Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I share a lot of the concerns that Senator Murray has laid out, although I understand that there are a lot of sections of this bill that are correct—obviously the digital sections and the foreign sections; I have no real concerns with them. But I think the issue that people have a concern with is cross-media ownership. On the issue that eyeballs have moved: I agree that maybe eyeballs are moving, but they are moving to an unregulated format where the majors that are protected by legislation can move as well. They can move there as well, and they can be as active on the internet as anybody else who wants to be active on the internet. So, when they are deploying their assets and want to redeploy their assets, they are going to redeploy their assets to areas that are controlled by legislation.

No-one has a problem if the majors want to be big in the internet; they can become as big in the internet as they want. But the issue that everybody has a concern about is how big they become in the controlled mechanisms—which are obviously television and radio, because they are controlled by licences, controlled by the government—and in print, where they can exercise their powers. There is not free entry into and free exit from the print media. When there is an entry by a new operator into the print media, the majors have the ability to—and they do—predatory-price the person out of the market. There is always an extremely aggressive fight for advertising revenue on the entry of a new paper.

Those are the concerns I think quite a number of people have. They have them quietly or not quietly, but those are the concerns they have. There is so much in this bill that is good and there are so many amendments that have been attained that—as all pieces of legislation are—it is both good and bad. I know what the numbers are. Even if I wanted an amendment, I would not get it, because I know that Family First will be supporting all amendments, so the legislation is going to go through.

But the concern is that the responsibility of this place is to protect the freedom of this nation. That is first and foremost the responsibility of this place. There is a building, up the other end of the street from this building, called the War Memorial, where there are records of a lot of other people who protected the freedom of this nation. Their names are engraved on it. One of the essences of the freedoms they were protecting is the freedom of the media. If an overarching control by a couple of organisations were to develop—maybe it is not foreseen now; they say it is not going to happen, but if that were to develop—what is the power that we have to reverse it? What is the power that we are going to exercise to try and control that? It is incumbent upon this place to make sure that we do that. That responsibility rides above all other responsibilities in this place, because otherwise you are taking the sacrifices of other people for granted, and you cannot do that. So it is an issue of the protection mechanisms if we happen to be wrong—the protection mechanisms if, on passage of this legislation, in a couple of years time that brings about a virtual oligopoly or a duopoly in the market. What protection mechanism do we have? Where is it now? Remember, we will have to try and bring in that protection mechanism in the future, knowing that the person who monitors everything that is said out there in the public is the person you are going to try to take on. That person is going to be in an extraordinarily powerful position as the gatekeeper of information between here and the public.

Unfortunately, when we talk about the internet, the internet is not that powerful. There is not a whole range of people who tune in every day to watch what is happening in this chamber. We think there is, but there is not. They pick up the paper and they get an idea from that. They get an idea from the news that they watch at night. They listen to the radio when they are going to work or when they are stuck in the traffic. That is their primary source of information. If they want more, they may go to the internet. That is the secondary source. It is not only us who say that; it is also the view of the ACCC—