Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Coonan, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. I refer to the government’s plans to weaken the cross-media ownership rules. Can the minister confirm that, under the government’s diversity or voices test, the number of owners of major commercial media could fall from 12 to six in Sydney and from 11 to six in Melbourne? How can the minister continue to claim that the government wants to protect media diversity when its plans allow the number of owners to halve in our major cities? How can such a massive concentration of media ownership possibly be in the public interest? What guarantees can the minister give that the government’s plans will not inevitably see newsrooms merged, reporters sacked and local content reduced?

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

I thank Senator Conroy for the question. The government has absolutely no plans to weaken media laws—let me make that perfectly clear. So the premise of Senator Conroy’s question is entirely false. The government is proposing to reform the media industry in the interests of consumers. What we have decided will be appropriate is to ensure that there will be strenuous safeguards to prevent concentration of ownership. That will be secured by the number of voices not being able to fall below five in a metropolitan region and four in regional and rural Australia, bearing in mind that there are very few markets that will qualify for that particular voices test.

On top of that, the ACCC have a mandate to ensure that no mergers infringe the competition principles of substantially reducing competition in a market. The ACCC have put out a paper issuing guidelines as to how they will approach media mergers, and it very clearly says that they will be looking at whether it also includes matters such as advertising revenue and what will be a market, and they propose to take into account news and opinion. It is important to understand that the only media rules that will be affected will relate to the regulated platforms of commercial television, commercial radio and print. They certainly will not relate to pay television, to out-of-area newspapers such as the Financial Review and the Australian, to the internet or to the ABC. No matter how many mergers there are, there will still be other additional outlets.

People can run around and make all sorts of scurrilous comments about this. Mr Keating was doing that last night. The media laws are 20 years old. They were fashioned last century, when the internet had just been invented and when it was all about academics, when IPTV had never been thought of, when the streams of content you now get over mobile phones and the internet had never even been dreamed of. Mr Keating came out from somewhere because there is a total absence of any policy on the part of the Labor Party. The best they can do is to trot out a former failed Prime Minister with a 20-year-old policy and suggest that is the way for the future. We have to ensure that consumers are able to take advantage of all the new services that this media package will enable.

This media package is all about consumers. It is all about providing benefits to consumers. Why should Australian consumers be worse off than consumers right around the world who are able to access these services? It is important that Australian media can grow and invest. Subject to the appropriate safeguards, which will look after diversity, these reforms will move Australia into the 21st century.

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. Is the minister aware that leading Australian law firms, including Phillips Fox, Blake Dawson Waldron, Holding Redlich and Freehills, have all cast doubts on the ACCC’s ability to stop cross-media mergers? Given the weight of legal opinion against her, why is the minister pretending that the ACCC will be able to do anything to ensure continued media diversity? Isn’t it really the case that the minister’s plans contain no effective safeguards against a dangerous concentration in media ownership?

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

It would be diverting, to say the least, if those opinions that are touted by Senator Conroy addressed the issue that was part of his primary question, which related to cross-media mergers. The ACCC looks after all mergers in this country. Unless you are going to say that the ACCC is incapable of managing mergers and acquisitions throughout the whole country, you cannot sustain that proposition. It is extremely important that the ACCC, like every other industry, is also able to regulate competition in the media sector. It ill behoves Senator Conroy to try to trump up some argument to the contrary.