Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, the interjection was: why do I hate Mount Gambier? It was such a stupid, irrelevant interjection and accusation against me that I want to respond to it. If you want to ask Senator Hanson-Young to withdraw the interjection then I will not need to answer it.

The TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN: Senator Macdonald, as I said, responding to interjections is disorderly. I have asked Senator Hanson-Young not to interject, and she would help the situation if she were to no longer interject. Senator Macdonald, in dealing with the amendments, if you want to deal with the broad subject matter, you can, but I would ask you not to respond to interjections and I would ask you to focus on the amendments which are before the committee.

Thank you, Mr Chairman. When you have stupid, irrelevant interjections like that, they have to be answered. I am sorry. They are on the record and they need to be answered, because I can assure you, Mr Temporary Chairman, that Senator Hanson-Young will have a media release out within half an hour saying, 'Liberal senator attacks Mount Gambier'. If she had listened, which she rarely does, she would have heard me say to Senator Xenophon just a fraction before that it was a lovely part of the world. I indicated that I was not terribly familiar with that area, but from what I have seen of it over the years it is a lovely part of the world. There are lovely people there. It is a very important part of the Australian regional economy.

But I am drawing the likeness to Senator Xenophon's attention. In Townsville, Cairns, Mackay and Rockhampton, which I am familiar with—and, I am sure, in many other parts of regional Australia—you do not need to regulate for this. If there are regulations—I am not sure that there are, but if there are—they are certainly not needed in those places, because again I repeat that the Channel Seven and Channel Nine affiliates, WIN and Prime or Channel Seven, actually compete for the local news, because it is good for viewer participation. Viewers do watch the local news. That attracts advertisers, and that, of course, attracts the businesses that run these organisations. I repeat that I am not familiar with the Mount Gambier area, but if there were a demand in the Mount Gambier area then one would think that the first people to know about that would be WIN Television, and the second lot of people to know about it would be the advertisers. If the viewer demand is not there then one would wonder why the federal parliament should be regulating to provide a service that clearly nobody wants.