Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021 is a masterclass in self-interest from both the tired old parties. As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, my view is that this bill should more rightly be called the 'Getting the News Media On Side Before the Next Election Bill'. It's apparently co-sponsored by every party in this place that seeks to replace data based policy, fact based policy, with cynical political expediency and public gutlessness. The government has no place getting involved in a fight between the billionaires in legacy media and the billionaires in new media, yet it looks like that is exactly what our parliament is doing.

One Nation spoke with Google and we spoke with them again this morning, and it seems now that this matter has been resolved in private meetings with the government where assurances were exchanged. So Australia is now governed behind closed doors, and the people's house, the house of review, the Senate, is simply here to rubber-stamp what is put in front of us. One Nation does not own a rubber stamp. Our many reservations about this bill remain, even if Google has found a way to work with them. It's true that there are no clean hands in this debate.

When Facebook banned conservatives last year, the Left, or the control side of politics, applauded the move as the legitimate actions of a private company. Left or Right are useless terms; really it's control versus freedom. The Left likes to control. Yet, when Facebook banned Australia's left-wing news media last week, there was outrage. 'They're a public utility; they can't do this to us,' shrieked the left-wing commentariat. Perhaps Facebook got the idea of deplatforming from Channel 7 and Channel 9, who deplatformed Senator Hanson last year. Conservatives must now deal with the political Left and with a left-wing media that is so convinced of its own moral superiority that the suppression of dissenting opinions is now celebrated. The Left, the control side, have clearly not considered the norms they have created to destroy their opponents and that those same norms could one day be used against themselves.

Google is right on board with this agenda, demoting conservative websites in Google search results simply because they advocate values that everyday Australians still share and value. YouTube has cancelled thousands of conservative channels and demonetised many more to suppress our voice. Google has decided that conservatives and patriots are the enemy of their brave new world and must be silenced. Google propaganda is clearly on display in image search, where they operate to portray our world not as it is but as they wish it to be and judge that it should be. That is not their job. It's no surprise, then, that many Australians, especially on the conservative side, have left Facebook and Google. They had it coming.

Let me be clear: One Nation is a trenchant critic of the Orwellian nightmare social media has become. Our left-wing legacy news media, though, are no better. Some sections of the left-wing legacy media print very little material that could be described as journalism and a great deal of material that could be described as propaganda. The ABC spent two years conspiring with a foreign power to prepare a story that misled viewers as to the intent of One Nation's visit to the United States. We demanded the raw footage from the ABC to prove the story was manipulated, and the ABC refused. Truth and honesty are strangers to left-wing controlled media in this country.

One Nation is concerned about the small businesses this bill will hurt. Two examples are the Glasshouse and Maleny Country News and the Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspapersmall businesses that are resisting the takeover of country news by the media oligarchs and printing truth without fear or favour. These papers are not protected by this bill, which is only concerned with protecting large media organisations, who will receive extra money to continue their buy-up of country news. The National Party seem to be happy with this, once again turning their backs on their rural constituents to woo the urban bubble, marching to the Liberal wets.

Australian Associated Press—AAP, as most people would know them—are not protected by this bill, since their model is copyright based and this bill only concerns itself with financial outcomes. AAP, though, employ 80 staff, and their newsfeed supports 250 rural news organisations. The increased revenue from Google will remain with the legacy media services and not feed back to AAP. This might have something to do with the Murdoch news media's new wire service, NCA NewsWire. They are just waiting for AAP to fall over so they can have a monopoly on news wire too. This will lead to a further consolidation of news ownership in Australia and yet more power to News Corp. Labor are supporting a process that will lead to more power for Rupert Murdoch. Kevin Rudd will be upset, won't he! When TheBetoota Advocate sounds more like a real news site than an actual real news site does, Australian media must accept they are the agents of their own demise.

Television is also on the nose. The highest rating program on television since the Sydney Olympics was the Australian Open final way back in 2005, attracting 4.3 million viewers. The MasterChef final in 2010 rated 4.1 million. In 2020, the MasterChef final rated just 1.6 million—60 per cent less. Tentpole programming is attracting half the audience it used to despite Australia's growing population. When Malcolm Turnbull destroyed community TV 10 years ago, it was to force their million-strong audience back to commercial TV. That strategy has been a complete failure and must be unwound.

Print newspaper circulations are also falling. Listen to these figures, Madam Acting Deputy President. Over the last 10 years, the Herald Sun has gone from 550,000 to 303,000, a 45 per cent fall. One Nation's great friends at Brisbane's Courier Mail, who bash us, are down from 211,000 to 135,000, a 36 per cent fall. And, wait for it, The Sydney Morning Herald is down from 210,000 to just 78,000. That's a 63 per cent collapse. With a lower audience, our conglomerate media companies are in search of more revenue and now want to take Google's. Is this the business of the Senate? This bill demonstrates a complete failure to understand how the internet works.

Let me give you an example. A startup media company trying to establish a user base would submit their news stories to Google. In return, that company, that startup, would pay Google so much per click for every person who clicked through to the startup news site. News stories cost between 20 and 50 cents a click in the Google advertising network. Over the last 20 years, Google has sent seven billion visitors to Australian news sites who, in turn, have used this traffic to monetise by showing advertising and encouraging subscriptions. If the Australian news media were paying for their traffic from Google, this bill would run into billions. This relationship, though, benefits both parties equally. So the basic assumption of the bill that there is a power imbalance is simply wrong. It is false.

Legacy media could have opted out, at any time, simply by adding a metatag to their header advising Google and other search engine crawlers to not index a page, section or entire site. News sites are not using that metatag, even though they could, because they want Google to index their stories in order to send them more traffic. Rather than paying Google for that traffic, legacy media now wants Google to pay them. We're only having this fight now because internet search has reached the top of the exponential growth curve. The market has reached maturity, as have digital advertising and online subscriptions. The $18 billion advertising industry is now equally split between digital and real world, with little opportunity for significant growth in a post-COVID economy.

To read this bill, one would think that real-world advertising and digital advertising were interchangeable. That's nonsense. They're not. Online advertising is suited to short messages. Legacy media is still king of longer format advertising. For over 200 minutes of advertising consumed online, 300 minutes is consumed in the real world. Both have their role in the economy.

As with any maturing market, Australian media has narrowed ownership so much it has effectively become a cartel. This bill represents nothing more than the billionaires in the media cartel thinking they have more power than the billionaires in the social media cartel, and, with an election looming, the government has decided to pick a side—because Mr Murdoch picks sides and decides who wins. That is the history of elections, in federal parliament, in Australia. The Liberals and Nationals want that, and Labor can't afford to let them have it. That is a terrible basis upon which to formulate public policy and legislation. The Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021 is a solution in search of a problem and should never have come before the Senate.