Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Conroy for the question. The government has absolutely no plans to weaken media laws—let me make that perfectly clear. So the premise of Senator Conroy’s question is entirely false. The government is proposing to reform the media industry in the interests of consumers. What we have decided will be appropriate is to ensure that there will be strenuous safeguards to prevent concentration of ownership. That will be secured by the number of voices not being able to fall below five in a metropolitan region and four in regional and rural Australia, bearing in mind that there are very few markets that will qualify for that particular voices test.

On top of that, the ACCC have a mandate to ensure that no mergers infringe the competition principles of substantially reducing competition in a market. The ACCC have put out a paper issuing guidelines as to how they will approach media mergers, and it very clearly says that they will be looking at whether it also includes matters such as advertising revenue and what will be a market, and they propose to take into account news and opinion. It is important to understand that the only media rules that will be affected will relate to the regulated platforms of commercial television, commercial radio and print. They certainly will not relate to pay television, to out-of-area newspapers such as the Financial Review and the Australian, to the internet or to the ABC. No matter how many mergers there are, there will still be other additional outlets.

People can run around and make all sorts of scurrilous comments about this. Mr Keating was doing that last night. The media laws are 20 years old. They were fashioned last century, when the internet had just been invented and when it was all about academics, when IPTV had never been thought of, when the streams of content you now get over mobile phones and the internet had never even been dreamed of. Mr Keating came out from somewhere because there is a total absence of any policy on the part of the Labor Party. The best they can do is to trot out a former failed Prime Minister with a 20-year-old policy and suggest that is the way for the future. We have to ensure that consumers are able to take advantage of all the new services that this media package will enable.

This media package is all about consumers. It is all about providing benefits to consumers. Why should Australian consumers be worse off than consumers right around the world who are able to access these services? It is important that Australian media can grow and invest. Subject to the appropriate safeguards, which will look after diversity, these reforms will move Australia into the 21st century.