Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) | Hansard source

As Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi says, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. This is very prominent around regional media and our media outlets in Australia. We're seeing the big digital companies come in, take the advertising revenue and drive them down. Just last week in the Hunter we saw 19 cameramen and journalists taken from the NBN News studios. There's always been a Prime there. NBN's been a great thing in the Hunter. We've gone to bed with Big Dog at 7.30 at night. We've listened to the live broadcast at six o'clock. That is now gone for us, with prerecorded stuff instead. We had the Newcastle Herald, which had hundreds of journalists. It had my uncle, who met his wife, my Aunty Effie, in the classifieds sections when he was covering sports there. My office now is in the Newcastle Herald building. We're losing these things. We had the Maitland Mercury from Maitland, a place just down the road from Cessnock. We grew up having a massive number of journalists five days a week. It's now an online landing page.

We need to find a mechanism that funds regional journalism the way it should be. It isn't just the jobs; regional journalism and telling our stories enhances our culture, is part of our community and brings people together. It is the very fabric that holds so many of our people together in our areas. We are losing this. We're not able to tell the stories. We're not going out there. The push on journalists who work so very hard for journalism to create so much cut-and-paste stuff because they have to create content at such a rate needs to stop. We need to value these places across all media—TV, print and radio. We need to find a mechanism to fund them correctly. Don't make them dependent upon the government, but have them there to tell our stories. If we aren't able to rely on our local areas, if we don't have the Big Dog of tomorrow, if he goes the way of Prime Possum, down the gurgler, in the Hunter, we'll have nothing to define one region from another, nothing to bind communities, nothing to bind us together.