Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of answers given by Senator Conroy to questions from Senator Sinodinos and Senator Birmingham. I would like to point to remarks that Senator McKenzie has just made in relation to local content. I know that she is a supporter of local content and I would hope that, when she is talking about the new media reforms that Senator Conroy was answering questions about, she would be aware that in fact what these reforms entail is more Australian content on TV. It is actually Labor that wants more Australian content—not less but more. On the issue of PIMA, the public interest media advocate, that is not something that is new just to Australia. The US has had a public interest test under its communications act for almost 80 years. This is not some kind of new thing that only Australia is going to be restricted by some kind of public interest test—it is to the contrary.

I cannot quite understand where the coalition is coming from with any of this, other than to just drum up the usual fear and the usual frenzy that they like to get into. They like to get a headline and they like to get some kind of political point-scoring in this whole policy area. I think if we actually look at what is on the table here, there are some really sensible policy reforms for the media for the 21st century. I note that Senator Brandis admitted that he is old-fashioned. I am pleased he admitted he is old-fashioned because, in saying so, he acknowledges that he is not perhaps up with the 21st century way of communicating through various forms of media platforms.

We do have social media. It is an incredibly growing, highly used form of communication, not only for young people but also for members of parliament, for us as senators. There is a whole range of media, a whole range of NGOs, business—you name it—who are using social media. So, he may be old fashioned but he is just going to have to get with the times and realise that this is 2013. This is the way we communicate. Therefore, the ABC's charter and SBS's charter will need to be updated to include those kinds of online platform to the way they communicate because at the moment their charters do not reflect that. That is because they were written at a time when such online platforms did not exist. But they do exist now and therefore we need to do something about that. That is what these reforms do. They are good things.

I know the coalition talks about freedom of speech, and Senator Brandis was talking about being a libertarian and having libertarian values. I think it is a bit late for Senator Brandis to claim himself as a libertarian when he has certainly shown himself to be more of a conservative, very much so, than that. But he talks about free speech. We are all for free speech. No-one here is denying free speech. Free speech has been a mainstay of Labor. We in fact were the government that introduced the most significant pro-disclosure forms in the Freedom of Information Act. Since its commencement some decade ago we have removed the application fees, which the coalition used in government to discourage freedom of information to the press; we have introduced free decision making time for journalists to promote openness and transparency. Freedom of speech: we have runs on the board in this area. The coalition's 'freedom of speech' posturing is simply whipping up a frenzy, trying to turn the reforms that we have in front of us into some kind of political point scoring rather than looking at the detail.

Talking of detail, I am pleased that Senator Brandis brought the Finkelstein report into the Senate and looked as though he was referring to it, or reading from it, even though I know he does not like any part of it. He may have actually learned something through that process. We have been quite clear that we have not adopted all of the Finkenstein report's recommendations. We rejected the recommendation that called for direct government setting of press standards. We rejected that outright. That was the dividing line, I suppose, between government control and industry self-regulation, and that is why you have a really good set of reforms on the table that the coalition needs to get its head around and read before politically point scoring every single detail.