Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is pretty trite to say that there have been pretty significant changes in the media landscape since the regulation that currently applies was passed in the first place. You only need to look at the likes of WikiLeaks, for example, in the new sphere to see what a big impact something that sits outside what one might have called the traditional or 'old' media formats can have. Certainly, if we look at television, many people do not consume television now at the time that the television networks broadcast it but consume it on demand.

But at the same time a number of truths still hold true. When we look at the news space, even with moving online we see that a lot of the presence online in the news space is of organisations and companies that have built up significant amounts of resources offline. Even some of the new entrants that are online-only in the news space are reliant on existing resources coming from elsewhere as well. There are many notable exceptions, but on the whole it is fair to say that simply the fact that there are new means of distributing and publishing news has not necessarily resulted in a massive flourishing or redistribution of who owns what in the industry.

This is so in TV as well. You just need to look at the fact that the existing networks are the ones who are taking up a huge amount of the online space. Yes, there are alternatives—YouTube and the like—but it is the traditional networks who are stepping in and taking up a big amount of the online space. So new forms of technology do not necessarily mean new forms of ownership or new forms of diversity.

That is why this Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Media Reform) Bill 2016 is so disappointing. With this proposed legislation, the government has missed an important opportunity to provide meaningful reform of the Australian media landscape and has instead settled on a simplistic deregulatory approach that will do nothing to improve media diversity. In fact, it might result in a concentration of media ownership at time when we need the opposite.

All witnesses to both iterations of the Senate inquiry into the versions of this bill, in May and October this year, agreed that the media landscape is changing rapidly, and that online delivery of content is one of the key drivers. And pretty much everyone agrees that regulations drafted in the pre-internet age have not kept up with the pace of technological innovation or with changing habits of content consumption. Indeed, content creation by the public is also something that is not captured by existing regulation. What is also clear is that Australia has one of the most highly-concentrated media ownership structures in the world. That makes support for public, community and independent broadcasters and publishers all the more important. But instead of grappling with these complex issues in meaningful ways, after nearly three years of consideration the government has done really nothing more than take the path of least political resistance—the bare minimum that the handful of commercial broadcasters and publishers could agree on—which is to propose the abolition of two regulations that were originally intended to protect media diversity.

Despite the emergence of online content and news delivery forming the basis of the government's rationale for this bill, nowhere does the bill provide any form of support for these emerging forms of diversity. Indeed, the government's attacks on the funding and independence of respected public broadcasters like ABC and SBS have been subjected to sustained criticism from the Greens and from the whole community, and rightly so. Ongoing neglect and crippling funding shortfalls for community radio and TV broadcasters have severely limited the potential of these important sources to provide the kind of media diversity that the government is telling us this bill will bring about. And responses to the large-scale structural changes to the global media environment canvassed in the 2011 convergence review remain entirely unaddressed in this legislation.

What is also clear from people who have fronted the Senate inquiry and, indeed, from the commentators is the self-evident assertion that access to fast broadband services to deliver new sources of on-demand content remains dramatically uneven across the country. If anything, the digital divide between those with access to rapid telecommunications services has worsened under the Abbott-Turnbull government's hopelessly incompetent handling of the National Broadband Network. This has put fast broadband out of reach for millions of Australian households. So even if a flourishing mix of local and international content were being produced for consumption, access for millions of Australian households will be out of the question for the foreseeable future.

If the government had come along and said: 'There's been a significant change to the media landscape and a lot more is being delivered online. We need to tackle that, including by making sure in the same way that people have access to free-to-air television, by and large, we are going to make sure they have access to online content. In the same way that we support public creation of content and free-to-air television, we're going to look at how we might do that in the online world,' then they might be starting to tackle some of the big issues. But the government is not going that; the government is just saying, 'What do the big commercial networks want?' and come in and ask for a change. In fact, when you look at one of the measures that is going to be removed, it is going to increase concentration of media ownership in this country.

The bill should not pass in its current form. The two-out-of-three rule should remain, at a bare minimum. Until such time as there is a plan to protect healthy media diversity in an era of changing technologies, the two-out-of-three rule provides a flawed but necessary bulwark against further consolidation of media ownership in Australia. The Greens do agree that the abolition of the reach rule could be supported, but not at a cost of the two-out-of-three rule. So until such time as the government is prepared to directly engage with those larger issues at play, the bill as a whole represents a step backwards. It exemplifies the approach of this government more broadly: upholding the interests of commercial players at the expense of the public interest and dressing up a counterproductive deregulatory agenda as though it represents genuine reform. It is the view of the Greens that this bill should not pass the parliament, at least until the two-out-of-three rule abolition provision is removed from the legislation.

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