Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Improved Access to Television Services) Bill 2012. At the outset of my remarks, let me reflect on what we just saw in the chamber. I am not referring to the division we just saw, although the division was of course like groundhog day in this place at present, where day after day, session after session, we face this situation of guillotines being applied to bills, quite unnecessarily. This bill falls into that category. But, immediately before we commenced this debate on this legislation, we saw the government whip in the Senate table a committee report into this piece of legislation. That is an unusual thing. It is unusual to have a committee report tabled just before the second reading debate commences, because usually these things are done in a proper process. The committee report would usually be tabled at the time of day for committee reports to be tabled.

But there has been nothing about this legislation that seems to involve proper process. It was introduced into this chamber only last Thursday, on 21 June. It was then shunted off for a rapid-fire committee inquiry. No witnesses were heard from and there were no public hearings. There were just a couple of submissions from those who were able to get them in quickly. There was nothing that would reflect decent or extensive consultation. Here we are, on Monday, with just one working day in between, and the committee has reported. The legislation is now here for debate and it will be voted on today, because it is subject to the guillotine. A bill introduced last Thursday will be guillotined by this government and their partners, the Greens, today. Is this bill a budget measure that has really special and particular budget considerations to it? No, it is not. Is there something that is terribly urgent about this bill that must see it pass soon, for very quick reasons? No, there is not. It is an important bill and it deals with important issues, but there is no particular reason why this bill should be subject to the type of processes we are seeing in this chamber at present and why there is the abuse of process we are seeing in that regard.

This bill is important. It seeks to amend the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 to increase the level of captioning available on free-to-air and subscription television services. It also introduces new obligations on broadcasters to transmit emergency warnings in the form of text and speech, and captions, where reasonably practicable. There are obviously a number of interested stakeholders in this. There are of course the free-to-air television broadcasters and the subscription television broadcasters. There are obviously those who are hearing impaired, and those in the disability sector in particular, who have a direct interest in the captioning services. There are also the emergency service providers, who have an interest in the transmission of emergency warnings. All of these stakeholders deserved to have a proper hearing about this legislation, yet all of them have effectively been denied the opportunity to have a proper hearing because of the processes being applied in this chamber.

Ultimately, the aim of this bill is to achieve 100 per cent captioning of a commercial broadcaster's core or primary channel during the viewing hours of 6 am to midnight. This is achieved over a number of years. The bill also seeks to increase the captioning of subscription television services. The aims of this bill have wide support both in the community and across the parties in this place. My beef, such as I have one when I rise to speak on this legislation, is not with the aim or intent of this bill; it is purely with some elements of the detail and some elements of the detail that could have been properly thrashed out had this bill be subjected to the usual process of Senate scrutiny. But the government appears to have decided to throw the rule book out when it comes to everything, so instead there is no proper scrutiny and no opportunity to thrash through the detail of the bill and reach a point at which the parties and stakeholders can agree as to how it could be improved with some technical changes to it that would ensure a bill with good intentions also ends up being a bill with good outcomes.

Captioning is an especially important service for people with a disability, especially for those with hearing difficulties. Television is an important means of communication and entertainment, and I believe it is important to ensure that people with a disability have access to this platform to the greatest extent possible. That is not just my belief but also that of the coalition. The coalition strongly supports these types of reforms to assist those in the disability sector broadly. I believe reforms such as this will be of benefit in enabling people with a disability to more fully engage with the broader Australian community through the broader range of television services that will be forced to provide captioning. I know that both of my colleagues with an interest in this—the shadow communications minister, in the other place, Mr Turnbull, and the shadow minister for disabilities, in this place, Senator Fifield—have had extensive discussions with the disability sector about this and about the need to see this legislation passed. The coalition support it, but in doing so we have explained some of our concerns with the detail, which we believe could be improved, not just for the benefit of the industries that will have to comply with this legislation but also for the benefit of the disability sector. So, while the ambitions of this bill have our support, it is worth considering the detail of the regulations proposed. In looking at that detail the coalition has found that broadcasters have several concerns about the regulatory burden of this bill and concerns about whether it will deliver the best possible outcome for those it is intended to benefit as well. I think it is important that we ask the question: can we achieve the goals set in this bill with less regulatory impact on the broadcasters and with better outcomes for those in the disability sector? As I have indicated, it would have been nice for senators from all parties to have been able to properly consider the details of these proposed regulations and their impacts, but instead we had a shotgun Senate inquiry with no hearings, with submitters being offered just two days to lodge a submission, and a draft report being presented to committee members just a day and a half after those submissions were received. Pretty much all of it happened over the weekend. This is an absurd situation and it is an affront to the proper processes we should have in this place, an affront to the disabilities sector and an affront to the television broadcasters that they are all being treated in this way. It has not been possible to provide the full and proper scrutiny of the issues within this legislation, and I think those opposite when they make their contributions to this debate should reflect about the failings of the legislative process in this regard. But I do take the opportunity to highlight the coalition's additional comments on the committee's report on this bill:

