Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Just recently I had the honour of representing the Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland, who is in the chamber today, at the awards ceremony for community television in Melbourne. This was an absolutely joyous event. It was a real spectacle, a celebration of diversity, in the broader sense of the word, of people from all walks of life, and a fantastic array of media and entertainment content. It was also a celebration of location, because the content that community television champions is very much local and community focused. The kinds of stories that are told you will just not find on commercial TV. It was also a celebration of our nation's storytellers, musicians, producers and creators. After all, it is community TV that is the training ground for Australia's future media talents, and that was evident on the night. There were young people and older people. When the awards were handed out, there was riotous applause from the crowd. Honestly, it was a lot of fun.

The content that received the awards was diverse. There were migrant offerings, there were motorsports and there were youth takes on politics, for example. That was interesting to see. Our young people are engaging in politics and they are watching what we do in this House. There were shows on fishing, shows celebrating food and wine and, of course, shows on the great Aussie icon, the four-wheel drive, and where it can take you in this country. What was evident is that these young people use community television as a means to hone their skills and spread their wings often to other arenas with a much bigger stage, like commercial TV, either in Australia or internationally.

It is for these reasons that I am very pleased to speak about the reforms being put forward today. The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Community Television) Bill 2024 effectively kills the Liberals' kill bill on community TV. Under the previous Liberal government, community TV would have ceased to exist in Melbourne and Adelaide by June of this year. This was part of a campaign to essentially gag and shut down community TV that was waged over many years and that we in the Labor Party fought against.

The bill repeals the legislative expiry date of C31, the channel that I celebrated, and C44 in Adelaide of 30 June. It allows community TV to have the certainty to continue broadcasting into the future. Instead, the bill will replace this expiry date with a new ACMA-led process for determining a future date for when the licences of the remaining community TV channels will cease. So it won't be up to the government of the day, at their whim, to decide when community TV continues or stops. The process will be led by a statutory body, ACMA, that will be held at arm's length from government, and that is a good thing.

I want to see community TV continue to prosper, to broadcast and to suck in our talent from our schools, our universities and our training institutes in order to deliver that talent to much bigger stages. After all, we have a wonderful story to tell in our country, but we need those talented young Australians to enter the media sector and to see it as a future career for themselves, and community TV is a very important stepping stone in that journey.

Labor has a proud legacy of supporting community TV, and for years we have stood shoulder to shoulder with the sector fighting to keep them on air. This reform will enable community TV to thrive for many years to come. I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context