In Australia the printed word has been fairly free. Governments have made isolated attempts at suppression on the ground of “”national security”, especially when they face embarrassment but without much success. Even the restrictive defamation laws do not absolutely prohibit publication; they just make it very costly.
The reason for this relative freedom is largely constitutional. The Commonwealth has no specific power over newspaper publication, and attempts by the states to control major interstate ones have not been made for fear of falling foul of Section 92 which guarantees freedom of interstate trade.
This could soon change.
A proposal by of the leading tenderers for microwave, multi-point distribution system (MDS) television licences shows that transmission of the written word might no always enjoy its present freedom. The proposal, by Kerry Stokes, is at present exploratory, but he indicated that he saw possibilities of transmitting newspapers, or sections of them, Australia-wide. People at the other end could either view them on their television screens or print them out. Or perhaps store them in computers for text searching.
The same sort of thing could be done by optic fibre, but that technology is further away. Raw text can be taken over the phone lines now, but it is comparatively slow and not as consumable or as familiar as newspaper-style pages displayed graphically on screen. It’s the vision thing again!
The practical effect is that you get your newspaper in your lounge room, just like now. But the legal effect is profoundly different. The traditional paper is printed on a press, carted to a newsagent and delivered to the home (give or take a few bushes). The electronic newspaper goes over the airwaves or via cable and into the home. The legal difference is that the Constitution ignored paper publication, but it gave to the Commonwealth Parliament the power to make “”laws with respect to .#.#. postal, telegraphic and other like services.”
The High Court has interpreted that broadly and it includes television and telephones which were not around when the Constitution was framed.
The economic and environmental costs of making paper, printing words on it and delivering the bulk will grow, whereas the cost of delivering it electronically is decreasing. Eventually electronic delivery will be cheaper and more convenient for users. Mr Stokes’s MDS concept is not likely to be the only form of mass electronic delivery of words. Others will join the fray and it will be the dominant delivery method. Then, by default, the Commonwealth will have gained control of the mass dissemination of the written word as well as the spoken word and pictures.
So what?
Well, the Commonwealth has shown a strong predilection to regulate and control what people see and hear and who provides the service. There is no reason to believe it will be less desirous to regulate and control what people read and the people who provides the service. And who knows what perfidy governments might get up to in the future.
Attempts at control have ranged from the outrageous ban on political advertising to controls over foreign investment in the media, racial vilification, cross-media ownership and so on. These go well beyond the ordinary fair-trading rules that govern other industries.
The other aspect of the Commonwealth gaining control over the mass dissemination of the written word is that it would be done by technological default, not by the people’s vote. If there were a vote, no doubt, the people would reject it.
Once the inevitable happens and more written word is disseminated electronically than on paper, only two things can stop unhealthy government controls: the good sense of politicians and rulings of the High Court. As things stand neither of these is very reliable.
The political broadcast ban showed how unreliable the first is and the High Court case which overturned the ban shows how limited the second is. The High Court ruled that Australians do have a right of communication of political matters as a fundamental part of our democratic Constitution. That right was implied in the constitutional structure in which the Parliament is elected by the people. However, it was a very limited form of freedom of speech. For a start, it had to be linked to the electoral process. Life is more than politics.
We need a more definitive guarantee of freedom of speech in the Constitution to ensure that the words “”postal, telegraphic and other like services” are not used by governments as a back-door way of controlling the “”newspapers” of tomorrow.