While agreeing with the general drive of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Improved Access to Television) Bill 2012, the Coalition adds additional commentary to the report in order to raise some legitimate concerns with the Bill. Our consultations with industry suggested there were several areas where imprecise drafting or insufficient clarity in the Explanatory Memorandum created a potentially unfair and uncertain situation for broadcasters in relation to reporting requirements, programs finishing after midnight, international pass-through channels, and strict liability for certain breaches.

The Coalition therefore moved amendments in the House to that effect that the Government was nonetheless unwilling to consider. The Coalition is of the belief the Bill could be improved upon without in any way reducing the level of service and assurance that is provided to users of this service. We acknowledge the importance of the provision of the captioning service to people in the hearing impaired community, and recommend the Bill not be opposed.

So, despite our concern at some of the detail, despite our attempts in the other place to try and address some of the detail, we will not oppose this legislation. But I do want to go through some of those concerns, in the hope that those opposite will reflect on them and consider whether this is an appropriate way to get the best possible outcome for all stakeholders.

First, let me say that in all submissions and all the consultations the coalition has had, the broadcasters have made it clear that they respect their role in providing captioning services and understand the importance of captioning for people with a hearing impairment or a disability. They are, however, concerned that in certain respects some of the new obligations are overly burdensome. It is important to note that captioning services cost around $750 per hour to provide. That is very expensive in terms of the cost of provision of this service across the number of channels involved across the number of networks and of course across both free and pay TV. For live broadcasts of programs such as news and sports, that $750 per hour cost is significantly greater still.

Expanding on the points highlighted by coalition senators in our additional comments, I am concerned that there have been several oversights in the drafting of this bill. The bill provides very rigidly for captioning between 6 am and midnight but it is silent on requirements for programs that begin broadcasting before 6 am but finish after 6 am or programs that begin broadcasting before midnight but finish after midnight. As drafted, this bill would likely see, and certainly would only appear to require, the captioning of programs within those rigidly defined hours of 6 am to midnight. There is a possibility that captioning could either stop or start halfway through a television program. While the government may not think that this is not an issue, there are many people, and I have been one, who might stay up late to watch tennis finals or other major sporting events or indeed other significant programs that may well go past the hour of midnight, or they may get up early to look at something that starts before 6 am before they head off to work. Indeed, just this weekend many Australians would have tuned in to watch a live broadcast from Royal Ascot on Saturday night that went well past midnight. It would not have been unrealistic that under this legislation some people would have tuned in, started watching, been able to have captioning services provided for all of the warm-up to Black Caviar's race but that the captioning would in fact have ended before the race occurred. What a ridiculous situation. The broadcasters have suggested that there could have been a more sensible approach, which would have been to allow some flexibility in the operation of the legislation, where they could count an entire program towards a captioning target so that if a program went beyond midnight and they continued captioning for an hour or so after that they could then, if there was a program likely to have less viewer demand on a different date, have not started the captioning between 11 pm and midnight. This type of sensible flexibility could provide a better outcome not just for the broadcasters but also for those benefiting from the captioning service.

Another area of concern is the provisions requiring the captioning of international pass-through services. What are these? They are the types of services particularly dominant on pay TV, where we see CNN, BBC or Al Jazeera broadcast as part of a Foxtel package. Under the provisions of this bill, these types of international news services could fall under the captioning requirements, whereas before they might not have because they would not have been regarded as Australian services.

The Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association stated in its submission to the farcical inquiry on this bill that captioning quotas for pass-through television channels would be:

… an expensive process and will significantly add to the cost of delivering these services into Australia. This is then likely to mean that it will become unviable to offer those services in Australia, resulting in a loss of differentiation.

