Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I shouldn't have taken that interjection, but unfortunately I did! But to read out members and senators' media releases and to say that that actually counts as local content—that is appalling. What this bill has done is incentivise those that have employed locally and have maintained that local journalistic commitment to the community. They will receive a points incentive. The regional broadcasters argued that the proposed inclusion of the three-point category for local content would not lead to a reduction in local content, as some others argued, but was indeed something that they very much supported. Prime Media Group said:

…we have committed to a local news bulletin in Western Australia, where we had no licence requirement to do it, says that we are not looking to cut back the amount of local content. We would much prefer to produce more local content.

Again, Mr Lancaster from WIN said:

From a practical perspective, if you as a broadcaster are going to go to the trouble of putting a cameraperson or a journalist … into a market to capture that footage to be locally relevant, why would you give it a reduced amount of time? It is good content. If you are going to invest in the capturing of that content to get that video content, you would not reduce the amount of minutes …

It doesn't make practical sense to those people involved in producing local content that the points system, as envisaged by the legislation, would result in a reduction of local content.

I also want to touch on the negotiations that seem to have been going on around this particular piece of legislation. I note Senator Hanson is in the chamber, and I recognise her support for the ABC rural and regional advocacy bill changes. In exchange for her support for the ABC media reforms, Senator Hanson and One Nation have seen the value in having a change to the ABC's charter, for it to reflect what community thinks it should do. That is: it should have a specific obligation to reflect the geographic diversity of our nation. She sees the value in having two people from rural and regional Australia with embedded experience on the board of the ABC. She sees the value.

Senator Xenophon and I worked on his short wave bill, and we went up with Senator McCarthy and Senator Urquhart to Darwin to talk to the Northern Territory community about the ABC's decision to cut broadcasting through short-wave technology to those communities of the Pacific and northern Australia. It was simply because the board did not consult with the communities affected, and the amount of information given to the board to make that decision was appalling. I would recommend the committee's report into that. Senator Xenophon is very concerned about that particular issue, and he knows the importance of the ABC consulting and having an advisory committee from rural and regional Australia on which to test their ideas around service delivery and the type of technology being used to service regional communities.

Finally, there are just some simple changes to the annual reporting of the ABC around staff and where they are located, to ensure that the ABC is delivering for regional communities. I would encourage and thank Senator Hanson for her support, particularly for those measures in my private senator's bill; I appreciate that very much.

The regional Australia media market is about our people telling our stories to our community—to live amongst us. And this suite of measures, aside from the gambling advertisement issues, sits around the review of children's content and removing and making sure the ownership laws of our media market actually reflect the reality of the 21st century. They give our media owners the flexibility to be nimble and innovative. It is an incredibly tough, disrupted environment out there right now.

In a liberal democracy like ours, you need a multitude of voices for the citizens to consider. Look at the public spend of local governments—and this is one of the issues raised in my private senator's bill, but it is instructive for this particular debate. When you look at the amount of public money being administered by local councils, often the only overseers, the only ones actually examining that spend and the decisions of local governments across this country, are newspapers like the Benalla Ensign, the Riverine Herald up in Echuca and what they look at with the Campaspe Shire, and the Bendigo Weekly, looking at how the Bendigo council administers its funds. It's very important—fundamental to the secure functioning of our democracy indeed—that we have a robust, diverse, sustainable local media.

I think our reforms are very thoughtful. The minister has widely consulted to ensure that the reform package being delivered here to the Senate tonight, and hopefully to be supported by the Senate this week, will deliver on the promise for Australia. We don't want to be a nation where American TV companies own our regional broadcasters and own our big broadcasters, where we have a diminishing amount of broadsheets available and everything moves online. It is rural and regional communities, and indeed the broader community, who will suffer. I have gone to the heart of ensuring that local production and local content is important.

The New South Wales Farmers' Association, in their submission on the bill, wanted to look at concerns around the footprint, expanding what definitions around 'local' entail. I know that ACMA will be looking at that. The New South Wales Farmers' Association wanted to request that ACMA be diligent in ensuring effective compliance activities in policing local content. They also recommended that consumer protections in voice and data and telecommunications be upgraded to ensure that regional people have equal access to both voice and data, because, as the media environment changes, it will be more and more important that all Australians are able to access a variety of media voices using a variety of technologies. Right now, in regional Australia, we are going ahead in leaps and bounds. The over 750 mobile phone towers that the coalition government has delivered to regional Australia are going a long way towards that. But the Productivity Commission's USO paper and indeed the government's deliberations around the universal service obligation will go quite deeply to how regional Australians will be able to access news content and information.

I did have a lot more to say around how ACMA can work with regional Australians' online footprint and ensure local content, but I know there are many other senators who need to speak on this. I commend all those who submitted to the Senate inquiries into this issue over a long period of time. I commend the minister for having a suite of arrangements which try and strike a balance between ensuring our media environment is forward looking, where our media owners are able to be nimble and innovative enough in this 21st century to deliver the content that we need to function, but also ensuring that they are financially sustainable going forward and that we have some rigour around the journalists who keep us all honest every single day of our lives in this job—and you wouldn't want it any other way. I would just like to see it across all levels of government. I commend the bill to the Senate.