Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Hansard source

I will try to pick up where I left off. The coalition government had a rounded and comprehensive plan to support the transition to digital television. Many of my colleagues would remember that fantastic election commitment to establish a dedicated new children’s channel on ABC, with an emphasis on educational entertainment content for all ages from preschool through to late teens. That was about providing new content, a reason for people to make the conversion from analog to digital—a new opportunity, a new viewing experience. That is what brings about the kind of change that is needed to see this transition. That funding, an extra $82 million over four years, was a very important commitment for a new advertising-free channel.

You might also recall the channel A and channel B action. Those initiatives were designed to bring new narrowcast offerings into the marketplace to provide a platform for community television to transition to digital. The current government has decided to step back from that. No-one quite knows what that means. All we know is it is not stepping forward. No-one is really clear on whether channel A and channel B or the spectrum that it represents is still being considered for alternate uses to encourage conversion to digital. More worryingly, community television is wondering where its spectrum is. We have already seen Access 31 in Perth shut down as a result of the uncertainty. They were saying channel surfers in the west, in that great city of Perth, could not pick up Channel 31. They have no digital transmission capability. Their prospects of hooking their wagon along with other community channels to the channel A and channel B process have been lost by this step back by Senator Conroy and they are crying out for some clarity.

What we have before the parliament tonight is a better bill than went to the Senate. It embraces some of the recommendations from the review of the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts. One of the main areas they highlighted was an absolute lack of clarity about what an adequate level of take-up was before a switch-over from analog to digital took place. This is when the simulcast would stop, where the only way you could get your free-to-air television was through digital technologies and analog would just black out. Surely it is reasonable to want to know what those benchmarks are, to know how the government is going to achieve those benchmarks and to get some public clarity about whether they are getting nearer or not. Even if just a small percentage of people are not ready for the switch from analog, surely it is reasonable to want to know just how many tens of thousands of viewers will have no television at all. Surely whether there is a need to vary or to defer or to take other action to bring about a successful transition over to digital is something that is important enough to be publicly canvassed, to be evaluated against an objective set of criteria, to be reported on and to be reflected on. These are perfectly sensible recommendations.

What has happened, though, in the bravado and the bluster in the other place, is that Senator Conroy has completely rejected these recommendations on what I have described as the ‘WIJI’ basis. ‘Well, it just is,’ is his argument when there is a debate on content, on policy. However, we saw moments ago some amendments that the government are now going to move in the House. So horrible were these suggestions that they fought tooth and nail against them in the Senate. They rejected outright engaging with the coalition and other parties in the Senate, and now they have come in with some amendments of their own, which have just landed. Some of them mimic the ideas that the opposition had introduced into the Senate. We are having a look at them right now, but how remarkable to completely and flatly refuse them and to put forward what can only be described as more of Conroy’s counterfeit logic as to why these things should be rejected, only to bring something that is trying to look like those amendment into this parliament.

Despite what Senator Conroy claims, the coalition’s amendments do not in any way move to change or alter switch-over deadlines. Our amendments are designed to save Senator Conroy from himself. Senator Conroy has dreadful form when it comes to meeting his own deadlines. Look at the national broadband network debacle. What a disaster, what a shambolic process that is. And we learnt today that the cost of administering that process is twice what is in the appropriations bill. There is a doubling of the amount of money: another $10 million just to handle a process that was supposed to have selected a tenderer some months ago—and work was supposed to have started today. So the process now costs twice as much to administer without a hole being dug anywhere, This is a process where one of the lead tenderers, Telstra, say they cannot go within a bull’s roar of the tender specification and where, if someone else wins it, we are likely to have litigation at 20 feet for as long as you can imagine. That is an example of why we in the opposition need to help Senator Conroy, to save him from himself.

These amendments put in place evaluation criteria, an objective framework upon which a decision to turn analog televisions blank can be determined so that we know what the impact of that switch-off will be on viewers. I commend the bill to the House. I encourage it to embrace the bill as it was embraced by the Senate. I am amused and interested in the government’s—I was going to say eleventh hour; it is not quite there yet—last-minute change of heart. It was something it flatly refused, and now it has tried to come up with its own amendments that have some of the language and some of the ideas but leave out some of the critical things that we were aiming for. That has now been dropped in this parliament. We are having a look at that, but at least Senator Conroy has recognised a constructive, a pragmatic, a positive opposition adds value to his processes, because Senator Conroy and shambolic are two words that travel together. I commend the bill to the House.

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