Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is; I agree. A few days later, very personal for me, it was GMV6 in Shepparton. I can remember waking up to GMV6 Six's Super Saturday Show. We only had two channels when I was young: Channel 3, which was the ABC, and Channel 6, which was GMV6. You'd watch the cartoons in the morning, Six's Super Saturday Show, and then at night you'd watch whatever good American TV was imported then—The A-Team or CHiPS. It was part of our childhood, it was great stuff and I really enjoyed it, and we want the same access for young people growing up now. I understand things are a bit different. I have conversations with my kids about streaming. But free-to-air television is still important for a number of families, particularly lower socioeconomic families in regional areas, where streaming is more difficult.

Regional television is part of our lives, and we're tempted to take it for granted, but we shouldn't. Local content has diminished over the years. Local news has consolidated, and that's disappointing. That has an effect on democracy. We used to have GMV6 News and then WIN News, which would report on local issues, it would report on what local councils were doing and it would report on what state politicians were doing and how they were representing their community. Those services have been significantly diminished, and I don't think that's good for our democracy. Now in Mildura the transmission of a whole network is ceasing because it's financially unviable. That impacts access and choice, it deepens the divide between city and country, and it's exactly why the Nationals continue to stand up for regional Australia, where people deserve equity of access regardless of where they live.

We often say in this place that your postcode shouldn't define a number of things—your access to education and to all number of services. It shouldn't define your access to the free-to-air television that people in the cities are getting. We are one country. We used to be more cohesive when we all got around the water cooler and discussed what we saw on the TV last night. I know things have changed, but equitable access to free-to-air television for people across Australia, including in regional Australia, is a really important thing that this parliament should be trying to facilitate.

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