Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Blaxland made a few interesting points in his speech on the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006, but it sounds to me as though the Labor Party is trying to back the Beta technology when everyone is walking out the door with VHS. It is always very dangerous for government to mandate technologies, and that was very evident in the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts—which was a bipartisan report—entitled Digital Televison: who’s buying it? That committee looked into the uptake of digital television in Australia, which was very slow.

I was certainly in the parliament 10 years ago when we chose HD, hence the seven megahertz spectrum. We seem to be talking all the time about these channels being seven megahertz, whereas the member for Blaxland quite rightly pointed out that it is no longer a seven megahertz spectrum; it breaks down into megabits per second. So we really should be talking about channels and megabits per second, be it an SD channel or a HD channel or one that is using MPEG2 compression or, in future, MPEG4 or MPEG6 compression or Pentium—whatever type of compression technologies will be used in the future for broadcasting. Certainly the spectrum required gets smaller and smaller and hence the opportunities for diversity explode. Diversity in the media underpins the coalition’s policy in this area, but we do not want to mandate technologies that people can use. You want to make provision for wherever the market goes in the future so you can support consumer choice and give consumers what they want.

We have made a huge provision for HD over the last decade, in that that would be the standard that consumers would want. I disagreed with it at the time. I thought: ‘That’s a load of rubbish. No-one is going to buy digital television for a good picture, for goodness sake!’ Today I am of a slightly different point of view given the number of televisions that are being sold with large screens—I am talking massive. Just the other weekend, I was with Len Wallis, who had a three-metre screen operating on very good quality HD. People are now designing their houses—you see it in project homes and display homes—to accommodate these TVs. Instead of the old family room and lounge room and what not, they actually have cinemas.

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