Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Stick to the bill—which is the importance of media diversity. Therefore I would like to give examples of why that media diversity is so important and how different stories give different points of view—some which can be fake to get to the truth—and why this bill is important and, it is clearly allowed under the rule of debates to give examples.

The example that I was giving was of the story about the bleaching of the barrier reef. While it was reported across many media outlets that two-thirds of the reef had actually died off, it was only two-thirds of what is called the far northern parts of the reef. The reef is divided into three parts: a central part, a southern part and the northern part. Yes, those stories that were reported were true that two-thirds of the northern part of the reef had died off. But the central part had only six per cent coral bleaching; and the southern part was less than one percent. So it is very important that we have diversity of media ownership, that we have the two-out-of-three rule and that we have the 75 per cent audience reach rule. It is very important that, within those rules, we have full diversity because, without it, people are simply being influenced by fake news.

Another example of media ownership—also going back to the US presidential election: we saw during the election that those speaking against Trump were telling us that his election, the election of a President Trump, would have a huge detrimental effect on the economy. That was reported in multiple news outlets across many areas, which clearly exceeded the 75 per cent audience reach rule. But what we have seen since the election is the exact opposite: we have seen a boom in the share market, and yesterday the OECD reported that they have actually upped their forecasts of global growth. Global growth at 2.9 per cent—the OECD are now reporting—which was the previous forecast, is now up to 3.3 per cent for 2007; and up to 3.6 per cent in 2018.

In the US, their previous forecast of 2.1 percent—

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