Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That:

(1) a Joint Select Committee on Broadcasting Legislation be appointed to inquire into and report on potential areas for further reform of Australia’s broadcasting legislation, with particular reference to:

(a) the abolition of the 75 per cent rule, particularly in relation to regional and local news;

(b) whether the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) should be required to examine program supply agreements for news and current affairs when determining whether a person is in control of a commercial television broadcasting service; and

(c) on-air reporting of ACMA findings regarding Broadcasting regulation breaches;

(2) the committee consist of ten members, two Members of the House of Representatives to be nominated by the Government Whip or Whips, two Members of the House of Representatives to be nominated by the Opposition Whip or Whips, and one non-aligned Member, two Senators to be nominated by the Leader of the Government in the Senate, two Senators to be nominated by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, and one Senator to be nominated by the Australian Greens Whip;

(3) every nomination of a member of the committee be notified in writing to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives;

(4) the members of the committee hold office as a joint select committee until presentation of the committee’s report or the House of Representatives is dissolved or expires by effluxion of time, whichever is the earlier;

(5) the committee elect:

(a) as its chair a Government member; and

(b) a deputy chair who shall act as chair of the committee at any time when the chair is not present at a meeting of the committee, and at any time when the chair and deputy chair are not present at a meeting of the committee the members present shall elect another member to act as chair of that meeting;

(6) in the event of an equality of voting, the chair, or the deputy chair when acting as chair, have a casting vote;

(7) three members of the committee constitute a quorum of the committee provided that in a deliberative meeting the quorum shall include one Government member of either House and one non-Government member of either House;

(8) the committee have power to appoint subcommittees consisting of three or more of its members and to refer to any subcommittee any matter which the committee is empowered to examine;

(9) the committee appoint the chair of each subcommittee who shall have a casting vote only, and at any time when the chair of a subcommittee is not present at a meeting of the subcommittee the members of the subcommittee present shall elect another member of that subcommittee to act as chair at that meeting;

(10) the quorum of a subcommittee be two members of that subcommittee, provided that in a deliberative meeting the quorum shall comprise one Government member of either House and one non-Government member of either House;

(11) the committee or any subcommittee have power to call for witnesses to attend and for documents to be produced;

(12) the committee or any subcommittee may conduct proceedings at any place it sees fit;

(13) the committee or subcommittee have the power to adjourn from time to time and to sit during any adjournment of the House of Representatives and the Senate;

(14) the committee be provided with all necessary staff, facilities and resources and be empowered to appoint persons with specialist knowledge for the purposes of the committee with the approval of the Presiding Officers;

(15) the committee be empowered to print from day to day such documents and evidence as may be ordered by it, and a daily Hansard be published of such proceedings as take place in public;

(16) the committee may report from time to time but that it make a final report no later than 17 June 2013;

(17) the provisions of this resolution, so far as they are inconsistent with the standing orders, have effect notwithstanding anything contained in the standing orders; and

(18) a message be sent to the Senate acquainting it of this resolution and requesting that it concur and take action accordingly.

I will speak briefly to this motion, which seeks to establish a parliamentary committee to inquire into three potential further media reforms beyond the legislation that will be introduced to the House tomorrow: firstly, the abolition of the 75 per cent reach rule, particularly in relation to regional and local news; secondly, on-air reporting of the Australian Communications and Media Authority findings regarding broadcasting regulation breaches; and, thirdly, whether the ACMA should consider program supply agreements for news and current affairs as part of determining whether a person is in control of a commercial television broadcasting service.

The intention to abolish the 75 per cent reach rule was announced in the package of broadcasting regulation reforms announced by the government in November last year. Over recent weeks, concerns have been raised that the abolition of this rule may jeopardise the delivery of regional news services or local content in general. Regional broadcasters in aggregated markets are currently obliged to meet minimum levels of content of local significance. When announcing our proposal to abolish the 75 per cent rule, we made it clear that this will be subject to adherence by any future owners of regional broadcasters with existing local content obligations in regional areas and written undertakings in respect of those obligations. We will provide to the committee draft clauses which bring effect to that policy intention of maintaining local content obligations into the future. If the committee were able to come up with a quick resolution or agree to a consensus on the 75 per cent rule, the government would include this amendment in the general package of media reform legislation.

