Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I think I am being unfair to Lebanon, Senator Ferguson. But in Sydney and Melbourne the number of owners could halve. In places like Albury, Dubbo and Bundaberg the number of owners could fall from six to four. These changes will undermine media diversity. Newsrooms will be merged, reporters will be sacked and local content will be reduced. Radio and TV news will just become a rip and read of the local newspaper. In regional Australia, local stories will be squeezed out by cheaper content from the big cities. These changes are demonstrably not in the public interest. To give credit, there is at least one member of the government on whom what is going on here is slowly dawning. It is, in fact, Mr Paul Neville, the chairman of the backbench communications committee of the government. This morning he went on radio and he said that, philosophically, his position is very similar to Paul Keating’s. He said, ‘We have to start considering why we are doing this.’ That is the trick. Why are we doing this?

He went on to say that you could not argue that there was not the potential for an interventionist proprietor or for a zealot editor to run a totally single stream point of view in a particular community. That is what he told ABC Radio. I think that I have almost unanimous support from National Party members and rural Liberals on this issue. I do not think there would be one who would disagree with me that we need to have a more vibrant local media and more vibrant local programming. As Stephen Bartholomeusz said in the Age today:

Unless there are new entrants, new competitors and new and compelling content, where is the trade-off for less diversity of ownership and content?

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