Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

I asked people online what they'd like me to do with this bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021. You wouldn't believe it, but it seems that they're a lot smarter than we are, because, out of nearly 2,000 who responded, 70 per cent said they're opposed to this code. How is it that they understand what's at stake better than do the people in this building? Why does that not surprise me? When you are charging a business every time a customer enters their store, you're going to break that business. That's what this code does. Every time a person shares a news story on Facebook with their friends and family, Facebook has to pay. Facebook is paying for someone else's use of their platform—oh, dear!—a platform they're providing to that user for free. Something's not right here; it's not common sense.

Some people in this place have argued that we should support this legislation only if the ABC and SBS are included in the code. What a terrible, terrible idea this is. It will not lead to a cent of new money for the ABC or SBS. The only people who are able to decide how much money our public broadcasters have are those in the government. Every extra dollar from Facebook or Google only stays an extra dollar if the government were to let it stay that way. If the government were to decide that the ABC or SBS don't need the extra money, they just cut the budget—just like that. There's no difference between how much the ABC or SBS would have before and after the media bargaining code comes into effect. Do you know what would be different? Facebook and Google don't offer three-year funding certainty to ABC or SBS, unlike the government. So all we would be left with is public broadcasters with less funding certainty and no extra funding that are now reliant on two multinational corporations to cover their costs. We have hit a whole new low in this country.

This is the big win secured by the Labor Party and the Greens. Well done to you; great negotiators you are! In fact, Labor would have you believe that, if it weren't for them, this bill wouldn't proceed and journalism in Australia would be over. Well, I reckon you've done that yourselves. Labor would have you believe that they've delivered a bipartisan solution to ensure that journalism survives in Australia. Do you know what you've actually done? Please, just have a good think about it. I'll tell you what you've done: you've made the Australian media landscape more dependent on the success of Google and Facebook, not less. Great job! Well done! media diversity saved! What a load of rubbish. The Greens think they've secured a deal that ensures that every dollar that comes from this bargaining code gets spent on journalism. Oh, surely not! I cannot believe the Greens have fallen for this. This is biggest joke I've heard all day. Even the Greens have fallen for it.

Let's say that every day I spend $10 on lunch. You give me $10 now and say that the condition is that I agree I can only spend it on lunch. I say to you, 'Yeah, no worries. That's fine, mate,' because that is what I was already going to spend. But what do I do with the $10 I normally spend? I put it in my pocket and walk off with it. You think you've got what you were after, and I've got 10 bucks to spend on whatever I want. This is exactly the same situation the Greens amendment has put News Corp and Nine in. This is the extent of the protection the Greens have managed to achieve. This is it. Well done! Nice work! I'm sure that Australian journalists are sleeping easy this evening. The people who are going to pay for your big tax on digital part players are the people with no choice but to pay it: the ones who want to advertise on Google or Facebook. This is what is at stake, because the media companies don't pay to put their stuff on Google or Facebook, do they?

The ones who pay for the services provided by Google and Facebook are advertisers, and the average small business advertising on Google spends $30 a day on advertising. Do you know how much advertising space $30 a day will get you in the papers of News Corp or Nine? Let me put it this way: you had better get out your magnifying glass because you're going to need it. It's that simple. They know as well as any of us in this place do that they are not competing for those same advertisers because not every business has a lazy few million dollars to drop on wall-to-wall full-page advertisements in every edition of the local paper. For every JB Hi-Fi or, of course, Harvey Norman, which is flogging it out there—I'm keeping them alive at the moment—there are 10,000 small businesses doing their best to try to earn an honest crust, because that is all they can afford. They are not going to the newspapers to get in front of customers, because it's not cost effective to do so; it will take them out. They could get in front of their customers for pennies on the dollar if they were to go through the digital players. They're the ones whose prices are set to go up as a result of this code. The big news players don't care about that. They don't give a stuff about small business. Why would they? They have never done so before and they're sure as hell not going to start today.

For them, nothing changes. Google and Facebook created a new market for advertising that was targeted, cost effective and local. The news companies have invested precisely nothing in developing this market, but they still want some of the benefit of it. They say, 'Yes, well, it's our stuff on Facebook and Google that people are clicking on, and, if it weren't there, Facebook and Google would have fewer people visiting.' Okay. Does my Aunty Mabel get money from this code, too, every time she shares her cat video? Every time my cousin shares her famous recipes, should Facebook have to pay her for that privilege? I'm sure she'd love it. She'd love to be paid for her pies, I can assure you. These news companies have their own websites, where you can find all their news content whenever you want. If I want updates from Aunty Mabel, I've got to go to social media companies to get it.

Australia has a need for decent-quality journalism, and we are losing it at a rapid pace. But you can't slap together a popular problem and an unpopular company and say the solution to one is to shake down the other. The solution isn't to break the way the companies operate. For all the bluster, this is just a really bad idea done very badly. If you want Google and Facebook to fund public interest journalism, then it's simple; it's really easy. It's called 'tax'. One simple procedure: tax. This code amounts to a white flag in tackling tax avoidance. The real tragedy is that every payment Google and Facebook make under this code will be tax deductible. So not only are we not going to make Google and Facebook pay more tax; we're actually going to make them pay less tax. This just keeps getting better. Also, Rupert Murdoch and Peter Costello can cut themselves a fatter cheque. How about that? Look who's winning here. It wouldn't have anything to do with those political donations, would it? Of course not. I've got no doubt that the 200 subscribers to News Corp's latest streaming service, Binge, will be over the moon that their parent company can now afford to buy the rights to more American TV content. Yay! And shareholders of News Corp and Nine will be delighted that their dividend is about to be fattened up on the back of shareholders in Facebook and Google. How is that fair, though?

