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

That is right. Consumers are arranging living rooms pretty much like this chamber, where you all line up in rows and watch massive screens. HD is critical. To get a good picture and good sound quality, HD is important. It is where technology is going. With the ageing population and people having eyesight issues over distance, good quality screens start to get important. So, although I disagreed with it 10 years ago, I do think HD technology is important and ought to be one of the choices that consumers have.

Given that, we need to ensure that when consumers purchase the conversion to digital they have a choice of checking out HD, checking out SD and saying, ‘Yes, I will pay the extra for that service because I like it,’ or: ‘Look, no, I am not really that much of an aficionado; SD will do me. I’m fine with 50 bucks for a set-top box. I will use all my own gear. I am not really interested in anything else the digital age has to offer.’ That choice is important; hence the government has proceeded with a multichannelling option in HD. At the moment that is a fairly limited right, because there are not too many consumers out there with HD, but it ought to be an option that consumers have in future.

I personally think that mandating an SD rollout and SD multichannelling is going to be a great driver of digital television uptake, as indicated by this bill, in allowing an extra SD channel in remote Western Australia. It is ring-fenced; it is only for remote areas. I notice that everything outside of Perth is remote: ‘regional’ has been redefined to ‘remote’ in this bill. It is a business model that has been worked out between government, Prime and WIN to provide some stimulus to the uptake of digital television in the regions and to give an option of an extra station. They cannot roll out HD across this area; it is much cheaper to roll out the SD transmitters. For consumers in the regions, it is a lot cheaper to buy the SD box.

One of the drivers of the cost of this technology is the quantity being sold. Our committee received evidence about what will happen when the cities—particularly Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane—convert. With the analog switch-off, people must make a decision. They must purchase this technology. The competition in this market is huge. Every weekend you will notice that your letterbox is full of brochures from competitors with loss leaders from JB Hi-Fi, Domayne, Retravision, the Good Guys, Harvey Norman—you name it. They are all really pushing these electronic goods.

A switch-off in the cities will drive the price of goods down, so the more remote and regional areas will benefit from the cheaper prices. If you have switch-off in the regions before the cities, I think the regions will be paying a lot more for the equipment. That was a lot of the evidence that was presented to the committee about keeping some parity in the cost of switch-over for consumers.

Let us have a look at what consumers are purchasing. What are they looking for in the new equipment that they are purchasing? They are certainly looking for extra services. It became apparent from all the international markets we examined that it was the extra stations that drove digital take-up. It was having something extra, which this bill provides. It provides an extra SD channel, which is different from anything you will get on the analog stations. I still have some concerns and reservations about where community broadcasting will go in the conversion, particularly in remote areas. Obviously Imparja, as the member for Lingiari correctly pointed out, is a great television station, moving ahead in leaps and bounds. It has the potential to be Australia wide and it is certainly servicing large Indigenous populations in Sydney and other parts of metropolitan Australia. We have invested in this national Indigenous television concept, and I think community television has the ability to deliver diversity in media as well, as shown by channel 31 in Melbourne.

Where can these stations move to? Are they going to be a ‘must carry’ on ABC? Do they have a simultaneous channel? They do not need seven megahertz—they really only need a quarter of that—to simultaneously broadcast, so they keep their consumer while they switch over. The cost of putting together content for community television is certainly substantially reduced. Technological advances like YouTube clearly demonstrate that there is content coming from all over the world that people are quite happy to make publicly available. So there are large opportunities.

One of the things that I have identified from looking at things is the SBS channel. SBS is sitting on a large swathe of spectrum. It costs government $100 million a year and it delivers probably one program a week for some of our non-English speakers. In Australia there are currently two pay TV platforms which deliver, in some instances, up to three or four channels in the language of the non-English speaker in Australia. They have a satellite footprint across Australia. It is about $60 a month. Anyone who wants to see a non-English program can actually flick between three or four channels all in the language of their choice on pay TV. You have to wonder, in today’s environment, at the value of spending $160 million on SBS. What can be done with that spectrum?

I suggest that spectrum has a lot of opportunities in the community TV area, and that provides a lot of diversity. But, again, a lot of this tends to depend on where people are purchasing this product, what the consumer is doing and what the consumer wants. I think there are better ways of delivering it and we must always be on the move, but you cannot dictate technologies. We need to be very cognisant of the diversity required in the media to maintain our independence as politicians and to maintain consumer choice so that consumers can see what they want, when they want and how they want to watch it. That will be driven, I think, largely by them.

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