I and the coalition are greatly concerned about the threat of imposing the expense of captioning on these services. Going from no requirement to full requirement would be a significant expense. These are live broadcast services—rolling news channels. So the live broadcast services would come with the very high expense of a captioning service. The risk is that we may see some of these services become unviable and, as a result, subscription television providers will simply cease to offer them. This would be a terrible outcome for viewers. At a time when particularly those opposite are railing against a perceived concern about increased consolidation of voices in news, it seems remarkable that they would risk passing legislation that could further reduce competition and diversity in the news media. It would be a blow particularly to those multicultural communities who may rely on services like Al Jazeera or the BBC to keep in touch with news from home, and it would also be a blow to the diversity of news media voices in Australia.

I would encourage the minister, as the coalition has done before, to revisit this issue before this bill passes and to return to the previous arrangements, which were agreed by the subscription television industry and the Human Rights Commission. The cost imposition here is clearly unreasonable. While I am informed that the government has indicated that it would be willing to negotiate for a reduced target which would be financially achievable, I understand this would have to be a negotiation done and enacted each and every year for each and every channel. This seems like a bureaucratic and administrative approach. Common sense—and I know there is not a lot of it on the other side—would surely suggest that it would be better to have the service actually operate and be guaranteed its continual operation without full captioning requirements than to have it not operate at all and be inaccessible to all Australians.

The government claims that technology will make captioning cheaper in the future and so service providers should not worry. This is a fine argument to make, but of course logic again would suggest that the time to bring legislation like this back to this place and to say that international channels, these international pass-through services and indeed all others should all require captioning is when captioning becomes cheap enough. I hope we do see a time when captioning service provision, because of technological advances, can be done in such a cost-effective way that it is made available 24/7 across the networks. That would be the ideal outcome. But, of course, it will only be achievable when it becomes cost-effective to do so. In the meantime, it is a matter of getting that balance right between cost, regulation and administration and the importance of providing these key services to the communities who need them.

Broadcasters are also concerned about clause 130ZUB, which will find them to be in breach of their requirements if, for some reason beyond their control, captioning is unable to be provided. For instance, if a third-party source contracted to provide captioning fails in some way, even temporarily, to provide the contracted service, it could be the broadcaster at fault and facing penalty. By contracting for experts to provide captioning services, broadcasters are acting honestly and in good faith. It would not be unreasonable to think that there might at least be some recognition that there could occasionally be faults in the captioning process which are not necessarily of their own making.

My final concern is about new and onerous requirements which will drastically increase the reporting requirements for broadcasters. This bill requires excessive new detail, which, quite frankly, has not been shown to be necessary and will impose additional new costs for broadcasters. Free TV Australia stated in its submission to the shotgun inquiry on this bill:

This provision could result in a broadcaster having to keep a running audit of captioned programs. This would require a broadcaster to review every single captioned program (over 6500 hours per year for each broadcaster) and make subjective assessments about matters such as comprehensibility. This would have significant resourcing implications.

Even SBS highlighted the absurdity here, saying that it:

… considers that it would be a particularly onerous burden to require broadcasters to report on their compliance with captioning standards when there are currently no standard industry measures.

The coalition did put forward amendments to this legislation in the House. I regret that they were rejected. I urge the government to reconsider those amendments and to reconsider them in light of the shotgun approach we have had to the legislation before us. But, ultimately, the coalition will not be opposing this legislation and we welcome the benefits it provides to communities. (Time expired)

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to add a few comments on behalf of the Australian Greens, who will also be supporting the Broadcasting Services (Improved Access to Television Services) Bill 2012. The bill is about equitable access to news, information and entertainment on TV for people with hearing impairments. It updates the Broadcasting Services Act and it implements the equal opportunity and access for people with a disability found in the Disability Discrimination Act.

According to Hearing Loss Australia, one in six Australians suffers from hearing loss. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the figure is about one in eight people who have some form of hearing loss. Ten times more Aboriginal people suffer from ear diseases and hearing loss than non-Aboriginal people. We were reminded just last week about the concrete impacts that hearing loss has for the education of children, when a Western Australian parliamentary committee visited the Kimberley and Pilbara and described the shocking incidence of chronic ear infections in Aboriginal schoolchildren, with the AMA calling for urgent funding for services in Aboriginal communities.

