Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Community Services) Share this | Hansard source

There may well be thousands, but I suspect it is somewhat less than that. Imagine if I littered this speech with a bunch of profanities. In 10 minutes, if I wanted to adhere to Mr Ramsay’s record, I guess I could get 20 or so Fs in and maybe a couple of Cs. Imagine the outrage that would be heard around Australia if a member of our parliamentary team used that language in a chamber like this. It would be appalling. It would be outrageous. Why should we expect anything less from our public broadcasters? I use the term ‘public’ in the sense that they are free-to-air broadcasters. They have carriage across a great percentage of our population. We need to determine whether they are going to be a licence unto themselves in what they broadcast.

I understand perfectly that there are live feeds that may result in inopportune or unfortunate language or comments being broadcast but there is no excuse for gratuitous bad language to be broadcast repeatedly if it has no real bearing on the material being shown, in a relatively early time slot, and when it can clearly be beeped out or censored. I say this not because I believe in censorship but because I believe strongly that what we broadcast on our televisions has a profound impact on how we conduct ourselves, over the course of time.

I go back to the examples of the Sex Pistols, who were banned from British TV and Graham Kennedy who was banned from television, for much lesser offences 30-odd years ago. What is the next step? If we accept that the c-word is perhaps the most offensive within the English language, and that it is now okay to broadcast it after 9.30 at night, the next step is to be able to broadcast it more frequently, and at earlier and earlier time slots. This is what concerns me. We have seen the incremental creep of bad language into our society. We have seen a change in what is acceptable in our discourse with our colleagues and sometimes with our families and our friends. I take the stand that this is unacceptable in the public domain and I believe that we should streamline the process so that ACMA has a more efficient means of dealing with complaints to ensure that the broadcast standards are maintained.