Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy, announced legislation from the government which I think is no more than an attempt by this government to limit free speech. Freedom of speech is the most fundamental right in a democracy and it is one that we must all work to preserve at all costs. Of course, Senator Conroy is no stranger to controversial legislation. He is the minister who brought us—or, rather, some of us—the NBN, the botched Australia Network tender and, in a similar vein to this legislation, the dodgy internet filter.

Under this legislation Labor is proposing wide-ranging so-called 'reforms' that will regulate the media in Australia in a manner never before seen in this country. There are two key parts to this oppressive approach to government regulation. The first is a new public interest test to determine the future of proposed media mergers. Australia already has laws to protect diversity of voices, promote competition and prevent market concentration. These laws were passed in 2002 and protect diversity of ownership and diversity of content and preserve diversity of reach.

Obviously, technology has changed since 2002 with the growth of online services, so it is effectively impossible to limit the reach of online news services as provided under the cross-media ownership rules. But of course, on the net, diversity is just a mere click away as the user can access an endless number of news services from all over the world and so is guaranteed a diversity of opinion.

The existing cross-media ownership laws provide that the percentage of the market which can be reached by any one company in various combinations of delivery platform is 75 per cent of the population, thus providing diversity of ownership in various mediums around the country. However, as I said, freedom of speech remains the key public interest test of any kind of legislation to do with the media. Licensing introduces a factor of potentially undesirable government control, which might mean that if the editorial policy of the media concerned was not considered favourable in various degrees by the government of the day, revision of content might be required. Another word for that is censorship. So why is a new opportunity for political interference in media ownership needed? And what additional protections will this legislation provide? Senator Conroy will not even provide the form of words he plans to use to explain this, much less any rational arguments for this proposal.

The second part of this government attack on free speech is a new bureaucracy, the Public Interest Media Advocate, who would be appointed by the government of the day to oversight of the Press Council. You have to ask: why is this necessary? The Press Council is doing a very good job. The government seems to have taken a particularly warped view of the recommendations of the Finkelstein review, one of which was to create a news media council.

The bills that we are considering were referred to a committee last Thursday. Although the reporting date for the committee's findings is not until June, Senator Conroy is insisting that the legislation be passed by the end of this week. It is a move that reportedly has shocked some of his fellow Labor members who apparently want a full and open debate on this legislation—surprise, surprise!