Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to put forward the Democrats’ view on Labor’s motion to refer the government’s proposed changes to cross-media laws to the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee. Before I do so, I want to remark on how quickly technology and the market have moved and how important it is for media law and regulation to keep pace with rapid change. That change can often mean that, on media in general, we parliamentarians need to be thinking differently than we have. For many people, telecommunications and media have been seen as separate fields, but both are about the gathering, transmission and receipt of information. Telecommunications and media are absolutely intertwined and have to be considered in tandem.

For telecommunications and media, we need to establish what we think must be essential, guaranteed, affordable services available to all but the remotest Australians and enforced through legislated customer service obligations. For the rest, the market needs to be as free and open as possible. We need to distinguish between consumer needs and political or societal needs. Consumer needs are satisfied by a free rein being allowed for new technology and a maximum variety of product types. That is best guaranteed through few barriers to entry and through encouraging real competition.

Consumer needs are best looked out for by competition and consumer regulators—the ACCC and ASIC.  Political and societal needs, on the other hand, mean that we must promote a genuine diversity of economic, political and social voices, serviced by properly resourced and diverse information and news-gathering abilities. That is where a much stronger special regulator, the ACMA, comes in. We need to let the market run free in as many aspects as we can, regulated by the ACCC and ASIC, always provided that the Trade Practices Act is really strengthened. Where limited spectrum or channels or media voices are available, in return for having a scarce good we need to require regulation and enforcement of local content, editorial independence and a high level of news-gathering and current affairs capacity.

The Democrats will support this motion for three reasons. Firstly, we believe there is no doubt that the current government media policy is outdated. We need to work out where we need to be going. The current media policy does not allow open competition in the marketplace and does not provide conditions where sufficient diversity and independence of voices can be heard. However, we believe that the government’s media reforms as they are currently proposed have the potential to have a profound and often negative impact on our democracy and the ability of Australians to access a range of views and voices. The Democrats believe that the government are exaggerating the impact that the internet has on media diversity and that concentration of the market is inevitable under the government’s current package. In fact, I have yet to hear any credible commentator agree with the government that these reforms will not lead to a concentration of the media market.

If you want to hear a clear message on these proposals, listen to the stock exchange and the market. However muted the commercial media have tried to be in an attempt to keep this policy unopposed, the stock exchange movements and the analysts are telling us their real expectation—greater media concentration. The big will have more power, more profits, more concentration. And that is what the market says.

Change in cross-media ownership rules and lifting foreign ownership restrictions may notionally increase competition but in the way they are presently constructed the reality will be different. It will not, in my view, increase the diversity of views and voices. The reality, as the shadow minister outlined, is that the majority of people still get their views from traditional sources of media—predominantly television and newspapers. In November 2005, a Roy Morgan poll found that 48 per cent of Australians get their main source of information from television—which might be why they are not as well informed as they might be—22 per cent from newspapers, 19 per cent from radio and only eight per cent from the internet. The internet market share data from ACNeilsen shows that Australian content on the internet is now more concentrated than in the old media of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV.

Minister Coonan’s assurances that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will protect competition are worthless. I wish her assurances were true but in reality the Trade Practices Act is weak, it is out of date and it badly needs strengthening. If the Trade Practices Act was strong, there would already be forced divestiture in over-dominant media companies and more competition than there is at present. Instead, under the coalition package, big media business will get the chance to accelerate the oligopolisation of the media market.

Because of big business pressure, the coalition has not had the courage to implement the March 2004 recommendations of the Senate Economics References Committee inquiry into the Trade Practices Act. Those recommendations include: introducing effective divestiture powers; clarifying the meaning of a ‘substantial degree of power in a market’ and ‘take advantage’ in section 46 to overcome existing deficiencies; introducing a financial power consideration; and strengthening the ACCC’s powers to prevent creeping acquisitions. Those recommendations, if implemented, would give the Trade Practices Act real teeth and afford us enforceable protection from anti-competitive abuses of market power. If those recommendations were implemented you could loosen up the present media rules quite considerably.

