Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

However, they are important. These are the people who are impacted by the position of those opposite. News Corp Australian Executive Chairman Michael Miller said:

… the passage of these two pieces of legislation will allow the local media players who have vested interests in local communities to compete with the internationals that are coming into the market—

Primarily straight into rural and regional households through digital communication platforms that are not subject to the same rules as some of the other longstanding organisations. Free TV Australia has said unequivocally that the government's media reform package is:

… crucial for Australian jobs and our ability to continue creating great local programming that is watched by millions of Australians every day.

The CEO of Prime Media Group, Mr Ian Audsley, said that this bill is critical to retaining regional broadcasting jobs and:

There has been a lot of talk about the threat to diversity if the two-out-of-three rule is repealed. We would argue that there is greater threat to media diversity if the media reform bill is not passed …

Which is exactly what Senator Hinch has just told this chamber, with all of his years of experience—that there is a greater threat to media diversity if these bills are not passed, because the risk is that even more journalists will lose their jobs in regional Australia, more newsrooms will be forced to scale down and, in a worst-case scenario, some businesses will close.

This bill will provide the Australian media industry and sector stakeholders with the necessary stability, assurance and support to embrace the modern media environment, the digital media environment, which this act never even conceived of back in 1993. Free-to-air broadcasters play a vital role in providing access to high-quality Australian content. What do they provide? They provide current affairs, sport, drama and children's programs to all Australians, all over this nation. However, as we all know and many speakers here have said, the broadcasters are operating in a very different environment, against increasingly competitive and challenging circumstances, due to the entry of online service providers, who are simply not subject to the same rules and restrictions as the broadcasters are.

Although Australian audiences have viewing opportunities across many platforms, I'm sure over the next few years there will be many more platforms to come. To make sure that the Australian industry remains competitive, the Senate must pass this bill. We can no longer shackle traditional media outlets with laws that do not apply to the new organisations and those that will come in the future. It is a fact that, if passed, the majority of broadcasters will be better off. Although it may take time for businesses to transition to the proposed new fee model, the minister has made it clear that a transitional support package will be available. The support package will ensure broadcasters are no worse off as a result of these changes in the bill. In turn—and importantly for broadcasters—it will provide them with certainty for the next five years that their fees will not increase. This is a very responsible thing to do, and it is yet another example of this government taking responsible actions and making responsible decisions that are in the interests of all Australians.

In addition to the government's media reform package, this bill will modernise regulation and help position the industry as a sector to deal with existing and future challenges and changes in communication platforms. This bill will not only ensure that the act is relevant today; it will also ensure that the operation of the act does not hold industry back or impose regulations that are no longer relevant or applicable—the time came and went for the current legislation many, many years ago. The minister lamented that the regulations governing our media companies do not allow them to meet the challenges on a level playing field, as a result of the increase in online, on-demand operators and the many foreign technology companies that now operate here in Australia.

Again, as the chair of the environment and communications committee—which looked in detail at this legislation and heard evidence from many different sectors in this industry—I firmly believe this bill, with the reform package that was announced in May this year, provides a sensible suite of measures. The package provides the necessary reforms to modernise media regulation and to position the Australian media industry to deal with existing and future challenges more effectively.

The first—and probably one of the most significant—reform that this bill will introduce is the repealing of the 75 per cent audience reach rule and the two-out-of-three cross-media control rule. As you've heard from senators on the crossbench and on the government side, these rules are completely and utterly out of date. They are distorting and killing some of our regional TV stations and other broadcast media. They were written in 1993. As Senator Hinch said, we are no longer in a world where Kylie Minogue lives on Ramsay Street, among many other things—for example, 1993 was the year Meatloaf released his song 'I'd Do Anything for Love' and, given his recent performances, he'd probably have done better to stay with that song in 1993. But that is the world that this legislation was introduced to regulate—an analog world, which no longer exists.

