Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. I refer the minister to her comments on Lateline last night claiming again that the new media laws will not result in a wave of takeovers. Has the minister seen reports than an unknown investor has gobbled up between five and six per cent of Fairfax? Given the activity by James Packer and Kerry Stokes, does the minister now accept that the media moguls are about to snatch and grab a host of the most influential media assets as soon as her new laws are proclaimed? Isn’t this the outcome that the government’s new laws were designed to achieve? When will the minister stop trying to deny what is clear to every observer in the market? Isn’t it the case that far from being a ‘friend of the consumer’, as she has claimed, the minister is the best friend that the moguls have ever had?

Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to Senator Conroy for the question. To commence my answer, I might ask rhetorically: when will Senator Conroy get through his head that any movement that is currently going on and has concluded is obviously taking place under the Keating regime and certainly not under the proposed new media laws? In fact, the important point about this, which of course Labor refuses to understand, is that people can now restructure their assets. They can restructure their assets now, and they can do what has been mooted over the past few days, under the old Keating regime.

I have said very clearly that what this government is about is not pandering to any particular proprietor, quite contrary to the Labor Party, which in a vindictive way tried to punish certain proprietors. We will not necessarily go into the history of that. What is so important about this is that we do need to move media on from these 20-year-old laws that marooned media proprietors and media assets on the old regulated platforms of print, radio and television and do not have any regard to the impact of the internet and new media on very old assets. It is important that this point be clearly understood. Also under the old Keating laws we have seen the reduction of local content on local radio such that it took people on this side of the chamber to realise that local content was being lost out of certain rural communities, and that has happened under the existing Keating laws.

We can go on about the history of this thing and Labor’s botched attempt to manage communications when they were in government, but the contemporary challenge to the Labor Party is this: will you cave in to Mr Keating’s demand that the media reforms be scrapped and all transactions unwound, taking Australia back to the 1980s? Because, until Mr Beazley stops flip-flopping and Senator Conroy stops squealing, gets off the fence and says what Labor would do, no-one can take anything that Labor say about this seriously. Senator Conroy has been very careful not to stick his neck out. He is too scared to do that. He has been timid and weak in his approach to this matter. Opposition for opposition’s sake gets Labor absolutely no further, and so I repeat the challenge to Senator Conroy: stand up in your supplementary and say what the Labor Party will do.

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. Has the minister seen comments by the Prime Minister today that ‘a certain concentration is needed in a nation of 20 million people’ for ‘economic reasons’? Can the minister confirm that profits in the media industry are at record levels and that the average profit margin is 24 per cent? In the light of these figures, can the minister explain why the government believes that giving more power to the media moguls is essential to the viability of the industry?

Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister is perfectly correct when he says that people ought to be able to behave in a capitalist society in a way where they can deal with their assets—they can restructure their assets—and such has happened over the last couple of days under the laws that were developed under Mr Keating’s watch, and certainly not under the watch of this government. But it is time for the Labor Party to come clean and say how it intends to deal with the media laws. Is it going to pay compensation to unwind transactions? How is Labor going to protect local content? Labor’s silence on these matters shows the kind of policy paralysis that has inflicted all of its deliberations—workplace reform, border protection, welfare to work. It does not matter what it is; Labor has no position, no policy imperative whatsoever and no idea what to do about media.