This bill has been in formation and under discussion for at least five years. It is a very long discussion and negotiation period that has brought together people who use, need and provide captioning services with broadcasters. Between 2008 and 2010, the department conducted a review, issued a discussion paper and a final report, with 22 recommendations to improve audio description and captioning levels. To inform those negotiations, research conducted by ACAAN in 2010 revealed that 30 per cent of Australians use closed captions at least some of the time while viewing television. Although I acknowledge the concerns that Senator Birmingham raised about the haste with which this bill is being put through the parliament, it is not as though this bill just dropped out of the sky yesterday. The bill does have quite significant consultation and work behind it.

The bill addresses a real need in our community, ensuring higher quality of closed-captioning services and greater certainty both for the broadcasters and for the viewers who rely on them. The Greens support the bill for these reasons, because it strikes a balance whereby broadcasters can still apply for exemptions to ACMA. Right now, under the Broadcasting Services Act our commercial TV stations and the national broadcasters must provide captioning for TV programs aired between 6 pm and 10.30 pm and for news and current affairs outside those hours. The subscription TV stations indicate where captioning is available in their program guides. This bill will increase the hours from 6 pm till midnight from 1 July 2014 in addition to news and current affairs, except for programs in a language other than English or shows that are wholly music. Programs on the multichannels will not need to be captioned unless they have already been captioned on the primary channel. Under the new bill, subscription TV stations are required to increase by a certain percentage to achieve captioning in nine categories of content; however, the bill does place a cap on the number of programs that require captioning. Again, TV stations are able to apply to ACMA to not caption programs and ACMA will have the discretion to decide on the applications after a degree of public consultation.

This bill is an important piece of legislation. It represents the greatest advances in access since the introduction of digital TV, which brought the first formal caption quotas to free-to-air TV. It is supported by the Australian Human Rights Commission. While the sector obviously hoped for more, such as audio description services for blind people, it is a positive step forward and I commend the bill to the chamber.

Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Improved Access to Television Services) Bill 2012 and I am very pleased to do so in my role as patron of cap that!, an education campaign that encourages teachers around Australia to turn on captions to benefit all students. In the lead-up to National Literacy and Numeracy Week, the campaign is also raising awareness of captions and how they can help not only hearing impaired students but all students, particularly those with English as a second language, those with learning disabilities, those who are visual learners or those who are struggling to read. This is the second year of the cap that! initiative. Teachers and students became very engaged last year with the website, which contains videos, teaching resources and lesson plans to help teachers bring their multimedia teaching resources and electronic whiteboards to life in their classrooms for the benefit of all their students. I encourage all senators to, in turn, encourage principals and teachers in their electorates and communities to become caption champions and join the cap that! campaign.

Using captions has proven benefits for students. Captions improve literacy, comprehension and inclusion in learning processes. For those who may be unsure about what I am referring to, captions are the text version of audio—including speeches, sounds and music—which can be found on TV, DVDs, online videos and at the cinema and theatres. Around 55 per cent of new-release DVDs are captioned. Media Access Australia's Accessible Education Database and the National Library of Australia provide listings of captioned educational titles. Captioned programs have the closed captions symbol. I encourage senators to turn on captions in their offices and at home and to encourage community organisations, clubs, venues and facilities to turn on captions in their public areas. This is easily done through device menus. I also urge senators and members who regularly add content to their own websites using programs such as YouTube or Vimeo to turn on the captions as a matter of course because it will increase their audience, and it may even make their presentations more comprehensible. More widely, the international campaign Don't Leave Me Out! is promoting the need for captioning in everyday life, and the expectations that captions will be available across the range of media used every day is becoming far more commonplace. Senator Ludlam highlighted in his speech the importance of dealing with captioning and assistive technologies for Indigenous children, in view of the hearing losses we reported on last week; but the benefits of using captions are critically important for every learner.

Access to electronic media more broadly is important to all members of our community. The influential nature of television on our society should not be underestimated; it is an important tool for building national identity. We have only to see the reaction to the recent ABC movie Maboto understand that, and I am quite sure we will see that again during the Olympics and Paralympics in the next few months. Increasing media access levels is consistent with Australia's international obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as well as with the government's social inclusion policy. The United Nations convention sets out the obligations on countries to promote, protect and ensure the rights of people with a disability, and in all areas of life it specifically prohibits discrimination against people with a disability. The convention also sets out obligations in relation to participation in cultural life and specifies that countries take all appropriate measures to ensure persons with disabilities can access cultural materials, such as television programs, in accessible formats. Improving access to television is an important component of the Australian government's response to the United Nations convention.