The other issues of on-air statements and the extent to which supply agreements on news programs may constitute a form of control over media voices have been raised in public debate leading up to these reforms. The government is interested in understanding the implications of changes in these areas for possible future legislative action, hence the establishment of a joint select committee.

I thank the shadow minister for his cooperation in ensuring that this committee can be established. Then it will be possible to appoint members to the committee. Obviously, the statement I have made about the 75 per cent reach rule, if a consensus can be reached, being able to be brought forward into the legislation is one reason for expediting the establishment of this committee. I commend the resolution to the House.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition are prepared to support the government on the establishment of this committee, but we have to say that the presentation of the so-called media reforms by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, yesterday was characteristically chaotic. Right from the very outset, he had a press conference which was incoherent. He had no press statement that he could distribute. It is a jumble of reforms. Some of them have been well flagged, such as the changes to content rules and the reduction in the licence fee. That has been well understood and it has been out there. But now also there is the introduction of a so-called public interest media advocate that is going to be a new government official to oversee and regulate the journalistic standards of all media outlets of any consequence, including newspapers. So, for the first time in our history, we will have a government official dealing with newspapers' content. This, of course, has just been a reaction on the part of the government to the injustice that they perceive of the criticism they have been getting from the News Ltd newspapers, in particular their tabloids.

Really, it is extraordinary that there are elements of important policy that have a timeliness associated with them—and the issues about the reach rule would fall into that category, as would the issues about licence fee and content arrangements—jumbled up together with changes of enormous significance which, frankly, deserve lengthy and detailed debate. It is one thing to say that this question of the reach rule is going to be considered by a committee which will report in the middle of June. I am sure that no doubt the committee can adequately deal with it in time. But it is another thing for the government to propose, for the first time in this country's history in peacetime, to have a government official overseeing the content of newspapers—for the first time in our peacetime history to have that enormous change—and for this to be, according to the senator, debated and approved by the parliament by no later than next Thursday. Coupled to that is a so-called public interest test for media acquisitions.

We have a number of laws that impact on media acquisitions, not least of which, of course, are the provisions of the Competition and Consumer Act, which deals with market concentration and ensuring that we have competitive markets. Indeed, Kerry Stokes's or the Seven Network's attempt to buy a larger share of Fox was knocked back by the ACCC recently, so the laws certainly work. We have clear, well-understood legal arrangements that impact upon media transactions—indeed, all transactions—and concentration of ownership.

But now we are going to have a new test, defined as the 'public interest test'. The public interest test, of course, is completely ill defined. A public interest test in respect of media will inevitably be a political interest test. Yesterday when the senator announced this, people naturally asked, 'What do you mean by public interest? That is a pretty general term. What do you mean by it?' And he said, 'There will be criteria of public interest, which will be released later this week.' So apparently we will find out what he means by 'public interest' on Thursday, and then we will only have four sitting days to consider it.

This minister is a serial bungler. He is the most incompetent member of this government—which is a big call. The Manager of Government Business over there is racking his mind, he is trying to think of somebody who is more incompetent—I am inviting him to nominate one of his colleagues who is more incompetent than Senator Conroy. The senator has this distinction: he announced 2½ years ago changes to the anti-syphoning laws and has been unable to present a bill to the parliament to put those changes into statutory form. This is quite remarkable. The parliamentary draftsmen, of course, are able to write bills on a few minutes notice, sometimes. But the minister has such a chaotically cluttered mind, so incapable of coming to a resolution, that we may well get to the election without any statutory enactment of the anti-syphoning laws. And no doubt a similar fate will befall the public interest media advocate and the public interest test for media takeovers.

We on our side of the House—and I say this with my friend the Leader of the Opposition here with me—are absolutely, fundamentally, irrevocably committed to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And when we talk about freedom of the press we mean, above all, freedom from government control. The biggest threat to freedom of the press, to freedom of speech, if you look around the world, is government. Government must be restrained so that it impinges no more than it has already on freedom of expression and freedom of the media in this country. Senator Conroy says he is concerned about concentration of ownership. What hypocrisy and humbug. Let us never forget that the transaction which created the concentration of newspaper ownership in this country and has been the subject of endless commentary in the nearly 30 years ever since was when the Hawke and Keating Labor government allowed Rupert Murdoch to buy The Herald and Weekly Times. That is a fact. That was what gave Murdoch the dominant share of metropolitan daily newspapers and that was approved by a Labor government—not by a coalition government, by a Labor government. So we have all this Murdoch bashing and 'down with News Limited' rhetoric from the Labor Party, but they created that domination.