This 75 per cent audience reach rule is a classic example of why this bill is required. It prohibits a person, either in their own right or as a director of one or more companies, from being in a position to exercise control of commercial TV broadcasting licences whose combined reach exceeds 75 per cent of the Australian population. This rule is clearly redundant and, as has been said by Senator Hinch and Senator Griff, is grossly distorting, particularly on rural and regional media. It doesn't protect diversity anymore. In fact, it is doing quite the opposite; it is further restricting media diversity, and it has to change. Audiences across the country today receive essentially the same broadcast content due to affiliation agreements between metropolitan and regional networks, and all three metropolitan TV broadcasters and the ABC stream some or all of their channels online to 100 per cent of the population. This rule takes into account none of that. It is an outdated analogue-era requirement. It takes into account none of the digital access to news, stories, programs and children's entertainment that most Australians now have.

The second thing that this bill does which I think is very important is amend local programming obligations to introduce additional obligations for regional broadcasters. This bill includes a welcome range of measures to ensure the availability of local content in regional areas and strengthens links between local content and the communities it is broadcast to. In the absence of such regulation, the high cost of local content production and structural changes underway in the media more broadly will create further incentives for broadcasters to achieve efficiencies, placing even further pressure on the supply of local content programming genuinely at the local level.

The third thing that this bill does—again, having heard all of the evidence in the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee—is amend the antisiphoning scheme and antisiphoning notice. This scheme was established in 1994 and regulates the acquisition of broadcast rights for sporting and other events of cultural significance or national importance. This bill seeks to ensure that events on the antisiphoning list remain freely available to all Australian viewers. This government continues to support the principle that nationally significant events should be available to free-to-air television. The antisiphoning scheme is outdated and needs reform. Again, it does not cater for the new digital media communications environment. The bill will remove the multichannelling rule, which prevents free-to-air broadcasters from televising events first or exclusively on their digital multimedia channels. Repealing the multichannelling rule will provide flexibility for free-to-air broadcasters to optimise television coverage of listed events to the benefit of audiences right across this country.

The fourth great thing that this bill does—and, again, having heard a lot of evidence on this in the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee when we looked at this bill—is abolish TV and radio licence fees and other charges. The committee heard overwhelming evidence that these licence fees and datacasting charges have absolutely no place in a modern regulatory framework in the digital age. They were designed for a very different nation and a very different type of media. This bill will repeal the unwarranted taxes, starting with the payment that would be otherwise due in December 2017. Instead, the government will establish tax collection and assessment arrangements for an interim transmitter licence tax and will establish a statutory review of the arrangements in 2021—a very sound idea. The introduction of a transmitter licence tax and the abolition of the broadcasting licence fees will result in the vast majority of broadcasters paying considerably less in terms of their overall fee and tax burden. Again, I point out that these are fees and tax burdens that their digital competitors, who are streaming right across this country into their markets, are not subject to. It is grossly unfair that we are saddling certain broadcasters with these outdated fees and taxes and not subjecting them to those who now broadcast the same content or similar content directly to our homes.

Finally, the government will establish a transitional support payment scheme for commercial broadcasters—again, a very sensible and sound measure. This five-year transitional support package will provide financial relief up to 30 June 2020. It supports 19 individual commercial broadcasters to transition to the new spectrum tax model, helps optimise their business structures and supports growth over the medium to long term. And, as I've said, importantly, that will help them also provide much more genuinely local content in rural and regional Australia.

As part of this package, the legislation will require the Australian Communications and Media Authority, ACMA, to, after 30 June 2019, undertake a review and report on whether the new tax laws should be repealed or amended. Again, this is a very sensible measure. ACMA will consult on the review, enabling broadcasters to input into the development of the future tax arrangements.

We have a historic media package that has the support of the entire media sector. We have heard very clear and cogent arguments of why this reform is so necessary to retain the diversity and the richness of, and the commercial viability of, this sector in our community. I commend the government for this package.