Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last weekend I received an email from Marjorie, an 81-year-old woman living in my community of Ballarat. Marjorie has been a reader of the Ballarat Courier as long as she can remember. If ever she is spending a night or a weekend away from home, Marjorie has her neighbours hold onto her copy of the paper so that when she returns home she can catch up on all the local news she missed while she was away. She tells me her daughter does the same.

Along with the Ballarat Courier, Marjorie reads the Ballarat Times and watches the local Nine and WIN television news. She consumes as much local news as she can get. In Ballarat Marjorie is not alone. We all love our local news and understand how important it is in our community and across regional Australia. Regional local journalists tell our stories. They examine and inform us about our communities. They report on issues that might not get the attention of the metro papers but that make a real difference in our lives. Ballarat news outlets are an essential service, reporting on important issues in my community, such as the royal commission into institutional sexual abuse and local politics right the way through to national stories and local sport and community events. Much of the community has a story about the time when they were in the local paper.

Sadly, local news outlets and news outlets more generally have been facing repeated cuts, whether they be commercial outlets or the ABC. Ballarat has had its losses, but I know that Ballarat and the smaller towns that make up my electorate are largely still lucky to have a range of locally based news. Despite the survival in Ballarat of our major outlets, our region has faced repeated job losses for journalists, other news staff, camera crew, photographers and admin staff. Most recently, with the closure of ACM printing in Ballarat, there were over 100 jobs lost in my community. I fear that these job losses will not be the last.

Media is essential to our democracy. It is essential in our regional communities. We have seen regulation and legislative changes that have actually diminished our local voices, not increased our local voices. The Save Our Voices campaign is incredibly important. I encourage everybody in my community and the regional communities beyond to engage with that. The decisions this government has been making about ownership and content in terms of local news and local stories are diminishing our democracy and diminishing the capacity of regional communities to have their voices heard and to tell their stories. The government needs to immediately look at how it can restore the integrity of our media market and ensure the voices of regional communities are heard.