While Rupert Murdoch's share of daily newspapers is no greater today than it was in 1986, when Hawke and Keating allowed it to happen, what has happened is that the share of the media pie represented by newspapers gets smaller every day. We have more voices, more competition and more diversity. Whether it is social media, whether it is all of the online publications or whether it is the dozens and dozens of channels on pay television, we have a more competitive and more diverse media than we have ever had in our lives. So to now suddenly say that we need a government regulator to impose an undefined public interest test on media mergers to ensure diversity is surely laughable and it will be seen for what it is. It is nothing more than an attempt to provide some sort of payback or retaliation to News Limited for their treatment of the government in their papers. And sometimes the treatment has been outrageous. I thought comparing Senator Conroy to Joseph Stalin was outrageous today; it was quite unfair.

Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Stalin.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The honourable members says 'On Stalin.' Everyone is entitled to their point of view. I would not go so far as to say that. I would say this: Stephen Conroy is not in the class of Joseph Stalin—

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise on a point of order. It is very clear in the standing orders and in the House of Representatives Practice that there are rules that go to statements that can be made of members of the other place—as the House of Representatives Practice would refer to honourable senators. I suggest that, given there is agreement for the resolution that is currently being moved, it would be appropriate if the honourable member would just return to the question.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I call the member for Wentworth and ask him to speak to the motion before the House.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The motion to establish this committee, which we are acceding to, has to be put in the context of this total mess of media reforms—or changes, the so-called reforms—which, as I have said, have been ill thought out and are being rushed through the parliament. The parliament is having a gun held to its head and is being told, 'You have four days to talk about these provisions and then you have to pass them or nothing will happen.' That is the threat that Senator Conroy has made. It holds the parliament and the people all of us here represent, both in the House and in the Senate, in contempt.

The reality is that if a senator or indeed any other member is unhappy with how they are portrayed on the front page of the Daily Telegraph they can always bring a defamation action and sue for libel. They have every recourse of the law. It is not the job of the government or any government bureaucrat to regulate the content of newspapers. There is a degree of regulation of broadcasters because they are using public licensed spectrum and that has been part of our media landscape for all of our lives. But the newspapers, whether they are on paper or online, have always been free of government regulation. Committed as we are to freedom of speech, we say that they should remain free. Those voices should remain free. We asked the Prime Minister in question time, 'What is the mischief, what is the problem you are seeking to address? Give us one example of some outrage that you think this new intervention is going to address,' and she could not nominate one—not one. So what is this? It is just the outpourings of a government that is obsessed with regulation and is determined to inflict some pain on News Limited because it has been unkind to the government—so they say. We would say that it has been thoroughly just in giving them the shellacking they deserve. We all have a view on that. But it is not the government's job to regulate newspapers and it should not be.

As far as concentration of ownership is concerned, I repeat what I said earlier, and it is an undoubted fact: there is more diversity in the media today than there has ever been in my lifetime. That is for sure: there is much more diversity today than there ever has been. The Guardian is about to launch an Australian online newspaper, a completely new paper. When did that last happen? That is an example of the liberating way in which the internet, this super platform, opens up so many opportunities for so many different voices. And of course that does not even begin to touch upon the impact of social media.

When Senator Conroy said that the threshold for media outlets to be subject to this regulation was circulation, readership or viewership of 50,000 I thought they were having a go at the member for Griffith, because he has more than a million followers on his Twitter account. But apparently they have to be paid subscribers, so the member for Griffith is not going to be subject to it.

Yes, we are committed to freedom and diversity. Technology and competition in the market have delivered diversity we have never known before in our lives and freedom of the press is as fundamentally important to our democracy as anything we do in this chamber or in the other place. The government is putting it under threat and it is asking the parliament to make decisions on these momentous matters in four sitting days. It is holding the people in contempt and we will not be a part of it.

Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would also like to speak briefly on the proposed establishment of the joint committee and the 18 items in the motion—in particular, item (1)(a), which relates to the reach rule for regional and local news. We have some process problems before this chamber tonight and this Joint Select Committee on Broadcasting Legislation is an example of that. The inflammatory language from the minister, with his 'take it or leave it' statement of a couple of days ago, adds to the problems that this chamber has to deal with.

