Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week we have heard a lot about the regulation of newspapers from the government. The Labor Party has a great history with newspapers. The Labor Daily in the 1920s and 1930s stoutly defended Jack Lang, and the AWU's Worker was, in the days of Henry Boote, a literary rival to the Bulletin. In the UK my mother's great-uncle, George Lansbury, founded the Daily Herald for the TUC and later published his own paper, Lansbury's Labour Weekly, for several years.

But there is another, more heavy-handed thread of Labor newspaper history that has, I am sure, inspired Senator Conroy this week. So I should share with honourable members an important piece of Labor history as recounted by one of my most distinguished constituents, the Hon. Gough Whitlam, AC, QC. In his memoir The Whitlam Government, 1972-1975, he writes:

There was one aspect of our policy, however, which did not come to fruition. I had first advocated the establishment of an Australian Newspaper Commission in 1961. At the 1971 Federal Conference the Party stepped back from the proposal, substituting a commitment to initiate a study of its feasibility. In 1975 even that modest undertaking was abandoned.

Yet in our time the Government Printer already had in Canberra, which was a convenient location under the Constitution, all the facilities to produce a newspaper, even a daily one. What we originally had in mind was a weekly, which would have published the legal and Public Service notices from the Gazette and given a more ready and permanent forum to ABC talks and the material in the Australian Government Digest, which we inaugurated.

In time, of course, I would have liked to see it developed into a newspaper of more general interest and appeal, a vehicle for independent news and comment unaffiliated with the established commercial media organisations. There was no reasoning theory why such a newspaper should not become as valuable, respected and authoritative as the ABC had become as an alternative to the commercial broadcasters.

The outrage and derision which the proposal provoked among media proprietors was more a mark of their anxiety at the prospect of Government competition than evidence of any inherent incapability or impropriety in the idea itself. By abandoning the proposal we secured no goodwill from the proprietors. Indeed, by 1975 the Australian media were uniformly and implacably hostile to the Labor Government. The Murdoch press carried its bias to such lengths that journalists on The Australian went on strike in November 1975 in protest at their proprietor's behaviour.

The Murdoch papers were not alone, however, in the extreme character of their editorialising or the unremitting nature of their anti-Government campaigning. The so-called 'loans affair' was orchestrated by the Melbourne Age throughout the whole of 1975, and editorials in the Sydney Morning Herald, including some on the front page, exhibited an intensity of virulence and hysteria which admirers of that journal might well find surprising today.

I note in passing that at the end of his memoir Mr Whitlam writes:

I am indebted to my secretary, Mark Latham, for preparing the appendices and chronology.

The Labor Party is often unhappy with the newspapers, and indeed every political party from time to time, and every politician, is unhappy with the newspapers and what the media say. But the answer to that unhappiness—for the Labor Party, at least—is to follow that grand tradition which it has in the past of publishing its own newspapers. Indeed, the internet gives it the medium and the means to do this at a very low cost. If it does not like what the Daily Telegraph is saying, or if it does not like what Dennis Shanahan or Matthew Franklin is saying in the Australian, it can publish its own journal. The cost of reaching out to the public in a day of social media and the internet has never been so low. That, of course, is why the economics of newspapers is being smashed. The real issue is whether there will be any newspapers left in a decade or so, not whether Rupert Murdoch owns 70 per cent of them. But this thread that Gough Whitlam canvassed in his day, the government owning a newspaper, is exactly the same heavy-handed approach that Senator Conroy is taking. Instead of having a go at doing it themselves, which real labour leaders have done in the past, what they want to do is regulate and own—use government regulation or even government ownership. That is not freedom's way, it is not the way of a democracy and the Labor Party should be ashamed of its assault on the freedom of the press.