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

I rise to speak to the report by the Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts titled Community television: options for digital broadcasting and, like the member for Werriwa and the member for Lindsay, I am extremely proud to do so for the following reasons. Firstly, the community broadcasting sector is one I had quite a bit to do with in my pre-parliament professional life and is one that I have become quite fond of; secondly, I share its belief that providing communities the opportunities to share information with each other, to share stories and to develop views at a grassroots level through the media, is an essential service which must run in parallel with commercial broadcasters as part of our long-term media landscape; and, thirdly, this report, which is extremely well-thought-through and generous, is about a sector of our nation that has worked tirelessly for 30 or 40 years to build the strong community broadcasting sector that we all enjoy today.

I would like to express my thanks to the other members of the committee—particularly the chair, the member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly—for the work they have done in preparing this unanimous report. We argued, we even fought at times and in the final result I think we made recommendations that go further than the government has made in the last few years. I would like to thank my fellow committee members for being prepared to move so far. I would also like to thank the secretariat. We are blessed in this House by having access to some of the most fabulous staff you can have, people who are absolutely committed to being fair and bipartisan. You can see in the work that they did through this process how much they came to care for the community and the issues they were dealing with, yet in front of us is an incredibly balanced and well-written report. It really is an extraordinary job and we should thank them fully for the incredible quality of their work.

The plight of the community television sector in gaining access to digital spectrum is now pretty dire. The Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts believes that urgent action is required. This became clear to the committee through its two most recent inquiries: the 2005 inquiry into the uptake of digital television in Australia and the inquiry into community broadcasting which commenced in January 2006 and is ongoing. Because of the urgency, we are delivering the special report specifically into community television and the conversion to digital; the full report into community broadcasting will be delivered later this year.

The urgency is caused by the transition from analog television broadcasting to digital. The transition period has been going for about 10 years now and is still underway. For much of the last few years, the commercial sector and national broadcasters have been simulcasting in analog and digital, so that as members of the community buy a set-top box or a digital television, they can still get commercial television and national broadcasters and they get an improvement in the quality of the broadcast.

The community television sector however does not have enough spectrum to simulcast. It broadcasts still in analog. So as members of its audience in their homes convert to digital, they no longer have easy access to the community television channel. They could if they knew their way around the technology, put the pieces together and run a few cables on their remote so that they could switch when they wanted to. But the reality is that most people do not know enough about that and when people switch to digital they effectively lose access to community television. That means, as 20 per cent of the population has now switched, 20 per cent of the population no longer has access to digital. As that percentage increases through this transition period, community television effectively is getting locked out of the market and the rest of the television sector is gaining that digital audience share.

There has been a suggestion in the past that community television could cope with a cold switch, that on the day that analog was switched off, it could then convert to digital on the same spectrum that it has now. What that effectively would mean is that community television would see its audience dwindle to less than 15 per cent of the market and then have to start literally from scratch in the digital world. Without any doubt, this would mean the death of community television. It is a sector restrained by its licence in the ways it can earn revenue. It survives on imagination, hard work and small revenue streams. It simply could not sustain the complete loss of its market over 10 years and then start again from scratch.

We are talking about a significant sector. A lot of people do not realise exactly how big it is. We really do not know exactly how big it is across the whole country. There are four full-time CTV licences—Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne—with trial services in Adelaide, Lismore and Mount Gambier. Channel 31 in Melbourne alone has 40 affiliated member groups which represent a variety of communities. That one channel in Melbourne has 1.3 million viewers tuning in every month—in Melbourne alone. That is bigger than some of the more well-known cable channels. This extraordinary television sector has done incredibly well under some very difficult circumstances.

The sector is also responsible for a large part of the training for the commercial sector. The commercial sector openly acknowledges that, as training within television stations and the national broadcasters has reduced, it is picking up more and more of its technical and on-air talent out of the community sector. We all know of the more famous one—Rove McManus, who came out of Channel 31 in Melbourne.

It is important that we get the recommendations right for this sector. It is extremely urgent because the options have been shrinking as more and more of the spectrum has been allocated to other uses. It became clear late last year that licence A, which is being auctioned off this year, is the last remaining real option for community television to be able to simulcast in digital. If that last piece of remaining spectrum is sold without providing access for community television, community television will be locked into analog and analog alone until the spectrum is freed up again at switch-off. So it became urgent for us to make a recommendation that community television get access to digital spectrum, and that is what we have done.

The committee has made five recommendations. The first one is that the Australian government sell the unreserved channel known as licence A with an obligation to be placed on the new licensee to carry community television during the simulcast period. This means that, once that licence is up and running, community television will be able to simulcast on their existing Channel 31 in analog and on licence A in digital. We have introduced some penalties should the carrier not meet its obligations. We have also introduced conditions that recognise how urgent this is. If licence A does not sell before the end of 2007 with a ‘must carry’ then sufficient spectrum will be temporarily allocated to one of the national broadcasters on a ‘must carry’ provision and the national broadcaster will be compensated for the additional costs. Both of those recommendations are necessary, again because of the urgency. In May last year community television were openly saying that they thought they may survive another year. That year is almost up. They really are in desperate need of our assistance.

We also recommended that, on the date of switch-off, the existing spectrum known as Channel 31—all seven megahertz of it—become available to community television. That will allow community television to expand in the digital world. The original government commitment made back in 1988 and then again in 2001 and 2004—in fact, over nine years—was to provide one channel. We have gone further than that and suggested that community broadcasting in all its forms—and we do not know what it will look like yet in the new world—be given the same opportunity to explore, grow and innovate that the commercial and national broadcasters have been given, and that is seven megahertz. We have also suggested some funding. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mrs Gash) adjourned.

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