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

An entire month for the public to consider it, let alone the parliament to consider it, when Senator Conroy is announcing to the people of Australia: 'We're going to regulate the media, we're going to set up an effective licensing regime for journalists and we are going to give you eight days to think about it.' If you actually raise any questions, if you dare to express a concern about the regulation of journalistic behaviour, then the government will not listen to it because Senator Conroy, wise as he is, has made his decision. This is a vehicle for regulation.

The Labor Party will obfuscate and try and muddy the waters by asserting in Orwellian tones: 'This is not regulation. We're not licensing journalists.' Yet when every significant media player in this country, whether it is Business Spectator, the Fairfax press, the ABC or News Ltd, is saying what a chilling effect this will have on the independence of the free press we know what the real impact is. This government, to its credit, has never, with its Greens cousins and allies, hidden its agenda. You dare criticise them and they will come after you, except if you happen to go skiing at Aspen, or wherever Senator Conroy went skiing and halved the licence fee. Apparently that is not doing a deal with a media mogul, but imagine if it happened elsewhere. I should say, before he corrects the record, it was snowboarding and not skiing.

This is a threat, because what we have is a threat by the government to use the power it has to pass laws to provide extra regulations for journalists and press organisations if they do not comply with what the government deems to be an appropriate regulatory mechanism. That is the gun to the head of an independent media. The other side rightly quotes the shield laws. We rightly have long had special rules and principles for a free media. They are not called the fourth estate for nothing, because even though we will all be criticised by them they play the most valuable role in a free democracy. Freedom of speech, along with freedom of property and freedom of religion—two other rights under threat by this government—is the very basis of a liberal democracy. Freedom of the ballot came along after we had freedom of speech and people could demand it. But that is not good enough for this government. That is not good enough for Senator Conroy, who seeks to regulate the behaviour of journalists, because they have been critical of a government that deserves it.

I could not go past this debate without a couple of Orwellian quotes. In Animal Farm there is a famous character called Comrade Napoleon. If it were parliamentary I would refer to him as Senator Napoleon, but that would not be parliamentary. Comrade Napoleon says all animals are equal. He goes on:

He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

We would be in a free and liberal society which is under threat from Senator Conroy's vindictive measures.

Question agreed to.