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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

Yet again, we have a minister who has lost touch with reality—Senator Coonan. I know it is hard to tell, Senator McGauran, listening to the drivel that we have to listen to in answers to questions, but we have a minister continuing to deny the undeniable. Everybody in the media industry understands what is going on in the marketplace today as we speak. A merger frenzy is building. PBL has generated a war chest. Kerry Stokes has launched a raid on the West Australian and today there is news that a mystery buyer has snapped up a strategic stake in Fairfax. The investment bankers and lawyers have been called in and the plans to carve up Australia’s media sector are being drawn up. The minister claims that everything that is happening now is happening under the existing laws. This is just treating the public with contempt.

Is the minister seriously claiming that it was just a coincidence that James Packer and Kerry Stokes made their moves when it became clear that the legislation would get through parliament? Does she think that Kerry Stokes would have moved on the West Australian if he did not know that it would be up for grabs next year when the new laws are proclaimed? For the past few days the minister and the Prime Minister have been wandering around feigning surprise, pretending that the speculation about a wave of takeovers comes as a shock to them. The very purpose of the media ownership legislation was to facilitate a massive consolidation in the industry. The minister said that the industry had to be free to realise economies of scale. That was the minister’s statement. The floor of five voices per market in the city and four in regional Australia was set deliberately so low as to allow these takeovers to occur. The explanatory memorandum stated that the cross-media ownership changes would allow companies to generate reductions in expenditure. This was always just code for media takeovers that would allow newsrooms to be merged, journalists to be sacked and local content to be reduced. Today we had the Prime Minister on radio claiming that we have to accept concentration because we are just 20 million Australians. The truth is that the Australian media sector, with the existing number of players, is tremendously profitable. Cross-media mergers are not needed for the viability of this sector.

The other great furphy being peddled by the government is that the new media laws are friendly to the consumer. What nonsense! How could a dramatic reduction in media diversity be in the interests of consumers? The minister has talked up the modest improvements in digital television in the package as a great win for consumers, but the claim that Australians need to sacrifice media diversity in order to enjoy the benefits of digital television is a complete red herring. No other government in the developed world has asked its citizens to make such an absurd trade-off. In truth, the digital package is not focused on consumers at all. It is a carefully crafted set of compromises designed to placate the interests of the big media players. Let us look at the rules for multichannelling, for example. Under the new laws commercial broadcasters will be allowed to run only one extra digital channel in high definition until 2009. HD equipment is available in only five per cent of households and is at least three times more expensive. But the best summation is in the editorial of today’s Australian. It says:

Whatever the outcome, Senator Coonan should be ashamed of herself. By protecting the free-to-air television owners from real competition, Senator Coonan has delivered them a free run at the nation’s print assets and in the process managed to reduce overall diversity and, most probably, the quality of Australia’s print media landscape.

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