Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting to come to the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006 after having just been one of the lucky people on the Labor side to speak in relation to the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill and the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill. When you look at the content of this bill and what it attempts to achieve and the contents of the other bills, they are worlds apart. We are led, at least in the media ownership bill, into an area so deep and dark we have never seen anything of its like before in Australian history. It is a dreadful thing, as the member for Lowe referred to in what was a very broad discussion on this particular bill.

I want to go to the core of the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006. What are the elements of this bill? What is it trying to do? For particular regional and remote areas in Australia—in one instance, virtually the whole of Western Australia and in other instances the Northern Territory, outback Queensland and outback New South Wales—we have a situation where currently there are one or two licensees taking an analog service through those remote areas. The difficulty those licensees will have is that, in being forced to make the transition to digital—and we know that that transition to digital was going to be in 2008 to start off with and was then pushed out to 2010, and I think the plan might be to push it out to 2012—it might be a bit like the Joint Strike Fighter in that we may be looking at 2015 by the time we finally get to put it into play.

When in opposition in the past and since it has been in power, the government has made a great deal of the changeover from analog to the digital service with GSM. We had advice when we were in government on that changeover. Certainly, this government has had a whole string of advice about how it should make the transition from analog to digital. This bill is very interesting because it is completely in line with what the government decided in the very first instance when it looked at the whole question of high-definition television. Remember the early period when the government was looking at what it would do in terms of the transition to digital? It was trying to work out whether or not to go with high-definition TV, as recommended by James Packer and the PBL organisation and, I think, also News Corporation at the time. They argued that Australia should make an immediate and straight jump to high-definition television.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer, Mr Costello, were both given high-definition TVs to have a look at what that service would be like during the summer cricket season. They enjoyed that for a number of months until someone found out and said: ‘Hang on, this is a bit rich, isn’t it? Why should two people who are making a decision about what kind of transition we should have be given a special privilege, at no cost whatsoever, particularly during the summer cricket season?’ It would, of course, affect one more than the other, given that the Prime Minister is a bit more enamoured of cricket than the Treasurer is. Whether that had any effect or not, the government went down the high-definition TV road. I argued at the time that I did not think this was very smart.

What might have been a better proposition for Australia as a whole—and I am not sure whether I still hold to this, but we will see where the argument goes—would have been to take a standard-definition route. If you took a standard-definition route and did not take the immediate jump, you could do what a number of European countries have done in making the transition. You could have much greater diversity and much greater approachability in media provision. The part of the band taken up by analog is very large. You can put either one high-definition signal in its place, or you can put six standard-definition signals in its place. If you are interested in diversity and in providing a multichannelled experience, you would go with the SD model. The government went with high definition.

What is this bill saying? If you have a couple of licensees in remote and regional Australia—those licensees are WIN and Prime in large areas of Australia and there is another entity in Perth—because of the wide geographical spread of Australia and the sparse nature of the population, you are going to have to have very deep pockets if each of those licensees is going to have to reach into those pockets to pay for the full transition to HDTV. Accordingly, this bill provides something like $19.63 million to assist. It says that, in those areas where there are two analog licensees, it will create another entity. That entity will have one digital channel—a third digital channel—which, in the wonderful way in which these bills are drafted, will serve effectively as one of the existing two. It is a mechanism to say two can become one. There will still be two licences in an area but this one digital one can serve for both.

I think it is a sensible and necessary thing not to put the hammer onto companies and say, ‘You will have to provide it all yourself.’ We know that has been done from one end of the country to the other in the major metropolitan areas. There is enough depth in there. We also know that Channel 7, Channel 10 and Channel 9 have completely different definitions of what HDTV is. So you do not get the straight 620p or the interlaced version of that, 1080i, on all channels. It is not the same HD broadcast on all, because they have adopted their own different standards. That makes it difficult for people who are making content and providing it to a number of those stations, but it also would make it difficult for people in remote areas in terms of what they are getting. You have both WIN and Prime which, from memory, have different definitions of what they are providing in HDTV. If they have one single channel to provide it and if they are saving costs as a result of utilising this, they will actually have to make some changes in the way they put their shows together in order to be able to run through the one single system.