If we want more money for journalism, let's tax companies making heaps of money and put that money into supporting journalism—put it directly into journalism. If we want Google and Facebook to pay more tax, let's make them pay more tax. Let's say they do, and let's say there's an extra $200 million to spend. Who in Australia really thinks that the best way to spend $200 million is to give more money to media companies? Media companies need money—I get that. But you know who needs money? Everybody. Welcome to the real world. This solution to the problem of how to fund public interest journalism is totally unlinked to the extent of the problem itself. It throws a bucket of money at the problem at the expense of spending on it on any other worthy cause for time immemorial. If all it takes to fix the problem of funding public interest journalism in Australia is $100 million, why do we justify the overspend of the other $100 million that this policy will provide? Are we really saying that, even once the problem is solved, there's still no better way to spend money? Not ever?

It's a basic standard of how to do good policy to say that you don't provide an unlimited supply of money to fix a problem that doesn't require an unlimited amount of money to fix. This code delivers an uncapped value to news companies, completely divorced from the scale of the problem that we all acknowledge exists. It doesn't scale when the scale of the problem changes; it just slugs the end user for now—until this foolish and short-sighted policy meets its fully justified end. Between now and then, we all suffer. Some of the problems that are caused by this policy will be irreversible. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. If we spill this, it's staying spilt—it's that simple. It's finished. It's not cleaned up with a simple repeal. This breaks the media and it breaks the internet, and it does so permanently.

Everybody making their speeches has failed to offer a number for what it will take to fix a problem that we want to solve, because they have no idea. That should scare us. Nobody knows what it will take, so the squeeze on small business will just continue forever—all this because a few media barons decided we should start the squeeze. Maybe food-bank charities should just buy themselves the newspapers so you guys will start falling over yourselves to give them some money! This whole exercise has been so embarrassing. You're all so desperate for positive press that you're prepared to make bad policy the law of the land because you think it will make them like you.

Let me tell you what's going to happen next. News Corp is currently trying to make its own newswire service a profitable product. Currently it's competing with a non-profit alternative, the AAP. AAP is not included in the code. News Corp is included in the code. News Corp will get money from the code. It will be able to use this money to cut the price of its products. This will put pressure on its only competitor, a not-for-profit that currently provides news to, among many, the ABC and the SBS. If AAP is unable to compete with the only competitor it has, it will go out of business. It is that simple. If AAP goes out of business the only competitor available to take up its position in the market is News Corp. How convenient for Mr Murdoch!

Thanks to this media code, we're one step closer to having News Corp write copy for the public broadcaster. Thanks to this media code, we're one step closer to the public broadcaster being financially dependent on the private sector for their funding. Thanks to this media code, we're now making it more expensive for small business to get into the market and cheaper for large businesses to maintain their share of the market—all in the name of encouraging competition, huh? Is that what you call it! This is your competition policy—really?

This is bad policy done badly, for bad reasons and for reasons of interests. Anybody who supports a strong public broadcaster should oppose this legislation. The Greens and the Labor Party should be embarrassed with themselves. Seriously! Anybody who supports a free and fair market, operating efficiently, should oppose this. It is a shakedown. This is a bipartisan shakedown delivered by a consensus of absolute stupidity here this evening. Journalism is important enough to deserve better than the poorly researched, poorly understood justifications being thrown around by a political class that's desperate to be noticed by the people it's clambering up to serve. Great work, everyone here this evening! You've all made the same passionate speech as each other, all defending why you're supporting such crappy bad law. You're about to make a terrible mistakes, with both eyes open. You are displaying the same indifference as the major news players to the interests of the little guy.

The crime we're all apparently trying to correct with this bill is that digital platforms are collecting revenue from news stories they don't pay for. They're collecting revenue by selling advertisements. Revenue from those advertisements doesn't go back to the person who produced the stuff they're selling ads against. This legislation is so badly designed it would be like making Channel 9 pay for every Coles ad it runs during program breaks because Channel 9 has created valuable real estate in the form of a television program, just like Google has created real estate in the form of search results. Channel 9 makes money by selling advertising space against a television program, just like Google makes money by selling advertising space against those search results. To argue that Google should have to pay news companies for every dollar it makes against the real estate it produced from nothing is like arguing that people who appear in the evening news should be entitled to revenue the TV company collects by selling advertising between breaks in the 5 pm bulletin. Let's advance that and see how Channel 9 feels about that, shall we? Of course they'd oppose it. They'd say, 'That's not fair.' What part of that example is wrong, though? What is the difference?

The contributions to this debate have been full of people complaining about the practices of digital platforms. If you want to run a business out of town because you don't like how it's doing business then fine. But when you're gone it won't be journalism that suffers. We all pay the price so you can get a headline. What's more important and what's even sadder is that we've already lost enough journalists over the last five or six years. The people who are going to suffer more than anyone are those journalists right down at the bottom. You can guarantee that this revenue ain't going down to them. That's absolute rubbish. If you thought we had fake news beforehand, watch it come in spits and spats now. It's coming!