Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

If we on this side are going to be accused of baying and howling in defence of freedom of speech, I plead guilty. For the modern-day Labor Party to come in here and say this side of parliament is trying to take care of media moguls, given their own history, shows the bankruptcy of their knowledge of their behaviour when they were last in office. Everyone here remembers what the Labor Party did to the Herald and Weekly Times, Australia's largest and oldest media group, and it was referred to on Melbourne radio this morning. Because the Melbourne Herald held Labor to account in 1984 and because it attacked Labor for introducing a pension assets and means test which Labor had promised not to introduce, Paul Keating went out and made sure Labor fixed the Herald and Weekly Times. He changed the law to create the so-called princes of print or queens of the screen, all as a means to go after the then independent Herald and Weekly Times, which was the owner of most of the popular mastheads in Australia. That has been preached about by Labor Party luminaries. That is not a secret, so the Labor Party's behaviour about appeasing moguls and trying to buy favours is well established. And Australia, as many people have said for a long time, is at a loss for the loss of the Herald and Weekly Times. Everyone who worked there will tell you what it was about: it was about Labor going after the independent Herald and Weekly Times because they dared oppose the Hawke government and were holding it to account for breaching a promise.

Senator Conroy's hypocrisy here is equal in doses to what we have had from every other Labor speaker. This is something Senator Conroy said in 2006 and it was tweeted today:

Helen Coonan's announcements today represent an arrogant Government that's ramming through the Parliament the most significant changes in 20 years, and they are only going to allow one month of consultations for the public, despite them spending 12 months having private consultations with all the media moguls.