Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

From five to 10 minutes per hour, sorry. I am just trying to read my notes. But we are not going to change the total amount of time per day that SBS can show advertising; it will remain 120 minutes a day. I have just checked, Mr President; I apologise. Currently, it is five minutes per hour, and we are going to allow SBS to increase that to 10 minutes per hour. Currently, they have to spread that 120 minutes over the day at five minutes per hour. We are—radically!—proposing that we give them more flexibility by allowing them to take advertising up to 10 minutes per hour while still keeping the cap of 120 minutes per day. That is the radical change that apparently is going to make the sky fall in! It is still under the cap of 14 to 16 minutes per hour of advertising that that commercial broadcasters can show, and they are permitted to show 350 minutes per day. Advertising on SBS, as I have said, will remain at 120 minutes per day.

Because this is a small, extremely sensible and reasonable change to SBS's approach to paid advertising, it is not going to raise an enormous amount of money. SBS say that it will raise around $28.5 million. I recognise that other estimates, particularly from the free-to-air TV industry, say it will be much higher, and I will go to into those in more detail. But, when you take SBS's figures, the proportion of their funding that will come from paid advertising under this proposal is expected to rise from 26 per cent to 28 per cent—again, apparently a radical change that is going to somehow completely change our broadcasting landscape, if you listen to those on the other side of the chamber.

Really, the only substantive argument that has been put by those people against this change is that, somehow, because the commercial TV industry are upset by this change, we need to listen to those concerns and not make the change. That is about the only substantive argument that has been put forward against the specific changes being proposed—that the commercial TV industry are not happy. It is true that some of them are not happy, and therefore I would like to deal briefly with some of the issues they have raised and dismiss the veracity of these claims.

SBS at the moment is not a mainstream broadcaster. It is a niche broadcaster, by definition. It is never going to earn large shares of our national audience; it is not intended to. The reason we have it is to provide services to Australians who may not—not yet, at least—be part of what would be broadly characterised as mainstream society, and it is a right and proper thing that we do that. SBS should be focused on providing services to those viewers, which is always going to mean that it will not carry or attract a great share or a great proportion of the viewing audience. At the moment, it attracts around five per cent of the national audience. That is not a figure that is growing in any great way, and I do not expect it to. That is not part of SBS's charter or approach. Its approach is to provide services to a niche section of our community, not to try and grow its audience like commercial broadcasters try, obviously. Because SBS only gets five per cent of the national audience and is restricted as to how much paid advertising it can show, it currently only gets around 1.4 to just under two per cent of the commercial TV advertising budget. The total commercial TV advertising market in 2012-13 was worth $3.8 billion and, in 2013-14, it was—

Debate interrupted.