Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

It is often said that if you hang around in politics long enough you see everything, and this evening I have achieved a new first. Finally, after 13½ years in the place, I have heard the honourable member for O’Connor, Mr Tuckey, say something sensible. I should note that down in my diary as a very significant event for 2006! I endorse his comments on the importance of competition in broadcasting. Sadly, I think the government does not endorse them and the legislation before the House this evening does not either. We are seeing yet another instalment in what is slowly becoming possibly the longest, most painful, most prolonged, most embarrassing public policy fiasco in Australian history. There are a few contenders for the title, I concede. There are one or two contenders. Nonetheless, the painful, protracted and messy transition to digital broadcasting in Australia, which has now been going for not far short of a decade and is still nowhere near completion, is witnessing today another small instalment in the endless tinkering, fiddling, protecting and, ultimately, messing with what should be a reasonably straightforward process.

We only need to look at the level of take-up of digital receivers in Australia to see what an extraordinary failure the transition from analog to digital broadcasting has been. The take-up is still extremely low, for a very simple reason: there is no substantial motivation for anybody to buy a set-top box even though prices are now fairly cheap. I have not got one. I still have only an analog TV. I have got Foxtel so I have got a digital pay TV service, but I do not have a digital terrestrial service because there is no reason for me to. I get no particular benefit from it—and, from 1998, when I did not have Foxtel, I saw no reason to get a terrestrial free-to-air digital service through a set-top box over that period either. Why? Because it meant simply that I was watching, by and large, the same programs through a different transition mechanism. There was no graded choice, no greater diversity, no proliferation of different options that gave me an incentive to go digital.

Contrast this with the United Kingdom and the introduction of FreeTV, which is owned by a consortium of different media companies, which sends roughly 30 digital channels and signals into about 55 or 60 per cent of British households. Although most of those channels would not particularly excite the average viewer, if you put together 30 or so channels there is a reasonable chance that there will be something for just about everybody to supplement the viewing experience that traditionally has been based on only four or five analog channels. This has given people an incentive to get a set-top box to go digital. In Australia, there has been virtually no incentive and, as a result, the government’s strategy to transition to digital has failed. So the package of legislative measures that we are in part dealing with this evening is designed to tweak that process without unduly upsetting anybody who may have a bit of political power—that is, incumbents in the industry. Therefore, it is not addressing the core problems that exist.

The core problems are things like mandating that the broadcast be in high definition. Initially, it was for 20 hours a week and then it was subsequently converted—in one of the numerous fiddles that the government has undertaken—to 1,040 hours per year. There is a list of other deficiencies, including the refusal up until now to allow multichannelling and the refusal to contemplate wider competition. There is a long list of deficiencies in the government’s approach to digital broadcasting which have all collectively manifested themselves in a transition that is not happening. If it continues at the rate at which it has been occurring, it will probably be consummated in about 2070 or thereabouts, by which stage we will probably all have TV screens implanted in our heads or something. I think that is a very damning indictment of the government’s approach to this issue.

The previous framework legislation that was adopted seven or eight years ago by the parliament, with the support of both sides, contemplated a switch-over to digital and a shut-off of the analog spectrum by 2008. It has been widely recognised for several years that that was an impossibility and that it is not going to happen. This legislation now contemplates that changeover occurring somewhere between 2010 and 2012. I doubt whether there is anyone in the government who would confidently assert with a straight face that the digital switch-over is going to occur according to that timetable. It is almost inevitable that we will see further backsliding, further delay and further procrastination that will ensure that the ultimate switch-off point for analog broadcasting in this country will be substantially later than the new delayed target dates.

The bill that we are dealing with this evening is in effect a relatively minor toe in the water for slight, further liberalisation of the regime that was put in place by the government some years ago. The genre restrictions that apply to the national broadcasters, SBS and the ABC, with respect to their multichannels are to be lifted—not immediately, but they are to be lifted. The commercial broadcasters are to be permitted to multichannel one standard definition multichannel from 2009 and one high-definition multichannel from next year but, until such time as the analog switch-off is completed, they are not allowed to broadcast sport on either of those multichannels. The restrictions on multichannelling generally are supposedly to be lifted at the point of switch-over, from which time one would assume that the commercial networks will be free to broadcast as many multichannels as they can fit within the spectrum to which they are entitled.