So what has been provided here could have been a great deal more if the government said: ‘We might make an exception here for remote and regional Australia, at least in the first instance, and go down the multichannelling SD route to provide more capacity, utilising the existing analog capacity. We could provide a great deal more diversity and give more choice to people instead of just the one HD signal. We can have up to six SD signals.’ They did not do that for Australia. The fundamental reason why? There were certain interested parties who came to speak to coalition members, ministers, the cabinet and indeed members of the opposition, pushing their barrow and arguing for what they wanted out of it.

What have we seen over the past 10 years in terms of the shape and nature of digital television delivery in Australia? We have seen that the take-up has not been really brilliant. It is about 17 per cent or so. It is still very slow. What has kicked on in that period and what has been most aggressive is people’s use of DVD. They have used some newer screens in that take-up. We know that in the next few years—and this will take quite a while to bed down—Toshiba will be putting their HD up against Blu-ray technology, which allows you to record roughly between 29 gigabytes and 50 gigabytes of information onto a disk. When you do that, you can actually tape one of these shows.

If you record about an hour of television and you use MPEG2—and what is interesting is that, once we get the legislation through this place, doing this will be entirely legal for the Australian population whereas at the moment it is completely illegal—you are looking at a couple of gigabytes of information. If you do the same with HD, it jumps dramatically in terms of the amount pushed out—something in the order of eight gigabytes for just one show of an hour’s length or so. You need to be able to store a lot. This makes a great deal of difference to people who want to time-shift and look at the information later, but it also gives you an indication of just how rich what is being provided through HDTV is. The signal is much better, the amount of pixelation is much greater and it is a hell of a lot sharper. But you are replacing analog with just that one service.

It may well be that, simply because of the quality of that signal, eventually people will pick it up and run with it. Part of the reason that they may do that is that they may see that DVD can in fact be surpassed. People who use DVD throughout regional and rural Australia now, those people who get just analog services—as we know, it is a bit hard to run down to the local shop in regional and rural Australia—are using the significant services available Australia-wide through Telstra and other entities where you can order a DVD service. That has supplanted a lot of the normal television watching we have seen, and it is part of the problem in the free-to-air area where advertisers realise they are not getting the same sort of bang for their buck they got previously, because people’s viewing habits have changed.

HDTV does allow for a significant jump in quality. If you have an appropriate system to use it and can access it, and if you have got over the hurdle of the cost of entry, you can take it up—and, as time goes on, a lot more people are coming in. The member for Gorton, who is here in the Main Committee, is a very crafty and sensible person. He just bought a new TV, but he did not buy it before the World Cup soccer because he knew the prices would have been up. He bought it after that, when there was a tremendous price drop. He got a television of the same quality for about half the price—and a lot of the punters out there are doing exactly the same thing. They are aware of the situation and they have waited.

The member for Gorton, like so many others in Australia, waited to see the price drop so that it could become affordable. That is a key point in terms of whether the transition to full HD will be really successful. You cannot undo this part of the changes in the media area. We cannot just go back and say, ‘Let’s just run with SD.’ But I think there are a number of things we can do. In the digital TV bill, which I just dealt with in the House but did not in fact speak on, there are some reasonable changes and we are supporting them. One of the things the bill allows is some multichannelling, as this bill does. You need to get a bit of a spread and allow people greater access to different programming. The fundamental problem since the kick-off of high-definition television in Australia, in terms of the government’s response and the manner in which they have just run down the line of the major media interest, is that we have not had diversity of access because datacasting was completely knocked out.