It is expected that by 2020 hearing loss is likely to affect more than five million Australians. That is an indication that now is the time to act in legislating to provide important services for a growing portion of our population. Senator Birmingham expressed his concern about the lack of consultation, but in fact the bill before us implements the government's response to a number of recommendations from the Media Access review and from investigation into access to electronic media for people with hearing and vision impairment. The review involved significant public consultation, and its final report, titled Investigation into access to electronic media for the hearing and vision-impaired, was tabled in the parliament on 3 December 2010. Since that time, the government has been working with the broadcasting industry to address a series of recommendations and provide for greater access to free-to-air and subscription television for the hearing impaired by, where applicable, increasing existing requirements for captioning on commercial, national and subscription television broadcasters.

Captioning is an important tool for people with a hearing impairment, providing the text version of speech and other sounds during television broadcasts. This bill sets out a way to achieve 100 per cent closed captioning between 6 am and midnight for non-exempt programs for free-to-air broadcasters' main channels. As Senator Ludlam said, if the main channel is captioned, then the requirement is there for subsidiary channels; if the main channel is not captioned, then the requirement is not there for them. It also sets out a path to achieve 100 per cent closed captioning of non-exempt programs for subscription broadcasters. Again, the legislation describes how that will come into play. The suggestion by Senator Birmingham that there are not standards for this is a nonsense. These captioning targets are comparable with international best practice. The US, Canada and the UK require 100 per cent of non-exempt television programs to be captioned. We are seeking to reach this target through gradual, incremental increases.

Importantly, the bill will improve access to televised emergency warnings for people with a hearing or vision impairment. The bill requires that emergency warnings broadcast on television be transmitted in the form of text and speech, and captioned where reasonably practicable. Again, this is also in keeping with international best practice.

What can frustrate most of us in using captions is the issue of caption quality. This too is addressed in the bill. I recently had a very bad experience in Canada with a captioned news service that could not quite cope with English in a French accent. It was incomprehensible captioning. But the Australian Communications and Media Authority will determine standards relating to the quality of captioning in terms of readability, comprehensibility and accuracy and ensuring that captioning is legible—because, for those who rely on captions, there is little value in captions that are of such poor quality that they cannot be understood. There are a number of programs that broadcasters are not currently required to caption for practical reasons, and these exemptions will be maintained. These include television programs that are not in English and music-only programs. This makes the increased targets achievable for broadcasters.

The bill will prescribe the new captioning requirements in the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, which will provide both consumers and broadcasters with a level of regulatory certainty through one set of clear future targets, one overarching regulatory system and a clear and cost-effective compliance and complaints mechanism. The Disability Discrimination Commissioner and the Australian Human Rights Commission are supportive of this approach, as having one regulatory system will remove the current need for the commission to negotiate with broadcasters recurring temporary exemptions under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.

The bill reflects recent developments. I am very pleased that, on 1 May this year, an agreement on the targets for increased captioning levels across existing subscription television channels and minimum captioning levels for new channels was finalised by the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association, so the agreement was taken into account when developing the new legislative requirements in the bill.

There are ongoing significant technical developments in the area of access technologies, and government initiatives have the potential to transform the media landscape in Australia. We will see that through the introduction of the National Broadband Network—and, as Senator Ludlam said, the switch to digital television is already making that happen. But we need to be very clear about our obligations as a nation and the extent to which the government and the broadcasting industry can be brought to account. For example, the National Association of the Deaf recently won a significant lawsuit against the online movie provider Netflix, with the District Court of Massachusetts holding that the Americans with Disabilities Act applied to website-only businesses. That is just an example of the changing environment that we are in.

As we move to convergence issues in our media, these matters will be more important in the future. I commend the bill today as a meaningful commitment to improving levels of media access for people with hearing and vision impairment and achieving it in a way that is practical for both broadcasters and content producers.