The extraordinary thing about the debate on multichannelling over the years has been the demand by two of the three commercial broadcasters that multichannelling should not be permitted because they could not establish a business case for it. So, in other words, you have people who are ostensibly capitalists, who believe in free markets and competition, arguing for the government to ban them from a particular use of the spectrum which they have lawfully acquired and are lawfully using, not because there is some kind of antisocial dimension to the use of that spectrum in this particular way or because this might hurt anybody else but because they do not think they can make money out of it. It is vaguely the equivalent of telling a pub that they are not allowed to sell red wine because they do not think they are going to be able to sell any bottles—something which I find, frankly, completely bizarre.

What is even more bizarre is that up until now—and still, to some degree, even now—the government accepts this argument: there is something wrong with allowing full use of the digital spectrum which these companies have been given and allowing them the option—not requiring them to send out three or four different channels or signals but allowing them the option to do that—which has been sought for many years by one of them, the Seven Network.

The government is dipping its toe in the water of reform on this front. It is taking very small microsteps towards liberating the possibilities that digital does actually open up. But it is extraordinary that the government has gone to great lengths to prevent the potential for diversity, greater content and greater choice that digital broadcasting opens up because it is a much more efficient user of spectrum than analog broadcasting. Even now, with this slight liberalisation, there are still restrictions, regulations, interventions and all kinds of things that restrict the capacity for people to innovate, test markets, try new things and narrowcast to particular sections of the community.

One of the fundamental weaknesses of free-to-air broadcasting in this country for many years has been the one-size-fits-all dimension, the inevitable lowest-common-denominator dimension, which is driven by the fact that there are only three signals. All of those companies that are competing in this market have to go to the predominant mass market and they have very little opportunity to target intermediate sized markets. Ultimately, this has been in many respects the core business of the ABC—to cater for the intermediate sized viewer markets that are not adequately catered for by the commercial networks. But there is no particular reason why the ABC should have a monopoly on those markets and why people with those interests should only have one option to choose from, one mechanism through which to view broadcasting content that is of interest to them.

The particular aspects that I have referred to are part of a wider package which is currently being considered in the Senate. Some of the more exciting and titillating parts of that package are the subject of interesting negotiations between members of the government and ostensible members of the government who belong to the National Party. This legislative package has a number of key features. Firstly, there will be no new competition for the existing free-to-air broadcasters. Secondly, there is a recycled, rebadged and revised version of Richard Alston’s failed datacasting experiment, where the two datacasting licences that were put on the block some years ago—and that, ultimately, nobody was interested in—have been kind of tarted up and fiddled with a bit so that you now have one datacasting licence that is yet to be fully defined and another that is available for broadcasting to mobile phones. In a recent extraordinary backflip by the government, the initial proposition that the existing free-to-air broadcasters were not going to be permitted to acquire these licences was abandoned, so they are now free to bid for these pieces of spectrum for limited and narrow broadcasting purposes. Finally, there is of course the removal of fairly longstanding cross-media and foreign ownership restrictions that are designed to guarantee a minimum level of diversity and Australian ownership in the Australian media market.

The net dominant factor in all of these proposals is that they differ only very marginally from the propositions advanced by the former, longstanding communications minister Senator Alston. There is very little difference. There is a little tweak and a little fiddle here and there, and there are slight modifications, such as broadcasting to mobile phones and the like, but basically the orientation of these changes is pretty much the same as what Senator Alston advocated. In fact, it is with some amusement that I have noted that apparently the government has agreed with the National Party to make the two out of three restriction—in other words, prospective proprietors would be prohibited from owning any more than two out of three of a newspaper, a TV station and a radio station—a national restriction. There was somebody in the past who actually proposed this as an alternative way of dealing with cross-media ownership regulation: Senator Alston. So, bit by bit, Senator Coonan is drifting into precisely the same propositions, sets of proposals and ideas that were promoted and largely abandoned by Senator Alston as communications minister in the past.

