They have my philosophical support and I think they are gradually getting the support of my Liberal colleagues in Western Australia who had a conservative view about that.

The reality is that we are looking at giving people services. There is other legislation that I presume will be debated in this place that talks about some of these matters and reform. As I have said, if you are worried about consolidation in the industry, that is because you restrict the number of licences. If you opened up the number of licences, would Mr Murdoch buy one of the existing ones to complement his newspapers or would he start a new one? As far as I am concerned, he should have the opportunity to start a new one. But I will not go any further into that because it is an issue for another day.

In terms of this legislation, we are changing the penalty regime so that ACMA can protect the commercial rights of licensed broadcasters. I do not agree with that. I do not think that is their job. Nothing on that list I read to you says that they are there to protect the commercial rights of licensed broadcasters. They are all things to look after the people, and I am totally supportive of that. I would just like to put these matters forward and I hope that it will draw the attention of other people to those facts. One day they might find themselves in a position to deal with these matters in the community interest.

Of course we want maximum standards in terms of transmission. We do not want static and we do not want snowy screens and all those sorts of things. We must make sure that when we license someone they provide the best available equipment and their programming of course is of an acceptable standard—and I wish I could add ‘has some diversity’, but that is a little bit hard. I will not go into some of the examples I gave some time ago when the member for Melbourne, Mr Tanner, had to correct me on my naming of a particular program. I think I got it right, but not in terms of the label that one sees on the screen.

It is a fact of life that this legislation—and I welcome the opposition’s support for it—is good, practical stuff. It addresses much more sensibly the way that ACMA does business with these people. It is not appropriate to have criminal penalties for many of the breaches that will occur. On the other hand, I wish that they did not have to prosecute people simply on the grounds that they are affecting the commercial viability of another company. Thank you.

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