Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The view on the other side of this House of consultation means, ‘Discuss it with the big end of town but don’t discuss it with the community.’ Let us talk about what has happened in the last couple of weeks with consultation, since it has been raised by the other side of this House. The Senate Standing Committee on the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts was given three weeks to conduct an inquiry into this legislation—this incredibly important piece of legislation—and the public had one week to make its submissions on the four bills of the package. The Senate communications committee was able to conduct just two days of hearings into which were crammed more than 30 witnesses. For most witnesses, the opposition had 10 minutes to ask questions.

The government’s rush job continued in the Senate, with amendments raining down like confetti. More than 100 pages of amendments and explanatory material were released during the debate, which again was gagged with unseemly haste, and again today we see the government gagging debate on this bill. This is not a bill that they want consultation on; this is a bill that they want to get through this House with as little attention as possible and as quickly as possible. I have to say that if I were the Prime Minister I would not want this bill to be scrutinised either. The government knows this is an unpopular bill. It knows that you cannot sell increased media concentration as good public policy. Nobody is buying it; nobody bought it the last time the government tried to introduce it or the time before that. And, yes, this is the third attempt. This time of course they have the numbers, but it was bad policy the first time, it was bad policy the second time and it is bad policy the third time.

The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill is deeply flawed. It makes two main changes to the media ownership laws: (1) it repeals the specific foreign ownership provisions in the Broadcasting Services Act that relate to commercial and subscription television—

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