Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition are prepared to support the government on the establishment of this committee, but we have to say that the presentation of the so-called media reforms by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, yesterday was characteristically chaotic. Right from the very outset, he had a press conference which was incoherent. He had no press statement that he could distribute. It is a jumble of reforms. Some of them have been well flagged, such as the changes to content rules and the reduction in the licence fee. That has been well understood and it has been out there. But now also there is the introduction of a so-called public interest media advocate that is going to be a new government official to oversee and regulate the journalistic standards of all media outlets of any consequence, including newspapers. So, for the first time in our history, we will have a government official dealing with newspapers' content. This, of course, has just been a reaction on the part of the government to the injustice that they perceive of the criticism they have been getting from the News Ltd newspapers, in particular their tabloids.

Really, it is extraordinary that there are elements of important policy that have a timeliness associated with them—and the issues about the reach rule would fall into that category, as would the issues about licence fee and content arrangements—jumbled up together with changes of enormous significance which, frankly, deserve lengthy and detailed debate. It is one thing to say that this question of the reach rule is going to be considered by a committee which will report in the middle of June. I am sure that no doubt the committee can adequately deal with it in time. But it is another thing for the government to propose, for the first time in this country's history in peacetime, to have a government official overseeing the content of newspapers—for the first time in our peacetime history to have that enormous change—and for this to be, according to the senator, debated and approved by the parliament by no later than next Thursday. Coupled to that is a so-called public interest test for media acquisitions.

We have a number of laws that impact on media acquisitions, not least of which, of course, are the provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act, which deals with market concentration and ensuring that we have competitive markets. Indeed, Kerry Stokes's or the Seven Network's attempt to buy a larger share of Fox was knocked back by the ACCC recently, so the laws certainly work. We have clear, well-understood legal arrangements that impact upon media transactions—indeed, all transactions—and concentration of ownership.

But now we are going to have a new test, defined as the 'public interest test'. The public interest test, of course, is completely ill defined. A public interest test in respect of media will inevitably be a political interest test. Yesterday when the senator announced this, people naturally asked, 'What do you mean by public interest? That is a pretty general term. What do you mean by it?' And he said, 'There will be criteria of public interest, which will be released later this week.' So apparently we will find out what he means by 'public interest' on Thursday, and then we will only have four sitting days to consider it.

This minister is a serial bungler. He is the most incompetent member of this government—which is a big call. The Manager of Government Business over there is racking his mind, he is trying to think of somebody who is more incompetent—I am inviting him to nominate one of his colleagues who is more incompetent than Senator Conroy. The senator has this distinction: he announced 2½ years ago changes to the anti-syphoning laws and has been unable to present a bill to the parliament to put those changes into statutory form. This is quite remarkable. The parliamentary draftsmen, of course, are able to write bills on a few minutes notice, sometimes. But the minister has such a chaotically cluttered mind, so incapable of coming to a resolution, that we may well get to the election without any statutory enactment of the anti-syphoning laws. And no doubt a similar fate will befall the public interest media advocate and the public interest test for media takeovers.

We on our side of the House—and I say this with my friend the Leader of the Opposition here with me—are absolutely, fundamentally, irrevocably committed to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And when we talk about freedom of the press we mean, above all, freedom from government control. The biggest threat to freedom of the press, to freedom of speech, if you look around the world, is government. Government must be restrained so that it impinges no more than it has already on freedom of expression and freedom of the media in this country. Senator Conroy says he is concerned about concentration of ownership. What hypocrisy and humbug. Let us never forget that the transaction which created the concentration of newspaper ownership in this country and has been the subject of endless commentary in the nearly 30 years ever since was when the Hawke and Keating Labor government allowed Rupert Murdoch to buy The Herald and Weekly Times. That is a fact. That was what gave Murdoch the dominant share of metropolitan daily newspapers and that was approved by a Labor government—not by a coalition government, by a Labor government. So we have all this Murdoch bashing and 'down with News Limited' rhetoric from the Labor Party, but they created that domination.

While Rupert Murdoch's share of daily newspapers is no greater today than it was in 1986, when Hawke and Keating allowed it to happen, what has happened is that the share of the media pie represented by newspapers gets smaller every day. We have more voices, more competition and more diversity. Whether it is social media, whether it is all of the online publications or whether it is the dozens and dozens of channels on pay television, we have a more competitive and more diverse media than we have ever had in our lives. So to now suddenly say that we need a government regulator to impose an undefined public interest test on media mergers to ensure diversity is surely laughable and it will be seen for what it is. It is nothing more than an attempt to provide some sort of payback or retaliation to News Limited for their treatment of the government in their papers. And sometimes the treatment has been outrageous. I thought comparing Senator Conroy to Joseph Stalin was outrageous today; it was quite unfair.

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