The House of Representatives has a role to play in improving legislation. There are standing orders that establish a proper and due process for the consideration by the House of Representatives of all legislation. I am disappointed to hear the minister in question and the government trying to ram this through, leaving behind issues that are at the heart of this media reform package—and I refer to item (1)(a) of the motion, relating to the 75 per cent reach rule—which in many ways define either the success or the failure of the whole exercise.

The 18 points listed in the motion do not mention the fact that this is not a 24-hour committee, as we were told two days ago, but, according to the terms of reference, it will report by 17 June 2013. My initial inclination of yesterday, when I said publicly that the media reform package was all in or none at all, is where I now end up. In many ways, this motion gives the game up, as far as I am concerned. If we are waiting till June this year to address the key issue of how local and Australian content is going to be dealt with through the new media landscape and in response to the considered convergence review of the last 18 months—if we are just going to park that in a committee for four months—we are now not conducting media reform at all.

I will be damned if I will be part of giving some sort of licence fee reduction to anyone on the way through and somehow dress it up as a media reform package. We deal with it all, including the reach rule, as part of a media reform package. We deal with it with the national interest in mind. We do not get caught up in tactical games of the moment around who is going to do mergers and acquisitions in what businesses, or tactical games around which party is trying to do over which party in an election campaign, or trying to subvert the processes of this chamber and speed the whole process up with take-it-or-leave-it language, or failing to consult with all the many stakeholders involved in what is a substantial media reform package.

From a content providers' point of view, for the first time in a long time they are united in saying, 'We need to do more than is currently being done.' Writers, producers and actors are united in saying, 'This package is undercooked.' Yet you are asking us to rush it through in some sort of take-it-or-leave-it language and you are parking the critical issues of quotas, subquotas, local markets and how the Australian story gets told in the future. You are saying: 'Don't you worry about that. That will get resolved in the future. Let's just get a license fee reduction through and the rest will look after itself.' I will not be a part of that.

In many ways, the motion to establish this committee bells the cat. I know that is the cliched term in politics at the moment, but it does bell the cat that the hard intellectual work has not been done. This committee is going to do what the minister, the government and the consultation process should have done in responding to the very good work of the convergence review. So we do not have media reform on the table at all; what we have on the table is a committee that is going to do media reform and a government that is going to give a licence fee reduction—with the support of the opposition by the looks of it—and not much else.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the shadow minister and the member for Lyne for their contributions. However, I do want to respond briefly to a couple of comments that have been made. To the member for Lyne on the 75 per cent rule, in moving this resolution I have made it clear, as did the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in his announcement yesterday, that if there can be a consensus gained by the committee then the 75 per cent rule could be included in the general package of media reform legislation. That is one of the reasons why we have sought to establish this committee in a timely fashion and why I have brought forward this resolution to establish the committee here. The fact is that there were changes to the way in which the free-to-air networks had put forward their position during this process, a change to the advocacy that had been put forward to the parliament, I assume including to the member for Lyne, to members of the opposition and to members of the government. What this is designed to do is establish a process so that if there can be a clear resolution on a way forward then it can be dealt with as a part of this package of reforms. That is certainly the government's intention.

With regard to the issues raised by the member for Wentworth, I say with respect to the member for Wentworth that, with regard to the positions, if he has differences with elements of this package, at least advocate on the basis of what they actually are rather than on the basis of what some have interpreted or deliberately misled people to believe them to be. With regard to regulation, the model that is in the legislation that will be brought forward tomorrow is a model of self-regulation by the industry, funded by the industry. That is what has been put forward in the processes that have been established. There has been the Convergence Review, the Finkelstein inquiry and considerable public debate on this. The minister made his announcement with regard to the determination—and this relates to the question of the member for Lyne of, 'What next if they don't agree?'—and then it will be up to this parliament to determine its response. It is as simple as that. But one of the things that we have made clear is that, in terms of the public interest test, if there is not agreement by this parliament in the next fortnight, what we are not going to do is spend the entire period in the lead-up to the budget, and post budget, dealing with this issue. It will not be pursued. That is a reasonable position, in my view, for the government to take—that is, to be up-front about what the decision-making process is. And part of that process, as announced by the minister yesterday, is the establishment of this committee in good faith. I commend the motion to the House.

Question agreed to.