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

In the 7½ minutes left—and I hope you excuse me as I quickly run my pen through over half of my speech—I will attempt to make some brief but, I hope, significant contribution to the debate on the piece of legislation before us today. I rise to speak on the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Improved Access to Television Services) Bill 2012. As we are aware, this bill looks to improve access to commercial and subscription TV for Australia's hearing-impaired community, which is projected to be five million by 2020. In fact, one in eight Australians has some form of hearing loss, so it is a worthy aspiration and, as Senator Stephens mentioned, fulfils our obligations under the United Nations requirements and also our own disability act.

The bill seeks to amend the Broadcasting Services Act to increase captioning targets on free-to-air TV and introduce captioning targets on subscription television; mandate broadcasters to transmit emergency warnings in text and speech and caption them where practicable; and enable ACMA to develop a captioning standard to legislate compliance reporting, recordkeeping requirements and a statutory review and to make compliance with the captioning requirements a licence condition.

Last week—and I heard Senator Birmingham refer to this as the 'shotgun inquiry'; I am a member of the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, and it most definitely was a shotgun inquiry—the Senate referred the provisions of this bill to the committee and required it to report back today. In fact, I think it was about 35 minutes ago, so I hope everyone has had a chance to peruse that report before contributing to this debate. Electronic media is central to modern social and economic life. We all acknowledge the importance of equitable access to electronic media services as a matter of social justice. The coalition supports this broad objective of the bill, though we believe that more practical changes could have been made. We have gone through those. One was the issue of timing: that with a caption program beginning before midnight and finishing the next day, the proportion of the program broadcast after midnight is taken to have been broadcast during designated viewing hours and thereby counted towards the broadcaster's target. Imagine how frustrating it would be for hearing-impaired sports fans if they were in the third quarter of a sports game.

The second amendment that the coalition attempted to move in the other place was the insertion for a general exemption for international pass-through channels such as CNN and BBC. There is quite a significant cost attached to captioning—$750 per hour, which obviously increases for live broadcasts because of the level of skill required to make that happen. Our own public broadcaster, the ABC, mentioned the increased cost. The ABC submission to the committee said:

Extending captioning on ABC1 will cost the ABC as much as an estimated $800,000 extra annually by 1 July 2014. The increased cost occurs not just as a result of increasing the percentage of hours captioned to 100 per cent. Costs will increase as a result of new requirements to caption each of the regional (state and territory) break out programs through which the ABC delivers coverage of local events (such as regional sporting competitions and other state based events).

As a Nationals senator, I would hate anything to affect that and the ability of hearing-impaired Australians who live in the regions to have the availability of local content. I hope the government allows additional funding for the ABC in order for them to deliver this great service to the hearing impaired throughout our nation. I look forward to that.

I also mention a submission from a hearing-impaired mother living in regional Victoria. Louise expressed some frustration at not being able to effectively share the viewing experience with her family and friends when captions are not provided, a point that particularly stood out for me as a senator with a particular interest in regional Australia. Louise felt further disadvantaged in her regional setting when she was unable to access deaf TV programs as shown in our capital cities.

I have only 2½ minutes, so I will go to the one issue within the legislation that goes particularly to matters in which I am interested. It goes to the requirement that pass-through channels be subject to captioning quotas. In the submission by ASTRA they made a pertinent point about the unintended consequences of this bill. According to division 3, section 130ZV, if a provider has over 18 general entertainment services, such as Foxtel, they are categorised as a category C provider. Foxtel's annual captioning target percentage for their programs as of July 2012 is 15 per cent. But if you have less than 18 general entertainment services you are categorised as a category A. Such a provider might be a company called TransACT, which delivers services into regional Victoria—shows that we see that are shown by other subscription providers—and their quota is 40 per cent, despite the fact that both Foxtel and TransACT could be offering the same service. One has to provide a 40 per cent captioning service; the other one provides 15 per cent. I am sure it is an unintended consequence. It is one of those things that flows out from a one-size-fits-all policy, but I am sure my regional constituents would not like to see a reduction in regional content or competition in the subscription TV market due to an increased cost burden for one provider in the regional market over the other.

Finally, I touch on the matter of emergency warnings, one that Victorians are highly cognisant of after our Black Saturday event and recent floodings. We think that will be a great provision for us. Aside from the matters I have mentioned and those mentioned in the report, I welcome this work as it provides access to those in our community who are unable to participate fully in the digital world unless services like these are provided in our urban and rural communities.

Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for consideration of this bill has expired. The question is that the bill be now read a second time.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.