Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

That is a shame—I was just getting into that! On behalf of the Australian Greens I rise to make a couple of comments tonight on the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Broadcasting Reform) Bill 2017 and the related bill.

The Greens cannot support the bill in its current form. We believe that there are really two pathways forward. One is for some sensible amendments, to cut away schedule 2 and schedule 5. We have circulated amendments for those two schedules, which would give that effect. That is for many of the same reasons cited by Senator O'Neill: to preserve the two-out-of-three rule, and I will go into some of the reasoning why we want that preserved. The other is to remove the provisions that hand back—depending on who you believe—upwards of $60 million to the broadcasters, and I will also speak as to why we have an amendment to that effect.

We also recognise, though, that this is a very serious issue and that Senator Fifield has a bit of a job on his hands. It has moved rapidly, even since this bill was conceived and introduced to the parliament a couple of months ago. Since the bill was introduced, going back quite a way—and it has changed shape a couple of times, most notably late last week—we have seen the Ten Network go into receivership and we have seen Fairfax looking really pretty shaky, with enormous redundancies at those mastheads and serious questions being raised about the future of print media at all in this country.

Against these, admittedly, extremely serious challenges—and I do not think that there is anybody in this chamber tonight who would claim to have all the answers—the government has introduced what Senator Fifield has referred to any number of times as a comprehensive package of reforms. This is our first point of disagreement with the minister. This is not comprehensive: this is actually a fairly narrow set of proposals and the only thing that we can guarantee would be the case, were the parliament to pass the bill in its present form, is that there would be less diversity in the Australian media landscape than there is now.

In order to justify this proposition, the government is once again waving its hands and vaguely citing the internet as both the cause of current Australian media difficulties and the excuse to do nothing about the core issue of media diversity. At the same time, the proposed changes that we are dealing with tonight do not address the issue of increasing digital media consumption and the difficulties that traditional platforms are having in bringing in ad or subscription revenue to actually keep the doors open. Nor do they equip the sector with a framework to embrace the further changes to come. I suspect that is one point of agreement amongst all of us, no matter what our political points of view are in here tonight, that these changes are going to keep coming.

People will continue to access news media in different ways as convenient access, not just to local but to global forms of news media, become more and more ubiquitous. There is almost nothing that can happen to stop that. Those news organisations that are adapting and trying to keep ahead of the curve are the ones that are in the best position to thrive.

Unfortunately, rather than embracing that agenda, the government is continuing to push the same agenda that it has for the last 20 years, which is just basically an agenda of deregulation, enabling further consolidation in what is already the most concentrated media market in any democracy. Once again, the winners are some of the most powerful media oligarchs on earth. So, on the surface, this bill seeks to repeal regulations that are several decades old, introduced at a time when the media could really only be delivered by radio, TV or newspapers. The government maintains that some of these regulations are obsolete. I have some understanding, and I do agree—up to a point—that this is true for some elements. That is why we are not opposing the bill outright. I think that there are some pretty sensible and, certainly, timely reforms contained in here.

The government argues that search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook are increasingly the go-to sources for media consumption—huge US companies. In turn, they are both beneficiaries now of the vast majority of advertising revenue. That has been a huge transfer from traditional media platforms to digital. This is true; we absolutely accept that argument. But the government is not proposing any direct solutions to the challenges presented by this upheaval, and nor does it really acknowledge the fact that these are increasingly platform monopolies. I could only find figures from around 2015, but in excess of 90 per cent of search engine traffic in Australia goes through Google. This is not a Coles and Woolworths situation; this is as if Coles and Woolworths were to have merged.

It is similar with Facebook: in excess of 12 million Australians use Facebook, and the next-largest social media platform in this country is simply miles behind. So the increasing tendency for platform monopolies online is something that we think is a legitimate public policy question that could have been addressed in a bill like this, if the minister is going to continue to use words such as 'comprehensive'.

We believe that the strength of our public debate is undermined when people are hearing the news from the same one or two voices. That is the legitimate public policy issue here that I reckon we probably all agree on. But we are going to have some substantial disagreement tonight and in August, when this debate resumes, about what to do about it. Yes, the media landscape is changing—there is no dispute about that. And, yes, we need to ensure local content is being produced, that Australian stories are being told and that a more diverse and high-quality media is maintained.

But, again, this legislation does not address any of these things. It really does not. It moves to ensure that the government's media allies are in a position to lead their long-sought-after monopoly of Australian media; it provides for further collapse in media diversity. This is maybe not as far as some had feared; I recognise that Senator Fifield will address this, no doubt, when he closes the debate—that there are other rules in place that would prevent this collapse into a black hole where Rupert Murdoch basically owns everything. We are not arguing that that is the case; we are arguing that this is a partial fix that only guarantees there be less diversity by the time we are done than there is now.

