Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Can I thank you, Deputy Speaker, for bringing this motion on in your role as the member for Mayo. I am one of those members of parliament who is a former print journalist. I hesitate to say 'former'; I think you're born a journalist and you die a journalist. It worries me greatly, to be utterly frank, to hear the reports from you and the member for Gippsland that advertising is dropping off in regional papers. I will follow that up. I will undertake to do that because that does concern me greatly. But I must say to the member for Gippsland that this issue predates this government, and it certainly predates the government you were part of.

When I was a journalist at an independent local paper in WA, we had the challenge daily with the fact that our paper did not get the level of advertising it should have from government departments and councils, despite having demonstrably higher readership than the corporate owned rival, which was co-owned by Murdoch and the West Australian Group, later bought out by Seven. That's because of the cosy relationships that advertising purchasers have with the big conglomerates. It's easy to make one phone call and one purchase so it goes into a national spread, and then they don't have to make multiple phone calls to independent regional publishers. That's what is needed; we need cultural change from the buyers of advertising. I don't think those decisions are being made at the bureaucratic level, and certainly not at the ministerial level, but it does concern me that the word is not getting out to the buyers of advertising on behalf of the government that they must ensure that there is a good spread of advertising in regional newspapers, whether it's in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania or wherever the case may be. So I will take that up.

My electorate in the north-west happens to be very well served by local papers. The Kentish Voice, under editor Heather Eiszele, serves 6,000 readers. Next door, in the Meander Valley, Craig Zimitat leads the volunteer team behind the Meander Valley Gazette, reaching 10,000 readers a month. Lana Best serves her community with pride in the Northern Midlands Courier, while Julie Jabour puts her heart and soul into the Southern Midlands Regional Newsagain, as a volunteer. Over on the east coast, we have Heidi's Coastal Column. There's also the Great Oyster Bay Community News, the Valley and East Coast Voice, the East Coast View and the Tasman Gazette, before heading inland to the Sorell Times, the Brighton Community News, the Derwent Valley Gazette and Damian Bester's New Norfolk and Derwent Valley News and finishing up with the Highland Digest.

These papers are a mix of commercial and non-profit. Some are traditional newspapers and others are printed on A4 photocopier paper. Some are independent. A handful are owned by bigger companies or councils. What they have in common is being grounded in their communities and being highly valued by those communities. Some have cover prices, others cover their costs by selling advertising space, and some do both. As you would expect, I'm a regular advertiser in all of them. I also contribute stories and story ideas. As a former print journalist, I recognise the incredibly important role these publications play in community life. They inform the community about what's going on, not just in the news but also in community life. There has been so much talk over the years about the destructive role of the internet on newspapers, and rightfully so. Audiences are fractured. Masses of advertising have moved online, especially ads for jobs, real estate, cars and second-hand goods, once referred to as the rivers of gold. Saturday newspapers used to be four times as thick as they are now.

What's not discussed nearly as much as the role the internet plays is the essential role that government advertising can play in the survival of regional newspapers. I don't think we should be supporting regional newspapers out of some nostalgic hankering to hang on to the past. Newspaper production is slow, laborious, expensive and resource intensive. It makes a lot of sense to replace it with the immediacy of the internet and the lower barriers to entry. The problem is that in regional areas you won't get a regional internet equivalent to a regional newspaper. It just will not happen. So we need to make sure that we protect our regional newspapers.

A key way we can do that is by government mandating a certain level of advertising spend in regional newspapers and, I would say, independent local papers in the suburbs and the metros, because they all play an important role. The big corporates can look after themselves, but our regional papers are the lifeblood of their local community. They deserve our support, they need our support and we should be supporting them.

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