Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to follow on from the member for North Sydney's contribution and just acknowledge that in the chamber right now—and, for the people I don't reference, please don't take this the wrong way—there are four of us, the Speaker, the member for Whitlam, the member for North Sydney and myself, who have focused on the area of technology and innovation for quite some time and have recognised its ability to transform environments in a way that provides opportunity to get things done better. I don't speak for the four—well, I certainly speak for myself, but not for the other three. I would hope that, as we often contemplate what impact we might have made in public policy through the course of our participation in this great place, at some point someone could say that the thing that the member for Chifley did, if you don't mind me speaking in the third person, is keep banging on about the value of technology to the country. I've been hoping and praying that business gets on to this sooner rather than later—that is, that they actually realise technology is of benefit, rather than something they shirk away from. So many of our public policy debates, particularly some of the most bedevilling ones that we've faced, have been unable to recognise the value that technology brings in terms of public policy improving the way that business works and improving the way that communities operate, and seeing things done in a much easier way. Technology is about not only doing things faster but doing them smarter and, in many cases, doing them much more efficiently.

That very long preamble that I've provided is basically to give a sense of what I'm thinking when it comes to this issue of media reform and where we're at. We have very big companies in the technology space and in the media space that are going head-to-head over, understandably, their futures. It has been largely a case that business failed to understand the direction of technology when it came to publishing and they didn't get onto this quick enough. Now we're getting to the point where we're trying to shove the genie back in the bottle, and it isn't pretty to watch. What we're seeing is a lot of media players that have staked a reputation on being antiregulation embracing a regulator to see a business outcome that works in their way. And I get it, because tech's market power in this country, particularly big tech like Google and Facebook—two of the biggest firms on the planet—cannot be ignored. But it also cannot be ignored that we have a media market that has been one of the most concentrated on the planet for quite some time. We need to be able to ensure publishers get paid but do it in a way that's much better. And the government have got to find a way to get through what they have, in terms of media reform, because it's looking like a slow-moving car crash.

We cannot have a situation where negotiations on this get prematurely concluded 10 days before they were supposed to. There's no indication that the ACCC had any problem with the way that Google or Facebook were going, and then suddenly the government terminated the negotiations and are bringing in this code where there are serious concerns about the way it may or may not work. I think what we should see is an outcome where the publishers do get negotiated agreements with those big tech firms but not in a way that a lot on the other side, the party of free enterprise, in any other circumstance wouldn't abide. We do need to ensure that there is fairness and we do need to ensure a moderated, negotiated outcome, but we cannot afford to see what I'm genuinely concerned about, which is a system where we may have some of the biggest tech players on the planet decide not to play ball with us because we couldn't get a deal that worked for everyone.