Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

a great bloke—helped to fix up some of those reception problems with ABC and SBS. But of course the commercial television stations were still intermittent. They broke up. There were various problems for them.

It was one of my election commitments to fix up TV reception in Craigmore, and we managed to do that in my first term. You know, when 150 people turn out to see the tower being constructed, that it is a popular thing. On Friday at midday, I think, most of them were there just to make sure it was actually happening. But that, I think, was evidence of how, if you get a clear signal, you take it for granted—television is part of modern life—and if you cannot get it you know all about it.

It is disappointing to hear remarks from those opposite failing to acknowledge the importance of captioning. Captioning is important for deaf Australians. I have a number of concerns, I guess, about the way that the government had been approaching consultation and indeed policy outcomes with deaf Australians. We know that the Minister for Communications, when he was introducing this bill, said:

… ACMA and my department have consulted with industry and key accessibility groups on a range of potential reforms that primarily seek to improve administrative arrangements for the free-to-air broadcasters and subscription television … while requiring that they continue to meet their captioning obligations.

But then we later heard from the Chief Executive Officer of Deaf Australia that Deaf Australia had not been consulted. That is not a really good outcome. We note that another arm of this government later acted to defund Deaf Australia and indeed impair its ability as a lobby group, as a voice for deaf Australians. That is really concerning. So we have government legislation not taking into account their needs, and then we have a defunding of their organisation. That is very concerning indeed.

The bipartisan report of the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee has also identified that consultation on this bill was inadequate:

The committee notes that a large number of submitters indicated that … the consultation processes in relation to the bill had been inadequate. The committee agrees that the breadth of consultation in relation to this bill has been insufficient.

That is not a great reflection on the Minister for Communications. He has probably been busier consulting his backbench—well, not his backbench, not yet anyway; we await that moment in time, once they conclude on a successor to the current Prime Minister. We all know what is going to happen; it is only a matter of time, I guess, before that happens.

So there is a lack of consultation and a defunding of the organisation, and then of course we see other government policy which will directly impact on deaf Australians. First of all, there is the potential privatisation which is being examined by the Department of Finance at the moment, not taking into account any consultations with Health or any consultations with the Department of Human Services. It is just Finance, bean counters, looking at privatising Australian Hearing, an organisation that has been around since 1947, and the National Acoustic Laboratories as well, as part of that. These two institutions provide vital services and vital research. If you go out to Macquarie University, in Sydney, to the Australian Hearing Hub, you see the impact of that research not just on services but on technology and on medical exports, which do not just help Australians but help the world.

All of this is being done as part of an obsession with privatisation, because this is an institution which has survived many governments. It started out in the Chifley government to help veterans who had been injured by prolonged gun and artillery fire. It was there to help children who had suffered in the rubella outbreaks. It survived the Chifley government, the Menzies government, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating, and Howard. This was a national institution. Indeed, to give some credit to Prime Minister Howard, he actually increased funding in this area. So that is something that needs to be taken account of. This was an area of bipartisan support, yet we see in this bill, in the defunding of Deaf Australia and in the privatisation of Australian Hearing and the National Acoustic Laboratories a really concerning impact on deaf Australians.

We know that the government are now talking about welfare reform, hoeing into the disability support pension—being able to access it and the very structure of it. So we wait to see what will happen there. We know that the government defunded Gonski, undertaking $80 billion worth of cuts. The impact of these cuts is yet to flow through to schools, hospitals and state governments. We know there has been a culture of conservative state governments standing mute in the hope that something will happen within the government and that, down the track, some fix will be made. Who knows? The member for Wentworth might be more agreeable than the current Prime Minister. We just do not know, and we await the deliberations of their party room, I guess, on that front. We have no idea about what possible future policy approaches might be done. It is a very big concern, because we know that that Gonski funding had disability loadings in it which would have helped and made a huge difference in that area, not just for deaf Australians but for all of those children who have a disability and who deserve a fair go at school.

As I said before, government, of course, is a leviathan, and I guess that is why we hear those opposite talking about red tape repeal day and all the rest of it. But the one concerning thing about this is that, for all the rhetoric of those opposite, we still find in this area one arm of government acting intolerably, without consultation with deaf Australians. We see the defunding of their organisation. We see the potential privatisation of the services that they use year in and year out. That is very concerning, and this bill represents just one part of our concerns in this area.

To conclude, red tape repeal—the repealing of unnecessary regulations—is not the province of one side of parliament; it is something that has been done regularly in this parliament and in state governments. We should not have to deal with the hoo-ha, the PR and the spin of those opposite. We should not have to deal with the rhetoric of those opposite, which is so frequently over the top. They do themselves a disservice, because the community knows that we live in a modern world where regulation is necessary. The situation with some of our foodstuffs coming from overseas demonstrates that, in a modern, complex world, you do need regulation that will protect consumers and the public interest. Labor stands ready to have a modern regulatory approach to these things, but the community should not have to put up with those opposite blowing their trumpets every time some minor amendment, minor regulation or unused act is repealed in this House.

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