Who would datacasting have assisted? It might have assisted the Fairfax organisation. They have a fair amount of data to pump around the country. People may have had more access to a broader range of data. It would have been a situation as well where, if datacasting had been allowed—and people could have had a very difficult time trying to work out what that was and what it would mean—and if you multichannelled, could you actually have a bit of a TV show and all the rest of it? What would it mean? Would it be sort of like TV? We are still imprisoned in this dilemma. What we do not have in regional and rural Australia is enough choice in this regard. For a government that underlines how important that is, we do not have fast enough internet access that could actually change what they are doing.

In fact, Labor has a plan—as we have for a number of things—to give to 98 per cent of Australians by 2010 fast internet access in the order of a minimum of six megabits per second. That is enormous compared to where we are now. We have gone from dial-up at 28 kilobits through to a provision where most people have roughly 256 kilobits—if they have woken up to the fact that they can pay as much for 256 kilobit access as they pay for 28 kilobit. The telcos are not going to ring you up and say, ‘Hang on—you can get a faster service for the same money.’

We are also in a period of immense transition where people in regional areas who are not so remote that they cannot get access have looked at other ways of doing things, of accessing high-definition content or accessing media content and data content through the internet. The innovative action here has been in the regional areas. That is where iPrimus and iiNet have said: ‘Okay, we can make some changes here. The copper network may be pretty dodgy because Telstra has not put the money in that it should have in order to maintain it, but if we put a piece of equipment into the existing digital exchanges’—a piece of equipment called a DSLAM—‘and, using that, are able to give people access to ADSL2, that is 25 times faster than 256 broadband.’ In the regional areas, where there was always the greatest deficit, people could actually have another choice, because part of what is happening in this area is that delivery mechanisms are changing.

Where this bill deals with the transition from analog to digital, from a couple of analog services through to one dedicated channel which would provide those HD services and some associated multichannelling, in the future there will be some competition from elsewhere, because we do not have the full SD multichannelling involved here. If your internet access is fast enough, except for in the most remote areas of the country, you will be able to run to an eight- through to 12- to even 25-megabits access through the net, depending—as it does at the moment with the normal ADSL—upon how far you actually are from the exchange.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

The choice that people in regional and rural Australia have is marginally increased through this action to license a digital channel, which can allow for some multichannelling at certain times instead of full HD. But the impetus Australia-wide is changing. I am firmly of the view that, in going from analog to digital TV, the use of that spectrum will still allow the free-to-airs to have a dominant position in the Australian market. This is not a view that is generally held but, if you look at the provision now, if you want to push out signals—analog, digital or whatever—to the broader market, you will see that the fastest, cheapest way to do that is to use the existing spectrum. Some have the view that you can supplant that by using broadband that is fast enough.

As I indicated just before a division was called, Labor’s plan to provide fast broadband for Australia will certainly be revolutionary in terms of the 256 kilobits, at the very minimum, that we currently have. Even members of parliament have just been allowed to go to 512 kilobits. The bottom end of regional Australia’s utility at the moment—if they use ADSL2—is to have 1½ megabits, then from that point you run significantly right up to 12 megabits or so. That is fast, and it is fast enough to have TV delivery around Australia and to have a whole stack of services. It is fast enough to be able to subvert what the government has done in mandating HDTV with respect to only the existing players. It is also a question of whether you do it and whether you do it well enough, particularly in regional Australia. Part of the problem here is that those people who are most affected by this bill live in remote Australia, and you still have the problem that they are part of that two per cent that are the hardest to serve. But there are already faster satellite services available so that you get some breadth, some diversity, some slicing of the market to give people a chance to have a run.

This is an interesting bill and a useful one for people in those circumstances, but it only partly recognises the changing nature of delivery of digital services to Australians. In fact, it is indicative of the fact that the government really does not know what it is doing in this area. It has for so long forestalled the dramatic increase in broadband access that Australia needs not just in the cities but in regional, rural and remote Australia. And where this legislation goes some way to making it cheaper for people to provide digital services, you have to go— (Time expired)

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