Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

The sentiment behind these amendments is important, but we cannot support these amendments, because they are unachievable. The MEAA, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, said: 'This is a major concern. We can't see where the revenue is going to go and how it is going to be directed to additional journalists or journalism.' The issue is this amendment does not achieve that accountability in any way whatsoever. The only way you could do that would be by deeper powers of inquiry for the ACCC, for example, to scrutinise the contracts. Amendments like these do very little or, in fact, nothing, or would even exacerbate or overemphasise some streams of revenue without even actually recognising where the real commercial interests lie. It is a naive interpretation of this legislation to think that amendments like these will fix this problem.

We've just had a big discussion about ranking et cetera that will, clearly, be a driver of revenue. There may not even be anything explicit, that you can identify, that demonstrates how there's been an uplift in revenue for one organisation versus another. It goes right down to the details of the deals that are done, and this kind of amendment does nothing to provide that transparency.