Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Broadcasting and Other Legislation Amendment (Deregulation) Bill 2014. The purpose of this bill is to amend the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, the Radiocommunications Act 1992 and the Media Authority Act 2005. This legislation implements changes to the communications sector which, I am advised, are broadly supported throughout the communications sector. Among the changes to be introduced by these bills are    the amendment or removal of provisions necessary in the transition to digital broadcasting; and the amendment of the framework used by the Australian Communications and Media Authority to plan the broadcasting services band spectrum by removing some requirements which are no longer necessary.

Deregulation is something the Labor Party supports, where appropriate. It is often necessary in order to improve efficiency, especially in industries like communications which have changed so much since the time of Federation, when we were talking about telegraphs and the like, through to the digital age. The former Labor government implemented many deregulation reforms. We did not have press releases put out when we did this, because deregulation is important to maintain and improve competition and productivity in the Australian economy. The former Labor government, without any fanfare, without putting out local press releases, repealed 16,794 acts and regulations. This is the everyday work of governments. You do not need a press release. You do not need to give yourself a medal and say, 'Aren't we great!' just for turning up and doing our job. Unless you are devoid of reason, unless you are devoid of vision, no government would ever do that. So it is sad to see the 'red-tape day' trumpeted by those opposite as 'one of the great achievements' of their 18 months of being in government.

One of the reforms included in this bill will remove certain requirements for free-to-air broadcasters in reporting on compliance with obligations requiring them to provide captioning of programs. And that is what I am going to particularly turn my mind to in this speech. The vision and hearing impaired community are particularly concerned that these changes will reduce the captioning services provided, and may eventually result in the loss of the requirement for there to be 100 per cent captioning from 6am to midnight on primary free-to-air channels. Deregulation may be necessary, but it always needs to be coupled with extensive community consultation and engagement with the affected industry or community or stakeholders.

Unfortunately with this legislation, the Abbott government, and in particular, the Minister for Communications, have not consulted adequately with the vision and hearing impaired community that may be affected by this bill. I would urge the minister to recognise that even if stakeholders are deaf it does not mean that you do not consult with them. We are living in the information age, and those of us who are not hearing impaired receive information almost constantly, from the moment we wake in the morning and sometimes until we go to bed with an iPhone in our hands. From radio to television and to the internet; if we miss a radio or television broadcast we can download the broadcast and record it, or see it on our phone and listen at our leisure. The days when the entire community is watching the same bit of media are long gone. It is a fragmented media market now.

However, the digital age is a particularly different reality for those Australians who are hearing impaired. One in six Australians are affected by hearing loss, and around 30,000 Australians have total hearing loss. With an ageing population these numbers are only going to increase, with now one in five Australians being over 65. People with hearing loss, obviously, can still be very productive members of society. They hold down all sorts of jobs, they are taxpayers, they are workers and they can do many things. In fact, one of the things that I do note about former Prime Minister John Howard was that he was hearing impaired, but he got on with the job of working hard for the Australian people in the way that he saw fit. That is something I often mention in terms of working with a disability and still going on to serve your community. So one-sixth of the Australian population currently relies on broadcast captioning to receive information.

Recently in Queensland we felt the brunt of Cyclone Marcia cross the coast just north of Yeppoon. I have a sister and her partner who live in Biloela, which was affected by Cyclone Marcia, and they also have a property at Byfield, that was particularly hammered by the cyclone. I know what it is like. There are electricians out working hard at the moment trying to restore power. As Queenslanders, when we have so many cyclones and floods and with so many of us living on the coast, we know how important the information is.

During Cyclone Marcia so many of us were tuned into our radios or watching television to get the latest forecast of where the cyclone was likely to make landfall and how dangerous it would be. The difference between a category 3 and a category 5 can be life or death in terms of how people respond. So we do need to make sure that the communications are appropriate. The hearing impaired people in the vicinity of the cyclone would have been relying on captioning to get the latest news broadcasts. I know that there was also some Auslan interpreting being done when Premier Palaszczuk was communicating with people, but the captions still play an important part. Imagine how fearful it would have been for them not to have had access to this information.