The fundamental problem with this package, of course, lies in the effective abrogation of the cross-media ownership laws. Although the proposition that is being floated has danced around from time to time, and we are yet to see what the final proposition put to the Senate will be, there is an underlying problem. Whether we have the complete removal of the cross-media ownership laws or whether we have the ludicrous five-voices test that says that sports radio station SEN in Melbourne, Gold 104 or Vega, in the domain of influencing and forming public opinion and in providing public debate, have significance equal to the Herald Sun, 3AW, Channel 9, Channel 7 or Channel 10, there is the ludicrous proposition that somehow this test would act as a protector of diversity. That has been abandoned, by the sound of it. That is certainly a good thing. But whether a two out of three mechanism is of any great benefit to the Australian media, in terms of protecting diversity, is entirely debatable because it still leaves open the possibility that we will end up with a media in this country that is almost completely dominated by two giant corporations—one built around News Ltd and one built around Telstra.

With Telstra being privatised and with the effective abolition of the cross-media ownership laws, although the two out of three provision, if that is what the government adopts, would in practice probably end up keeping such giant corporations out of radio—perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies—it would nonetheless still enable a massive concentration of ownership and power, particularly in the case of Telstra, which would end up potentially owning, for example, the Nine Network, Fairfax, three-quarters of Foxtel and, of course, the vast bulk of Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure, two-thirds of the entire activity in telecommunications and over 90 per cent of the profits. That would enable a privately owned Telstra to have massive dominance in the formation of public opinion in this country, enormous control over content, enormous market power to the great disadvantage of not only people who have alternative points of view and seek to have differences in public debate but also prospective competitors in both the infrastructure and the content spheres. This legislation opens up that possibility.

If you think it is fanciful, reflect on the fact that, even under its previous management, which was a significantly less aggressive management than the current one, Telstra tried to buy the Nine Network and Fairfax. So those ambitions are there, the pockets are deep, the possibilities are endless and there is every chance—maybe not immediately; maybe not even this year or next year—that, if the legislation does ultimately go through, then, even in the form of a two out of three test, the end result will be a massive concentration of power in a very small number of hands and a massive reduction in the number of voices in our mass media, which is ultimately the overwhelmingly dominant point of intersection between the ordinary citizen and the democratic process.

The reality that we all face as representatives in this House is that, if we are to obtain a mass audience, if we are to get a message across to a large number of people to seek to persuade or influence people to our point of view, it has to go through a relatively small number of media outlets. Although it is true to say that the development of internet and digital technology—notwithstanding the government’s best efforts to retard the shift to digital broadcasting—is slowly eroding the dominance of traditional media like newspapers and television, that is a slow process. The companies that own those media are busily moving into new media like the internet and establishing very powerful positions as well. It is not of much benefit to anybody to say that we will effectively regulate for a world that might be 15 or 20 years away. It is not much of benefit to public debate and democracy in this country to regulate on the basis that we are already at that point, when in fact it could well be 20 or more years away before we literally have the unlimited voices and the enormous diversification that, supposedly, the emergence of the internet and digital broadcasting will provide. Eventually it will happen, but it could be a long way away.

Finally, it is worth noting that the position the Howard government has taken with respect to digital broadcasting is characteristic of its attitude to competition, which is, namely, that competition is a very good theoretical proposition which should be applied to individual workers—especially individual workers who do not have much bargaining power and do not earn much money—in order to drive down their wages and conditions. The government is very strongly in favour of competition for those people. However, the government supports compulsory unionism for wheat farmers. It is very strongly opposed to compulsory unionism for workers, but it is gung-ho in its support for compulsory unionism for wheat farmers through the AWB, notwithstanding that the AWB turned out to be world champion bribers of Saddam Hussein. The government is very strongly in favour of protecting pharmacies from wider competition from companies like Coles Myer and Woolworths. It is very strongly in favour of protecting Qantas from wider competition in areas like the Pacific route, even though that would be of substantial benefit to the Australian tourism industry. And it is very strongly in favour of doing nothing to enhance the degree of competitive pressure on Telstra to ensure that we get serious high-speed broadband in this country, accessible to all Australians.

The broadcasting example is just the most extreme example of how, in practice, this government always goes for the special interest. It always goes for the special interest; it never pursues real competition when big-business mates and special interest groups are in there with their interests to protect. All those people out in the Australian community like plumbers, hairdressers, panelbeaters and accountants, who do not get protection from competition, who do not get special deals, who have to put up with the prospect of somebody setting up shop next door to them and competing with them, should think about the Howard government’s attitude to competition. (Time expired)

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