Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

As the House considers the amendment that the Senate has returned to the House as part of the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Broadcasting Reform) Bill 2017—this comprehensive, extremely important set of amendments and reforms to the existing outdated legislative and regulatory regime under which Australia's media businesses operate—the House should be informed about some of the ludicrous logical contortions we've seen from the shadow minister as she has desperately attempted in the media to defend her intellectually incoherent position on this issue and her complete failure to engage, her complete failure to respond to an industry that unanimously has been saying to the Labor Party and to the shadow minister: 'This is our hour of need. Will you help us to continue to be competitive in a world where we are competing with large global companies using global internet resources? Will you help us to continue to be competitive and to continue to be able to employ Australians in this vitally important sector? Will you help us to continue to offer a diversity of voices in metropolitan Australia and regional Australia?'

One of the propositions that is blindingly obvious, it would seem—to just about everybody except the shadow minister—is that if businesses are not sustainable, if businesses cannot keep going, then they cannot provide a diverse voice. If they're not there to provide a voice, you can talk until the cows come home, using all kinds of theoretical arguments about the desirability of a diversity of voices, but you need to turn your mind to the practical questions of how businesses sustain themselves so that they can provide a diversity of voices. That, it would seem, is a basic proposition of logic that has escaped the shadow minister. But we've seen some fairly remarkable propositions of logic from the shadow minister, including her immortal interview with Kieran Gilbert on Sky News, where she was trying to defend her head-in-the-sand attitude, her attempt to pretend that the internet hadn't fundamentally transformed the media businesses—a position that is almost indefensible. Kieran Gilbert, referring to the Australian regulatory regime governing the media sector, asked the shadow minister:

So these laws are current even though they were written at a time before the Internet?

Her answer was:

Well, quite frankly, we have competition laws in Australia that were written in the 1970s but we don't say that we should abolish competition laws outright Kieran. This government has gone ahead and said we're going to do all these deals with all these different parts of the media, we're going to call it a holistic package. This isn't a holistic package, this is a grab bag.

Now, notice the first rhetorical technique there—the straw man. You refer to some suggestion that you're going to change the competition laws. And the second rhetorical technique is the complete diversion into ad hominem attack. Kieran Gilbert then wanted to ask:

But every media outlet agrees . . .

And here's what the shadow minister had to say:

Every media outlet agrees because they've got something in it for them.

In other words, to the question, 'Is it not the case that the internet is fundamentally transforming competition and the conditions in the media sector and therefore it is well past time for regulatory reform?' the shadow minister's answer was, 'Well, participants in the industry have an interest in this reform, so we couldn't possibly support it.' That is the standard of analysis and contribution we have had from this shadow minister in one of the most inadequate, inept and hopeless performances from a shadow minister when faced with the opportunity to engage with a substantive set of reforms that are desperately needed and that have been unanimously called for across the industry.

And what have we seen from the shadow minister? We have seen a continued wilful, illogical and incoherent failure to engage. Step after step there has been bitter, trenchant resistance from the opposition and from the shadow minister to any reforms of the media sector. You could not find a better example of gross irresponsibility from an opposition or from a shadow minister, and it really does make me wonder what her motivations are for being in public life, if the whole exercise here is to stand there intransigently, opposed to every attempt by this government to make vitally needed reforms to this sector, reforms that the entire sector— (Time expired)

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