Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am opposed to the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2006 and will vote against it with my Labor colleagues this day. This is the most disgraceful piece of chicanery we have seen introduced to this parliament since 1901 and behind it is the dirtiest, grubbiest deal we have ever seen between an Australian prime minister and a media organisation in this country. Prime Minister Howard did a deal with Mr Packer senior in 1995—which he denied of course—which he has attempted to put into action three times in the past 10 years. That deal was to destroy the cross-media ownership laws introduced into this parliament by my former boss, the former member for Blaxland, the Treasurer and then Prime Minister, Paul Keating.

The cross-media ownership laws that Keating introduced in the late 1980s were right and correct. They ensured at least some diversity in Australia’s media. They ensured that up to this point in time the Fairfax organisation, once it was released from the grip of young Warwick, could, with its mastheads the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, be at least one place in Australia where it was possible for Australian journalists to have a bit of their say, a bit of expansion of a different point of view from the views of the News Corporation, owned by Rupert Murdoch, or Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, owned by the Packers.

This legislation is not just about creating a duopoly—we are almost back to that situation here—this disgraceful piece of work is about creating the most concentrated level of media ownership in Australia’s history. It is about power and control. It is also about subverting almost all of the fundamental laws of the Commonwealth of Australia to take one private company and put it in a position where having stripped away all of Australia’ controls in terms of the ability of foreign entities to buy into Australia’s media those entities would buy for good or for ill. The purpose of it is not to allow companies from one end of world to the other to come in and bid for Australian media interests. The purpose of this is very simple: it is to allow the deep concentration of media ownership in this country to be further embedded.

This situation did not happen overnight. It has been done by design, behind closed doors, in secret meetings away from the eyes of the Australian public by the Prime Minister of this country, the Treasurer and the communications minister. They should stand condemned from this day forward for bringing it into the Senate and getting it passed through every means available to them. As the member for Lowe indicated at the end of his speech: there is nothing that this government would not do to put these media laws into play.

Who is to benefit—the Australian people? The answer to that is no. Who is to benefit: a public company at the moment that is going private again. It will become a private equity company again, not just an Australian company but one that will do a deal, as has been demonstrated in the last two days. Before I read the Financial Review, these questions occurred to me: why would PBL be acting in the way they are in response to these media laws? They never do anything except by design. It is well thought through, well crafted, well engineered and then executed as well as they can. Why just a week ago did James Packer as the chair indicate that there had been lots of long discussions? He was pretty happy with the way in which this legislation was ramping up. Why? I called for a stake in the sand in relation to this set of laws and that we should be looking in the future at divestiture if the tests under the current laws—our cross-media laws—were to be trammelled by what was introduced in this House and by what is done in the future. The reaction to that was largely this: ‘Don’t worry too much about that because the speculation is that PBL is not really interested in media any more; it is interested in gambling and casinos.’

James Packer is currently in Singapore bidding for a $3.5 billion casino licence. He is more interested in that. Mr Deputy Speaker, I tell you something: he is interested in the casino that they have got in Burswood in Perth, he is interested in the casino licence that they have got in Melbourne and he is interested in the Star City Casino in Sydney. Twenty-five per cent to 50 per cent control of PBL media assets in Australia means control of any Australian government that is run by the coalition—any Australian government that has not got the backbone to stand up to those media operators and say: ‘You cannot run this country from one end to the other. You cannot exercise power and control—that is the government’s job. It is our job to regulate what happens in here. It is our job to try to run this place in a democratic way.’

We do not want in a modern Australian democracy to descend to the level of the 1930s—in fact, in the twenties initially—when in Italy the corporate state was developed: lo stato corporativo. We do not want to descend to the situation where that idea was taken up and brutally made real under the fascists in Germany, where individuals had their rights crushed under an iron heel and a society was completely atomised. People lost control over their lives because the churches were destroyed, the trade unions were destroyed and people’s capacity to fight for their rights at work was destroyed. The power in the country went to two central points: one political party that dominated the country and, secondly, those who were in league with them, the major corporations.

This bill gives enormous power to Australia’s media interest. This bill will ensure that the level of pressure that publishing and broadcasting has been able to exert on Australian governments will continue to be exerted so that its monopoly interest in casinos in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney can be assured into the future.

The deal that has been done is quite remarkable. Would you think that any Australian company would seek to do a deal with the Gordon Gekkos of the American private equity market not just where they are preyed on by them but also where they would then seek to prey on every Australian media or gambling interest that is up for stake? Watch out, Tabcorp in Victoria, because the money to pay to take your holding is right there. Watch out, Fairfax Media and those journalists who are part of what are some of the greatest newspapers that the world has seen, because the voices of diversity in those media empires and those parts will be crushed out of the system.

It is believed that the deal has been put together with complete foreknowledge. The only way in which it can be done is to take advantage of laws crafted not just by the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts in the other place but also in hiding, in secret and behind closed doors between PBL and those very people. What we have are laws that are designer made to allow PBL to break free of the shackles of having to do what they do in Australia. The foreign ownership restriction being taken away allows them to do deals with Newbridge Capital and the other two entities that seemingly are a part of this to say, ‘What we are going to do is sell off part of our interest—50 per cent or so of those interests—and we will have a new media company.’

What is in it? ACP Magazines, the Nine Network, ninemsn, 25 per cent of Foxtel, 27 per cent of SEEK, 50 per cent of Hoyts and further consolidation opportunities such as Fairfax and Western Australian Newspapers. Are PBL still interested in media? You bet your life they are. Are PBL interested in being able to buy up the advertising list that Fairfax has? You bet your life they are. Do PBL know that under the existing rules they cannot do it? Of course they do. That is why they want them completely destroyed. Do PBL know that under the Trade Practices Act, having what they have in SEEK and also attempting to take over the whole of carsales.com.au would put them in a position where they would not be able to take up Fairfax?