The reliance on captioning by the hearing impaired is real and vitally important and, as I said, will only become even more important in the years ahead as we enter this time where we have two generations retired simultaneously. The fear of not having access to that captioning service is also real and should have been taken much more seriously by the Minister for Communications. Maybe the Minister for Communications finds it easier to talk about himself than to hear the concerns of those people who are hearing impaired?

The concerns of the hearing impaired community were also reflected in the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights in their Sixteenth Report of the 44th Parliament in the Senate, which examined the bill. It said:

… the committee considers that the measure would represent a limitation on the right of persons with disabilities …

The report sought further advice from the Minister of Communications.

The Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee conducted an inquiry into the bill. Mr Kyle Miers from Deaf Australia, in evidence to that Senate committee, said:

… 'information is power'. We access information through various mediums: radio, public announcement systems, theatre, the arts, online, emergency announcements. There are various mediums to access information, but many of those are not accessible to deaf people, because they are not captioned. So, we rely heavily on accessible information via the television.

The Community and Public Sector Union said that any reforms to captioning regulation should be focussed on improving captioning services for deaf and hearing impaired Australians.

My electorate has a particular connection with these reforms. Deaf Services Queensland is located in Moreton, on Ipswich Road. It is an organisation that has been operating in my electorate since 1903. It is the leading provider of support services and information to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community in Queensland—not just in Brisbane but right up to the Cape—from Coolangatta to Cunnamulla, to Camooweal and to everywhere in between. It is a very worthy service. I have been in consultation with the CEO of this service, Brett Casey, and its employees over many years. I know that Brett Casey might be watching this speech at the moment—hopefully, having someone translate it—a big thumbs up to you, Brett, for the input you have had into this speech. Brett Casey has for many years been involved in community events. He has turned up to community events and they have organised translators to be there so that the hearing impaired can access the information as well. Brett Casey, the CEO of Deaf Services Queensland, commented about the proposed reforms from the government, 'Implementing a complaint based assessment process therefore puts the onus on the deaf and hard of hearing viewers, who would then need to complain in regards to the captioning standard.'

He went further, explaining his disappointment with the government's handling of this reform: 'My understanding is that it was a Liberal government that developed the compliance regime in 2001 when captioning was introduced on free-to-air broadcasting for prime-time viewing with amendments to the broadcasting act. It seems the LNP are forever 'giveth' and then 'taketh' from the community. Seems the broadcasters have some close LNP friends.'

After listening to the hearing impaired sector, Labor has worked through the concerns that they have raised and have sought changes to the bill. I note that the member for Blaxland and shadow communications minister is in the chamber, and has raised many of these concerns. He has sought changes to the bill that will make it more palatable for the Labor Party. These changes will ensure that broadcasters will still be required to report annually on their compliance with captioning obligations. Labor has also ensured that there will be a statutory review next year, in 2016, of all the issues that concern the deaf community and broadcasters, including captioning.

To their credit, the Abbott government have understood these concerns and have supported the changes put forward by the Labor opposition.

However, I do stress again that this is where the government should have consulted much more thoroughly. It should have engaged with the deaf community and the broader communications area. Minister Turnbull definitely was negligent in not doing that. He failed to address the real concerns of a vulnerable sector of the community and the hearing impaired community deserves much better. In fact, all of the people involved that will be impacted by this legislation deserve better. Perhaps the communications minister could spend less time talking about himself to the backbench—those 39 and counting—and more time doing his job.

With the changes made to this legislation by Labor, by the member for Blaxland, the honourable Jason Clare, this is now a bill which will ease the regulatory burden in the communication industry but will retain the safeguards around these vitally important services that I have detailed. I support this piece of legislation.

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