Australian experience clearly proves that market forces alone will not guarantee competition or the service that we are looking for in highly concentrated or very vulnerable industry sectors. But I acknowledge that these TPA recommendations alone will not be enough to ensure diversity. The current view of a media market has tended to focus on advertising revenue rather than diversity of views and voices and on a commercial imperative rather than a societal imperative. The new media will also force policy makers and regulators to change the way they think about the media market, and so it should. In this respect Australia can learn from the United Kingdom’s use of a plurality test when considering mergers and acquisitions. There are critics of this approach. Some think it is not transparent enough and it should be a more open public process. But these are issues that this parliament should be exploring and they are issues that a good Senate inquiry would explore.

Regulatory powers are necessary safeguards for efficient, effective and diverse competition. This is particularly important where the government is introducing media reform changes in an environment where it feels politically vulnerable to vested interests and so feels obliged to be beholden to those interests. In many respects I feel sorry for the government. They are so frightened of losing power that many of them are going to act in this matter in ways which are actually contrary to their personal views and interests. They are going to react to big business pressure in a way which seems to suit the political self-interest but which does not address the national interest.

I also have concerns about journalistic independence, resources and editorial separation. I must confess that I have not been able to solve this one yet but one idea I have had is to require editorial independence mechanisms to be developed by the company to the satisfaction of ACMA and then be enshrined in the company charter or constitution and be subject to periodic independent audit. However, I am still thinking about that one, and that is the sort of concept I would like to see explored in a committee such as Senator Conroy is recommending.

On that theme, in 2003 the Democrats successfully moved an amendment to the then media ownership bill that required media companies owning television stations and other types of media such as newspapers to cede editorial control of their television news to an independent internal news editor. The aim of the amendment was to protect diversity of viewpoints, even if ownership in media companies was concentrated under the bill. The Democrats were successful in that debate, with an amendment establishing an independent editorial board to guide the editorial content of a cross-media company’s television station. The three-person board, which would include a journalist-appointed member and an independent chair, would have to ratify the appointment or the dismissal of a news editor. The news editor in turn would appoint the staff. The news editor, under the guidance of the board, would be responsible for the editorial content of news and current affairs rather than the media company.

However, those Senate amendments came to nought because the government abandoned that bill. The government have decided to abandon those amendments in this latest media reform package as well. I think this issue of editorial independence and editorial separation from corporate motivations needs to be revisited and investigated, because it goes to the heart of what I would describe as the political or societal needs, rather than the commercial needs of the corporations.

Our view is a simple one, and that is that further concentration of power in television and newspapers would be devastating to the society we want to see Australia enjoy. Democracy works best with a strong and diverse media: one that is unafraid to tackle big and small interests, whatever they are; one which has a resource base which enables it to do proper investigation; and one which is imbued with a public interest and is not just commercially driven and dictated by profits and by the particular views of the board. I would argue that these reforms as they stand—that is, Senator Coonan’s recommendations—only seem to benefit the coalition government. That is a situation Australians cannot afford if this is a government that believes that it already has a stranglehold on the federal parliament and will continue to have that stranglehold. It is important, therefore, that these issues are properly examined.

The second reason we support this motion is because we do not trust this government to give the parliament adequate time to analyse and scrutinise the media reform legislation once it is introduced into parliament. Since the Liberals and the Nationals have had control of the Senate, the role of the Senate in scrutinising legislation has been negatively affected. I will remind the chamber of some of those abuses. A motion moved on 6 September 2005 to allow a Senate committee to inquire into and report by 10 October on the very complex legislative measures of regulation, licensing and funding attached to the sale of Telstra was opposed by the government. It was instead replaced with an amendment for a one-day committee inquiry. Senators had to start the second reading debate five minutes after the bills were introduced without having sighted any of them and before the Senate inquiry had begun. The public had less than two days to be fully across all the potential issues or implications in the bills, make submissions to the inquiry and appear before the committee. The committee and other parties had the weekend to write the reports. The chamber had two hours to debate amendments—which, I might add, were not actually debated because government members asked dorothy dixer questions. It sounds familiar to us all these days.

The government’s behaviour on the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005—a significant bill which, in my view, attacked the rights and freedoms of all Australians—was not much better. The government moved without warning, late on the afternoon of Thursday, 13 October 2005, a motion to refer the proposed antiterrorism legislation to a committee for a one-week inquiry. A subsequent delaying move by the Democrats forced the motion to the next sitting period and the government accepted the slightly later reporting date, which was 28 November 2005. The bill itself was guillotined through the chamber over two days, with a total time of six hours of debate. Similar abuses of Senate process and scrutiny occurred for the Work Choices, Welfare to Work and voluntary student unionism bills, just to name a few.