Coalition governments have a bit of form in this matter. They have been striving to repeal these laws aimed at preventing media concentration since at least 1996. But it took them more than a decade to progress their planned increased media concentration. I think successive governments are very aware, because of the very tight and sometimes deeply unhealthy feedback loop between media organisations and the political class down here in this building, that the media proprietors have a powerful voice. I do not know how many people were here back in around 2012, when the then communications minister, Senator Conroy, was the last one who really tried to engage in meaningful reform through both the Convergence Review and the Finkelstein review, and it was as though the sky fell in. Before you knew it, Senator Conroy was being depicted as a dictator on the front page of The Daily Telegraph. You would have thought that Senator Conroy had proposed to nationalise the print media, and nothing could have been further from the truth. But these are very finely balanced political debates, and our usual method of getting our word out, through the newspapers, the TV stations and the radio broadcasters, is somewhat kinked when the very channels through which you are attempting to get your message out have a very large commercial interest in the outcome.

In 2006, the Howard government removed the main cross-media ownership restrictions, and that allowed TV, newspaper and radio mergers, and he introduced the two-out-of-three rule and the five/four voices test, which I acknowledge Senator Fifield is not attempting to play with tonight. They have since been striving to repeal the rest of the regulations, and until recently this push was kept at bay largely by lack of industry consensus: you could not do what Mr Murdoch wanted without enraging Mr Stokes, and so on and so forth. That was what kind of jammed up any attempts to change the status quo.

But here we are in 2017, and we find the situation has changed. Fairfax is being slowly suffocated by its own corporate masters and some of the decisions that they have made as they exploit public trust in those mastheads while starving the newsrooms and the mastheads of revenue from the more profitable properties. That is a commercial choice; it really has nothing intrinsically to do with the internet. In this environment, the government has presented a suite of enticements that appeal both to the commercial TV networks, in the form of removal of licensing fees, and obviously to Foxtel—the changes to antisiphoning. I understand that Seven West are not wild about the changes to the antisiphoning rules, but it was enough to keep everybody in the tent. So, if anything, this really is a package of assembled political fixes designed to keep anybody from throwing rocks from the outside. It is not our job in here as the Australian Greens—and, I would argue, as members of all political organisations in here—to speak for one or another commercial interest. We are here for the public interest. That is who put us here, and that is who we should represent at all times.

With this sort of cobbled-together set of concessions to various competing commercial interests—and, obviously, a showcase event in Parliament House—the industry reached a consensus to repeal all the regulations preventing at least a media duopoly in Australia. It is clear that the government's process for developing a comprehensive media package has involved nothing more, really, than finding enough to feed the dwindling number of mouths at the commercial trough—no offence intended to parliament's own trough.

Several media commentators have obviously raised the questionable timing of Channel Ten's voluntary administration. I am not actually prone to conspiracy theory, which is something that might surprise some in this chamber, but let's take a look at how the industry viewed the timing and some of the circumstances surrounding what just happened at Channel Ten. Dave Donovan of Independent Australia noted:

This happened after shareholders Lachlan Murdoch (7.7%) and Bruce Gordon (15%) refused to guarantee a new finance package—one that does not become due until December. There is no problem with liquidity at Ten—it has good cashflow and is paying all of its bills as they become due. In short, it is not insolvent.

Nevertheless, this voluntary administration, made during the second last sitting week of Parliament before the long winter recess, did allow Communications Minister Mitch Fifield to yesterday stand in front of the cameras and solemnly urge the Parliament to pass his new media "reform" laws.

Lucky timing, eh, Senator Fifield? Former Liberal Party staffer and Crikey founder Stephen Mayne said this on the ABC's 7.30 last week:

This is the most unusual administration that I've ever seen, where a company that is doing a whole bunch of things to fix itself and doesn't have to pay its debts back for another six months, and has only borrowed one third of the total amount that it can borrow from its banks, has pulled the plug and handed over the business to administrators. So it's very puzzling.

Repealing the remaining regulations will not reverse Google and Facebook's impact on the market. In referring to the coalition's recent media dealings, Associate Professor Tim Dwyer of the University of Sydney, in The Conversation, said:

The takeaway from this sideshow is a profound sense that Australia is a media policy backwater. The time-honoured political and media-owner manoeuvrings are a substitute for smart, citizen-focused policymaking.

That is what we get sent to this building to do. That is our job, surely. Associate Professor Dwyer calls for a comprehensive review of how media is consumed across old and new platforms.

Fortunately, that is exactly what is happening, just not in this chamber tonight. I wish that debate was being joined tonight. It is not, but it is happening in the Senate Select Committee on the Future of Public Interest Journalism and the Australian and Children's Screen Content Review. That is something that I want to address a little bit tonight. That select committee, which I kicked off with senators Dastyari, Xenophon and Lambie a couple of weeks ago, is the main vehicle for assembling these views about what a genuinely comprehensive package of reforms would look like. That is due to report a bit later this year.

If you look a bit further around the world, the UK's Ofcom and the European Commission have both made significant progress in monitoring, researching and updating voice pluralism policies. That is what we could have been debating tonight, but we are not. This is one template we could consider for Australia. Ofcom has reviewed the UK's ownership rules at least every three years since 2003, and their regulatory framework sounds pretty familiar to us. The current restrictions include a rule limiting cross-media ownership of newspapers and TV at a national level, requirements for the appointment of a regional TV news provider, and a rule for administering a public-interest test for mergers. The UK government, via Ofcom, have actively engaged with the rise of online news and rapidly changing audience behaviours, like large groups accessing news only via Facebook. Ofcom have developed a 'share of references' to compare news consumption across different platforms. That data is available to lawmakers, publishers and providers to help ensure that the public are being well served by the laws governing the media landscape in the UK.

