Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Was it Patrick Henry who said, 'Give me liberty or give me death and I will die for your right to say what you want even if I violently disagree with you'? That is the nature of a free society—freedom of speech, and integral to that is freedom of the press. In recent times in this country we have seen an unprecedented attack on freedom of the press, motivated in part I suspect by a syndrome within this government of shooting the messenger. If they do not like the message, they shoot the messenger.

Sections of the press have been on the tail of this government because of things the government has done, not because of things the press have invented. The press have not created the stories around various things the government has done wrong. The press did not invent the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, breaking her commitment on the carbon tax. The press did not invent the cost overruns on Building the Education Revolution. The press did not invent the stories around the maladministration of the pink batts insulation program that tragically put people's lives at risk. This set of initiatives was born in part by that sort of malice and spite and wish to shoot the messenger. It came very quickly on the tail of what had happened in the United Kingdom when there were revelations around certain issues in the British press. I do not believe that the Australian press suffers from those same issues.

The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy claims that this has been in gestation for the last four or five years. There have been discussion and reviews over the last four or five years and then all of a sudden the cloud burst and we got all this. With a thunderclap we got this legislation. We are told it must be passed by the end of this sitting and we should take it or leave it. There is no negotiation; it is non-negotiable. There will be a two-day inquiry by the Senate and off we will go. This piece of legislation—if I put on my hat as chairman of the deregulation task force—has no regulatory impact statement attached to it. Surprise, surprise! Regulatory impact statements are meant to be mandatory for legislation. You can have an exception if it is okayed by the Prime Minister. We still have not been told by the minister, I think, whether he in fact did get the permission of the Prime Minister to treat this as an exception. Of course, when it is treated as an exception there is a requirement, within a couple of years when the legislation has been implemented, to have a post-implementation review. Do we have even a commitment to that? These are tricky technical points? No, they are not. They go to the essence of the accountability process of public legislation: that when you put up legislation you must rigorously examine the problem that you seek to deal with and the costs and benefits of different ways of dealing with it. Again, there is no regulatory impact statement, unlike with the last set of measures around these particular areas, in 2006 under the previous government, where there was a regulatory impact statement. Why the rush? Why hide the regulatory impact of this particular measure? There is no merits review in this package either, even though it raises some very important issues.

We have a situation here where the matter was discussed, I think, under the line in cabinet. I do not know how much time ministers had to look at cabinet submissions on this matter. They are quite complex issues. If you are given a paper in the room and told, 'Here, this is where we're going; read all about it,' how does that promote an appropriate cabinet process? What about the caucus being told, 'This has to go through, and here it is'? The caucus are treated with such disrespect. There used to be a time when the Labor caucus had great authority in Labor governments, including in the time of Whitlam. That was not always to the then government's advantage, but the fact is that the caucus had real authority. Here it is being used as a rubber stamp, and the cabinet is being used as a rubber stamp. This was a deal done between the minister for communications and the Prime Minister. Some people speculate that it was actually a distraction—that they thought at the beginning of last week, 'This would be a good week to do some media stuff, because there's all sorts of stuff around; there are polls around and all the rest of it.' That is not the way to treat the parliament, the caucus, the cabinet and, through us, the Australian people.

I have to say that I am also in possession of some information provided by Kim Williams of News Ltd; that particular organisation seems to have been particularly demonised by this government. That material talks about Senator Conroy, the minister, and what he told the ABC Insiders program: that his model was just like the Irish model. This is completely untrue, according to News Ltd. Under Senator Conroy's model, the government appoints the Public Interest Media Advocate. Under the Irish model, it is the Press Council of Ireland that appoints the ombudsman and not the Irish government. At the core of Senator Conroy's model, the government has oversight. Under the Irish model, it does not. This goes to another point: the governing philosophy of Labor in power, which is to put government at the centre of the economy. We saw this during the global financial crisis: Kevin Rudd repeated his mantra that he was going to put government at the centre of the economy—'Government knows best.' That is why we have so much regulation in this economy. Interestingly, Kevin Rudd had said the very same thing in his maiden speech: 'I will put government at the centre of the economy.' So here you have a situation where again, through the Public Interest Media Advocate, we are putting government at the centre of the economy in an area where we already have at least three other regulators of different types if we are talking about situations where there may be a takeover or a merger and all the rest of it.

News Ltd go on to say that under Senator Conroy's model Australian publishing companies are punished for not joining the Australian Press Council or a similar PIMA-approved body, as they lose relevant exemptions under the Privacy Act. Without these exemptions, journalists simply cannot do their job. Under the Irish model, publishing companies are rewarded for joining the Press Council of Ireland in the form of funding towards defamation cases. They have a positive incentive to join. If they do not join, there is no penalty, and Irish journalists certainly do not lose their ability to practise journalism. How far different is the coercive Australian model from that Irish model.

On the comparison that was drawn on the Insiders program by Senator Conroy with Finland, which ranked No. 1 in the world for press freedoms as determined by Reporters Without Borders, there are differences between the Finnish model and what is proposed in Australia. Finland has no equivalent position of a public interest media advocate. There is no threat to the capacity of journalists to do their job in Finland. There is an express right to free speech contained in the Finnish constitution. Finland also has an express source protection law. News Ltd argue that the Finnish model is very different from, and not a precedent for, Senator Conroy's media model.

Senator Bishop was right to say that the old media is changing under the pressure of structural change. We know that. We know the old business models are going, and many of these media companies are looking for new media models. We all know that, and the market will determine those models. What is happening out there is a proliferation of sources of information and a proliferation of people providing information. Just look at the explosion of the blogosphere and of the Twittersphere. Indeed, some of the visionaries in the internet space have argued about how this explosion of information creates a democratisation of information and a new troop of citizen journalists. The issue then becomes: if you want to have professional journalists providing, if you like, impartial advice and expertise in the analysis of important issues, who pays for that? How is that paid for? Ultimately you have to create a market to pay for that, and that is not something that governments can protect media companies from, nor should they seek to do so.

But this legislation actually seeks not so much to protect media companies as, it seems, to protect the government by having the Public Interest Media Advocate in the midst of the situation, creating a discretion which goes on top of all of the other forms of regulation around what are already very regulated sectors of the economy—except that, for the first time, we have the spectre of regulation of the content of newspapers, something which is unprecedented in peacetime. You would say it would be a very brave government that tried to go down that route, but why create the capacity to do that if you do not have in the back of your mind the possibility of using it, or of using it as a big stick to threaten companies and to say, 'If you really want to go on a campaign against this government then you should understand that we have PIMA waiting in the wings and they will come down on you like a tonne of bricks,' or, 'If we're not happy with the extent of self-regulation and the content of self-regulation, we have a capacity to come in over the top'? That is what this discretion is all about. This is what creates the uncertainty in the minds of journalists and media proprietors: 'How far can we go in getting out of line with the government of the day?'

We are all subject to the probings of journalists, and we all know how uncomfortable that can be from time to time, but the fact of the matter is that a free press is integral to our society, and I believe that this legislation crosses the line in how it seeks to treat the press, particularly the written press.