If there are any Queensland listeners who either voted for the coalition or put their preferences in such a way that it benefited the coalition and knocked off my colleague Senator John Cherry, this is what you achieved. If we had had Senator John Cherry in this chamber and the coalition did not have the numbers delivered in Queensland, this would never have come to pass. That is the effect when you allow the government to dominate this chamber. Given the government’s recent and autocratic track record, we in the non-government seats are concerned about potential threats to our democracy and public policy and need to be sure that the government would give due process to scrutinising media reforms. We do not have any faith that that is likely to occur. That is the second reason we support this motion.

The third reason we support this motion is we think it is about time the Nationals followed through on their words and their various media assurances. Some Nationals members have, I think quite honestly, expressed concerns that concentration of media will result in generic programming and a lack of local input, may push up advertising rates in regional areas, may reduce the sort of media service which they get at present and will damage small business as well as the community in the process. Here is a chance for the Nationals to have a Senate committee examine these and other concerns. Personally, I am bit sick of the hype that the media give the Nationals on these issues when, in the past, they have often failed to deliver. When the Telstra sale was under way, the Nationals were so busy haranguing Senator Joyce and trying to present a unified conservative front with him being painted as a maverick that they missed their chance to come through with a very strong negotiation on the sale of Telstra. It was only a lot later that as a group they finally realised that a more independent stance was in their interests, but that was after the deal was done.

For all their talk on getting a great deal for regional Australia, they failed in important respects. With the sale of Telstra, the Nationals squibbed a golden opportunity to insist that the Trade Practices Act be strengthened with antitrust powers and to attack the issues of creeping acquisitions and section 46 deficiencies. That reform alone would have curtailed excessive media and excessive telecommunications power. They did not even have to do the work, because the Democrats and Labor had a host of amendments that addressed the industry’s and the regulator’s concerns. The Nationals also failed on broadband. In the 21st century one of the most important delivery systems of media content is the internet, which is why I say telecommunications and media are absolutely intertwined. It provides access to the most diverse range of media content, but rural and regional Australia will miss out on this access because of the lack of telecommunications infrastructure to deliver high speed broadband access.

When the Nationals sold Telstra, instead of negotiating that rural and regional Australia would be able to access video on demand, video streaming and audio streaming from down the street and around the world, most rural centres will be unable to even get a public telephone. It is a pity that nobody advised the National Party that telecommunications is the way to deliver media diversity in the 21st century. That is a shame, because I think the Nationals’ hearts were in the right place but their political heads were not at the time. All they could see was that Senator Joyce was being a maverick, when in fact his independent voice was saying, ‘This is a way in which we can exercise some meaningful power.’

If we are to have a fair and open society, this government must pursue policies to increase diversity of views and voices. It must improve use of and access to new technology, such as digital and broadband; it must ensure open access to media content; it must ensure that there is an adequate level of local and Australian content; and it must protect the independence and freedom of journalists and the media. Failure to protect diversity of viewpoints is a failure to protect the necessary public debate that makes our democracy function—and, as Democrats, we intend to fight hard on this issue.

Before I close my remarks, however, in case everyone listening thinks I have been unfairly hostile towards and critical of this overall package, I would say that it does have one major redeeming feature, and that is a recognition that we cannot persist with the present media regulation and policy. It is outdated and it needs to be addressed. I do not think that any serious person examining this area would think otherwise. That is another reason that we should be supporting this ALP motion. I would not mind at all if the government were to suggest improvements to the motion. That is not the issue. The issue is how we devise on a cross party basis a media policy which is genuinely in the national interest instead of a media policy that is promoted by just one side of politics and will be pushed through to the great misgivings of all the other political players who are not part of the coalition.

For those reasons, I do support the Labor Party’s bid for a comprehensive inquiry into cross-media reforms. I hope those many Nationals and some Liberals who feel concerned about the direction this is going in will apply some internal pressure to perhaps recognise the wisdom of going down an inquiry route and coming to more consensus and a better compromise on this proposed package.