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

'Propaganda rags' I hear from my colleague, and that is a very unfortunate name to be throwing about in the context of our current media structures. We do need to ensure that we maintain media diversity. In division 9 in the first schedule of the broadcasting legislation amendment bill, there is a list of news media voices. It is a big country, and there are many, many stories to tell, and there are a range of people who can tell them. But we have only got a page and a bit here of listed television broadcast services and we have got a pretty short list of radio broadcasting services. We have an incredible concentration of ownership of these voices. This is a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens to have a range of stories told. This is a threat to our country to tell our stories to and about ourselves as we progress the history of this great nation. Two critical existing mechanisms that we have to address the risk of concentration are competition law and foreign ownership restrictions. But these alone are not adequate tools to really help us deal with the need to maintain media diversity.

In Australia the reality is, in the time since I have been a reader—happily, quite a long time now—I have seen a number of newspapers fall by the wayside. We find ourselves in a situation here in 2013 in which two newspaper companies which deliver their services online account for 86 per cent of the Australian newspaper market. Let's just pause for a moment, without the hysteria, to let that fact resonate. There are two companies delivering their newspaper services online that own 86 per cent of Australia's newspaper market.

A point of comparison around the world would be helpful if we are going to analyse what that actually means. It sounds bad, and it is probably even worse than it might sound when you look at the reality in the US, where the top two newspaper companies, which are very successful companies, only take up 14 per cent of the market. If we want to compare ourselves with somewhere else, let us turn to a country that is often considered to be quite similar to us in culture, another Commonwealth country with a smaller market size, Canada. If we look at the top two newspapers there, we find that they take up just 54 per cent of the Canadian market. That is quite a chunk still, but it is a lot less than the 86 per cent owned by two Australian companies.

One might be able to argue that, with the diversity of ways in which information can move around in our community now, because we have all this new media, we have a chance to free ourselves of the dual vision that is offered by those two online service providers. But the reality is that eight out of nine of the most popular news media websites are owned or run by traditional Australian media outlets. Where do you go if you are an Australian who wants a range of views? The answer is that you have not got very much to choose from at all. As I was preparing to come into the House this morning, I heard it put on radio that, across the broad spectrum of media, there is incredible resistance to this range of bills. The comeback was: 'How broad is the spectrum?', when there is a concentration such that 86 per cent of the Australian newspaper market is held by two prospective deliverers.

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