Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the media reform bills and note that, as I understand it, as I stand here there are various backroom deals going on to allow these bills to be passed. I just attended a function in parliament at which the member for New England was scurrying around looking for somebody. Perhaps it was the Leader of the House. At the moment there is a lot of movement and colour going on around here but no-one seems to know why there is such indecent haste to get this particular legislation through.

The Leader of the House is still not quite sure what these bills will say because he is still negotiating the legislation with the Independents. The Public Interest Media Advocate Bill—one of the six planks of this legislation—is still a work in progress. There is no act, yet one of these bills refers to the PIMA Act. It is shameful policy on the run.

The member for Wentworth said in his speech that he never thought the government could plumb these depths, but that is precisely what this Labor government is doing tonight. We have no idea who or what the PIMA is, because the government itself has no idea. The Prime Minister realises that this is a test of confidence. Indeed it is.

When I was the editor of the Daily Advertiser at Wagga Wagga we ran a line across the editorial which read:

This is true liberty, when free-born men,

Having to advise the public, may speak free

That particular line—a quote from Milton—had been on the newspaper since the paper's first edition way back on 10 October 1868. It was still there, and run in every single edition, certainly until I left in February 2002. When we think about that particular quote we realise that it is so true. When we have a democracy in which people can 'speak free' we have true democracy. When people are able to say what they think—within the parameters of common decency and defamation—that is to be desired.

I have an editor near my electorate of the Riverina, Tertia Butcher, who emailed me this week—she comes from Africa—saying that she felt that the media censorship laws were far greater here than what they were where she comes from. She feared that if this sort of legislation passes—even though we are still not quite aware of what it all entails—we could have more draconian laws than some African countries. This government's claim that it is doing this in the name of regulation is nonsense.

The media is already very well regulated. The court of public opinion will always tell a news organisation whether it has crossed the line. The court of public opinion, certainly in this day and age of social media, will determine whether a radio station loses advertising. The public will vigorously lobby companies to stop advertising. We saw that last year, when Alan Jones said what he said. We all know about that; we do not have to go into that again. When the broadcaster Alan Jones went a tad too far the court of public opinion certainly let his radio station know that that was transgressing, that it was a bridge too far. People voted with their feet, and people should be able to continue to do that without needing a public interest advocate.

I interjected in question time yesterday—when the question was about who it might be—that the public advocate might be Bob Brown. Who would know who this Labor government might put as the public interest advocate—the guardian of journalism, the person who is going to decide who has done the wrong thing!

I find it interesting that the member for Lyne would be doing these backroom deals at the moment to get this legislation through, when it was the member for Lyne who, in 2010, gave that rambling 17-minute speech about letting the sunshine in, kumbaya, 'beauty in its ugliness', and all those lines. He was getting on his high moral horse about how things should be run and yet, as I understand it, he is doing backroom deals with Labor to try to get this legislation through. In fairness to the member for Lyne, he said that he would not back it. I hope he keeps his word, because this is an attack on the media. It is an attack on free speech. It cannot be seen as anything else. Why Labor would want to do this in an election year is unfathomable; but why Labor would want to do it in the first place is unconscionable.

As for some of the other bits of legislation involved in this, the government's claim that they are protecting diversity is sheer humbug. It was the Labor Party in government which led to a concentration of media ownership in the Australian newspaper market with the sale of the Herald and Weekly Times to Rupert Murdoch in 1987. Keeping promises has never been a strong suit of this government. Phone hacking was a serious breach of British law, but are we seeing the John McTernan influence on the Prime Minister? I know that the government in Britain at the moment—the Tory government, as Labor would call them—are bringing in certain public interest tests for their media, but we have always known that the British media does go that bridge too far. We have always known that the British media are quite different to the Australian media.

The Australian media are responsible. The Australian media are accountable. I can see you smiling, Deputy Speaker Lyons, but it is true. Certainly we might not always like what is written about us—we have all in this place had articles written about us that were not quite accurate—but there is always the ability to pick up the phone and ring the editor and say, 'Look, that's not quite right.' And, by and large, newspaper editors respond with corrections or clarifications. I see you shaking your head, Deputy Speaker Lyons. There is another way that we can address those problems and it is called the Press Council. It has operated very effectively. Even the newspaper in my home town has had rulings against it by the Press Council in matters relating to local government coverage. And, in good faith, the newspaper reported those particular findings in a prominent space so that the readers knew that the Press Council had found against it. The readers knew that the Press Council had done its job—and that is the way it ought to be.

ACMA does the same job with respect to broadcasters.

I do not know how often, when I am driving around my large electorate, I hear on the community radio bands, and certainly on the commercial radio bands, people being urged to ring the radio station in the first instance if they think that the radio station has aired something that was not quite right. Then they will put them in touch with the relevant authority to see that that particular problem or issue is resolved. Television stations are also subject to defamation laws with their news coverage and they are subject to content discretion with their TV programming.

For the government to say that this is necessary is just rubbish, and we all know it. We all know this is an attack on News Limited. We all know Labor does not like the coverage it is receiving. The only offence the News Limited papers have really committed in this country is to write headlines about how great a job the Prime Minister is doing, because we know she is not. We know that Labor is not governing properly. But I must say that the coverage has been balanced. The Fairfax papers always seem to find a way to report that Labor is doing a reasonable job, and indeed some of the policies that Labor have put forward could be construed as being half decent, but it is just the delivery. I can see the member for Makin smiling. Some of your party's policies are quite decent, but it is just the way you put them into practicality, the way you implement them, that is making everybody sick and tired of the way Labor is governing.

This legislation is important. We cannot put in place measures which are going to muzzle our media. It has never been on. As the member for Wentworth has said repeatedly, there has been absolutely no media watchdog like this that government has wanted to put in place in our peacetime. It is not needed. It has not been needed in the past and it is not needed now. With those remarks, I will sit down so that I can allow the member for Hughes to make some very pertinent comments on this legislation.

See this speech in context