Deborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with some considerable pleasure that I rise this evening to speak on the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (News Media Diversity) Bill 2013. I am a former teacher. One of the things that teachers really need to do at the beginning of the year with their students is to create an environment in which trust can grow and an environment where the notion of rights is very carefully debated and considered.

In the many years that I was teaching I was very pleased to learn wonderful things from my colleagues. Amongst my colleagues was a man by the name of Bruce Helyard, who I taught with at a school called Corpus Christi Senior High School on the Central Coast. In one year 11 introduction session, I happened to be team teaching with Mr Helyard when he spoke to the students about how the course might progress. I have never forgotten that at the very bottom of a list of outlines of the ways in which we might behave was the sense that, 'Any right I claim as my own I extend to the other people in this room.' I think that it is a very important premise. Some people are not more equal than others. We need to make sure that the variety of voices which were heard in that classroom are, in fact, replicated in our community in a much more significant and a broader way.

At the heart of this piece of legislation is a determination by this government to put a line in the sand and say that there will be no further shrinking of the range of voices, of the different perspectives, that need to go on the public record every day if we are to live in a healthy and functional democracy. A diversity of views is essential. Despite all the shouting and outrage that we saw from the Manager of Opposition Business in his speech, the reality is that at the heart of this is a sense that diversity of voices is essential for us if we are to get a reasonable perspective of the things that are going on in our community.

This particular piece of legislation is a response to the fact that there are fewer and fewer organisations owning or controlling the sources of news and commentary in this country. I speak to people in my community, and many of them bemoan the fact that the newspapers to which they used to turn for fact and very balanced reporting have been moving further and further to a state where they are called 'opinion papers'.

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