Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to Senator Conroy for the question. To commence my answer, I might ask rhetorically: when will Senator Conroy get through his head that any movement that is currently going on and has concluded is obviously taking place under the Keating regime and certainly not under the proposed new media laws? In fact, the important point about this, which of course Labor refuses to understand, is that people can now restructure their assets. They can restructure their assets now, and they can do what has been mooted over the past few days, under the old Keating regime.

I have said very clearly that what this government is about is not pandering to any particular proprietor, quite contrary to the Labor Party, which in a vindictive way tried to punish certain proprietors. We will not necessarily go into the history of that. What is so important about this is that we do need to move media on from these 20-year-old laws that marooned media proprietors and media assets on the old regulated platforms of print, radio and television and do not have any regard to the impact of the internet and new media on very old assets. It is important that this point be clearly understood. Also under the old Keating laws we have seen the reduction of local content on local radio such that it took people on this side of the chamber to realise that local content was being lost out of certain rural communities, and that has happened under the existing Keating laws.

We can go on about the history of this thing and Labor’s botched attempt to manage communications when they were in government, but the contemporary challenge to the Labor Party is this: will you cave in to Mr Keating’s demand that the media reforms be scrapped and all transactions unwound, taking Australia back to the 1980s? Because, until Mr Beazley stops flip-flopping and Senator Conroy stops squealing, gets off the fence and says what Labor would do, no-one can take anything that Labor say about this seriously. Senator Conroy has been very careful not to stick his neck out. He is too scared to do that. He has been timid and weak in his approach to this matter. Opposition for opposition’s sake gets Labor absolutely no further, and so I repeat the challenge to Senator Conroy: stand up in your supplementary and say what the Labor Party will do.