We have a government that connives with those private companies and private interests to bring this piece of chicanery into this House and introduces legislation which says that it is okay to subvert virtually all of our laws to gain what Publishing and Broadcasting wants. What we have here is very simple. In allowing them to go overseas to sell off half of their interest into this new vehicle, PBL can argue and say: ‘It is very simple. We have a diluted interest in this entity. Firstly, it is foreign owned. Secondly, our interest is diluted. We only have a maximum of 50 per cent of our current holdings.’ You do not need 50 per cent to control anything. Kerry Packer proved on his own—before a Senate committee, in fact—that 15 per cent allowed you full control.

This brings me to a bit of history. What does this really look like? I was thinking about it the other day and had a talk to a couple of people—someone from the library and a couple of other people I know—and I asked, ‘What does this really look like?’, before we got the Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald rolling out what it was. Do you know what it looked like? It looked like the Tourang consortium. Who was in the Tourang consortium? Conrad Black, Kerry Packer and Trevor Kennedy. They rolled up to the government of the day—a Labor government—and said, ‘We’re here to help. We are going to put this deal together and change the way in which the assets of Publishing and Broadcasting are put together.’ That would have succeeded if the very key question in Tourang had not been answered. Kerry Packer had 15 per cent of Tourang. He also had absolute control of it. He put together a device which the Labor government at the time rubbed out and said he was not going to get away with it.

What do we have instead under this vile shambles of a government? We have Australia’s capacity to govern itself being sold away. We have a situation where this government thinks that it can benefit from continued support from the major media companies. This government thinks that it can, in darkened places, come to these deals which inevitably mean that media is so concentrated and venality so embedded in this country that you can get a result like this. I think it is gangsterism. It reminds me of the twenties and thirties in the United States. It is also reminiscent of the period from 1860 to the 1890s in the United States. That was the period of the great robber barons in the oil and media industries where—untrammelled—companies could exercise monopoly capitalism, with governments doing nothing to stop them. It almost destroyed the United States of America and foreshortened its rise to power and great significance.

One thing the Americans learnt out of that was that untrammelled monopoly capitalism will destroy modern democracies. The United States, for all its faults, actually has governments that believe in governing. Our cross-media laws came from the example in the United States. The United States understands that if you have a cabal—a group of companies joining together in order to control markets—you need to break it and smash it. We have the example of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. We have the example of what they did to AT&T and the Bell Telephone Company where these entities, which were monopoly organisations, were broken into small pieces or ‘baby Bells’. What do we have here in Australia? It is supposedly a modern democracy but it is rapidly moving towards an advanced form that is different from a modern democracy. If you give control to companies in this way, you are on the road to fascism, pure and simple.

What we face here is a very simple situation. By handing control of so much of Australia’s central communications infrastructure to PBL, by allowing it to do what it is doing, by allowing it to double its capacity, it will be able to create a war chest of between $4½ billion and $4¾ billion—or possibly, as one of the papers stated, $6 billion—to buy more casino assets and to dominate media interests. Casinos from one end of the world to the other have a number of functions. So many people, poor common punters from my electorate and elsewhere, have had their capacity to live a normal life ripped away because of their addiction to gambling. But we also know that casinos worldwide are places where money is laundered by criminal interests. We know that it is unhealthy to actually encourage it. What we have got here is an empire built (1) on casino interests and (2) on dominating media interests. The one continuing public company in the gun sights here is Fairfax. This legislation will mean that it will be destroyed.

At the same time, we have got a government that has taken a public monopoly in Telstra and is turning it into a private monopoly with the sale of T3. This is a complete and utter disgrace, and it is monopoly capitalism, which almost destroyed the United States, on the road to destroying this country as well. You cannot simply argue that Australia is so big that you have to have a monopoly in every industry. This is disgraceful work that is being done. It is really hard to undo. What should this Australian government be doing? It should be doing the sort of thing that is in Labor’s broadband policy. Instead of flogging Telstra off in the way it has, it should have enforced the fundamental responsibility for Telstra to provide Australia’s backbone and network for communications. Instead, Telstra has been allowed to have its own private monopolies in that area. This is a complete and utter disgrace.

These bills on media ownership really do put a flag into the ground. They create a dividing line between what was a relatively naive past and what will be a deepening and darkening future for the Australian people and for this parliament. This legislation is unconscionable. It puts private interests above every public interest in this country. It is the dirtiest of deals one could imagine. What is the play on this? A bloke coming out of Cranbrook School with Lachlan Murdoch started One.Tel—what a genius piece of work that was—and had a series of other ideas. This is being hailed by a number of people as a stroke of genius—completely brilliant and marvellous.

The only way this deal could be put together was for this company to deliberately connive with this government to subvert the laws of the Commonwealth for its own private interests. The great difficulty we will have is: how do we pull this to pieces? I have tried to do something, as others have. Labor has strongly said how significant the cross-media ownership rules are, how much we support them and how much we support diversity. The government want to smash them out completely because they simply want to create one state in which they control the lot through what they have done in concert with their corporate buddies—those that they think will stick with them.

I see nothing here that is positive. All the talk about voices is simply ludicrous. The Nationals have sold Australia’s national interest down the drain. This legislation will be gagged very shortly. I am glad that at least I have had the opportunity to have one single, solitary say about how devilish, nasty, vicious and fascist this legislation is. This is a dark and terrible day for our country. I am completely against this atrocity. (Time expired)

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