The US too has had a process of structured media ownership reviews since 1996: the quadrennial media ownership reviews. The last two reviews in the US—2010 and 2014—have left key ownership restrictions, including on cross-media ownership, firmly in place. These markets are both obviously much larger than Australia, but there are some similarities, and one key difference, which I would argue is as a result of the rules that have been left in place: they are way less concentrated than the Australian media market already is. Yet it is in Australia, tonight in this parliament, that the government proposes to remove some of those remaining cross-media ownership restrictions.

The bill also proposes to substitute licence fees worth around $100 million in annual revenue with a tax scheme worth around $40 million. What are the taxpayers getting for their $60 million? Are we getting $60 million worth of new Australian content? Are we getting $60-million-a-year's worth of employment for new investigative journalists, expanded newsrooms or support for new media start-ups, subscription models or innovators? We are not getting anything of the sort. These elements, we know, were added to appeal to industry. They should have been debated separately, and I would have argued that they should have come with some concessions or some benefit to the public.

There have already been a number of reductions in licence fees for commercial TV broadcasters since 2010, under the former minister, Senator Conroy. The Greens have argued in the past that licensing fee reductions serve only the interests of commercial broadcasters, not the public. In 2013 we argued that broadcasting spectrum is not a free gift; it is a public good, it is a form of real estate that the public owns, and it comes with an obligation—or it should—to deliver Australian content. A decrease in fees should carry with it increased Australian content obligations. That should not be too hard to understand. The government is only vaguely promising to increase local content requirements sometime in the future with their content review. We will participate in the review, and it is good that it is happening, but there is nothing here in law. The pattern has been to reduce local content requirements in the past, basically arguing the same commercial imperatives that the broadcasters argued to get the licence fees eliminated.

Absent from this debate on this comprehensive media reform package is any mention of public or community broadcasters. A Department of Communications and the Arts discussion paper as far back as 2014 noted that any examination of media diversity in Australia needs to, obviously, consider the roles of SBS and the ABC. The paper stated that the national broadcasters:

… make a significant contribution to media diversity through their provision of television, radio and online services. This is particularly so for the ABC, the reach and depth of whose media outlets compare favourably to its commercial counterparts in most areas of Australia.

What are we seeing, though? We are seeing ABC and SBS being squeezed. They are having to cut services and funding. We were in an inquiry the other day about cutting short-wave funding. That is the tip of the iceberg.

Community radio broadcasters, which I would say are an essential part of a media ecosystem, also face a very uncertain future, with no assurance that funding will be provided beyond 2019. Their ongoing costs are less than a tenth of the discount that is being given to commercial broadcasters in this bill tonight. Senators Hinch, Xenophon, Lambie and I introduced a Senate motion today to increase funding for community radio to $4½ million for the 2018-19 financial year and to commit to this funding on an ongoing basis. That is what media diversity is. It is there; we just need to provide proper support for it.

The challenge of managing Australia's media landscape in the 21st century really needs a more substantial response than a couple handouts to the biggest players and, effectively, just ticking off their wish list. The government says 'the internet' when asked about diversity, but, when nine of the top 10 news media sites are owned by existing major media brands, it is far too simplistic. Let that sink in. The incumbents have basically shifted their incumbency online. Sure, there is diversity out there, but we are still in this transition where it is at the margins. The other thing, obviously, is that we have to ask when NBN penetration will be at a level sufficient to allow most Australians even to access these alternatives—certainly in the broadcast space.

What is the role of the ABC and SBS in Australia's media future? The package is cutting $60 million a year from the budget bottom line, and we are getting nothing in return, as are public broadcasters, community broadcasters or any of the numerous initiatives that are already being brought to bear in the future of public interest journalism inquiry. There are better uses for this money.

I told Senator Fifield last week and I will say it again to make sure it is firmly on the record: we recognise that things like the reach law are obsolete. We would not have opposed that being taken out. It has basically been completely overrun by radio broadcast over IP networks. We also recognise that, if we give this another five or 10 years, probably the two-out-of-three law will be obsolete as well. We would be prepared to talk and negotiate with the government, the opposition and the crossbenches with the two-out-of-three rule on the table but only when we have some legitimate options and incentives on the table for actually promoting and sustaining media diversity. What we have at the moment is one half of the package and not the other half. That is why I have been quibbling with the minister about whether this is comprehensive.

Something comprehensive, if you are willing to come back to this debate in the fourth quarter of this year, is what the future of public interest journalism inquiry is going to try to serve up. That has so far been a very collegial body of work and very collegial committee to be a part of. Everybody is taking part in that—government, opposition, crossbench—and we think that is going to serve up to this minister and to the Australian people a menu of options for genuinely sustaining media diversity in this country. When we have that in front of us, let's talk about the two-out-of-three rule. Not tonight.