Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise this morning to speak on the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Media Reform) Bill. This bill will amend the Broadcasting Services Act of 1992 to repeal outdated media ownership laws and control laws to better reflect the changing digital media environment, with three separate things which will change.

First is the repeal of the 75 per cent audience reach rule; second is what is known as the two-out-of-three cross-media ownership rule; and third is the introduction of new programming obligations for regional commercial television broadcasting licences where a changing control, known as a trigger event, results in a licence forming part of a group of commercial television broadcasting licences whose combined licence area population exceeds 75 per cent of the Australian population.

The first schedule of the bill is the 75 per cent audience reach rule. This currently prevents a person in their own right, as either an owner or a director of one or more companies, from being in a position to exercise control of commercial television broadcasting licences whose combined licenced area population exceeds 75 per cent of the population of Australia. This rule has had the practical effect of preventing mergers between any of the predominantly metropolitan commercial television broadcasting licences such as Seven, Nine or Ten and any of the regional commercial television broadcasting licensees—being Prime, WIN and Southern Cross—because such a transaction would result in a person controlling commercial television licences whose combined licence area population substantially exceeds the 75 per cent threshold. Clearly, such a provision in the laws is completely redundant in today's digital media age, where someone can have access simply online to 100 per cent of not only the Australian population but, effectively, of most of the world's population.

The second change is to the two-out-of-three cross-media rule, which prohibits a person from controlling more than two out of three regulated media platforms—that is, a commercial television broadcasting licence, a commercial radio broadcasting licence and associated newspaper—in any one commercial radio licence area. Again, this is a redundant provision, given the change in the media technology.

I myself, and I am sure many in this parliament, have noticed that, when we go to hand out our newsletters at railway stations during election campaigns, we rarely see someone carrying a traditional newspaper. In fact, I saw and said, 'Good morning,' to at least several thousand people at local railway stations over the recent election campaign, and I think I could count on one hand the number of people carrying a newspaper under their arm to read on the train. Being in Sydney, those newspapers were simply The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph or The Australian. But on their mobile devices, they in fact had access to almost every newspaper in the world—whether it be TheNew York Times, The Washington Post, South China Morning Post, The Straits Times from Singapore; anyone can access any of those newspapers online. So it clearly shows how such legislation once was perhaps fitting to ensure diversity, and how diversity of opinions in our media landscape are no longer.

We need to continue to monitor our media landscape, because diversity of opinions and a variety of ideas—the contest of ideas; people putting up different ideas—across our media are essential for our democracy. We have concerns about that with the growing amount of what is called fake news across the digital spectrum—not only the digital spectrum; also traditional media outlets. I would like to give a couple of examples: during the US presidential election campaign, there was a news report in the major metropolitan papers throughout Australia. It was also reported on some of our current affairs programs. It was alleged that a group of a thousand people, pro-Trump supporters, were chanting disgraceful words in New York: 'We hate Muslims. We hate blacks. We want our great country back.' When I heard that on one of the current affairs programs being stated as a fact, I thought: that just simply does not seem right. I could not imagine people in New York chanting those obscenely offensive words. But, yet, it was reported as news across many different platforms and it turned out to be completely and utterly fake.

Another example is the recent coral bleaching we have seen on the Great Barrier Reef. We have seen stories printed in our newspapers saying the reef was dead or that 70 per cent of the coral reef had died off. Without in any way minimising the seriousness of the recent bleaching on the coral reef—

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