Lawyers, grandfathering and governmental weakness have moulded Australia’s media policy in the past decade and events this week show that nothing has changed.On Wednesday, the Opposition accused the Government of making mogul-specific media rules. It said the latest plan to have an absolute rule that no television proprietor could have more than a 15 per cent share in a newspaper in the same city was directed at Kerry Packer because he had offended Labor. Mr Packer is seeking to increase his 17 per cent share in Fairfax.
The Prime Minister Paul Keating denied this, saying the proposed change was merely to strengthen laws in place since the 1980s. And Communications Minister Michael Lee said that his latest proposals would not be set in stone “as the lawyers are always coming up with new ways to seek to get around the rules”. It is a Punch and Judy show of the disingenuous and the spineless.
Mr Keating’s statement is a convenient rewriting of legislative history. In 1992 his Government changed what was then a blanket prohibition against 15 per cent or more ownership of a newspaper by a television licensee. That absolute threshold was changed to an indicative threshold of 15 per cent which a licensee could go over provided he was not exercising “control”. “Control” was defined in a convoluted schedule to the Act of several thousand words. Small wonder that Kerry Packer’s lawyers could _ in the words of Mr Lee _ get around the rules. And he did, lifting his share in Fairfax beyond the 15 per cent mark. Spineless.
This week’s exercise is merely strengthening laws the Keating Government weakened in the first place. Disingenuous.
But we are not even going back to the pre-1992 status quo. Rather the changes since then are to be “granfathered” _ that is allowed to continue under present owners despite being contrary to the new laws.
This is the weak-kneed approach to media law in Australia. Sloppy rules are drafted or subtle changes tot he rules are allowed. The lawyers and the big players move in. The wheedle their way through the quagmire of law to make arrangements in breach of the spirit of those laws, ever pushing out the boundaries of control and greater ownership in fewer hands. The public baulks at the obvious rort and breach of the spirit of the policy. The Government flusters and announces changes to the rules. But the changes are not retrospective and media ownership gets ever more concentrated.
The same has happened with foreign ownership of the print media. Originally a 15 per cent limit was imposed on a single foreign owner and 20 per cent total foreign ownership for any major newspaper. The aim was to prevent any foreign control. We now see a Canadian getting control at first with less than 15 per cent and then having the temerity to argue he should have a greater share to cement the control he should never have been allowed to have in the first place.
We also have a Canadian company asserting it does not have control of Channel Ten because its actual equity is less than 15 per cent even though it has economic ownership of 57 per cent of the company.
The irony is that for all of Labor’s running media rules to curry favour particular players at particular times and to express displeasure at others, it does not appear to have done the government much good. It would have done better to have enforced a policy with stated aims of diversity, Australian control and greater Australian content. Instead of the helpless cry we had from Mr Lee this week about lawyers getting around his rules, Labor could have said it would not tolerate legal shenanigans to get around the stated policy of the Act, legislating retrospectively to counteract them if necessary.
Such an approach would have commanded support and respect. As it is, the history of media law and policy in Australia rightly engenders deep suspicion whenever any legislative changes are proposed.
In the absence of an objective national-interest policy, the Opposition is right to suggest that Labor’s policy is mogul specific.
The tragedy for Australia is that we are not even getting the one benefit that concentration of ownership might bring _ the economies of scale of a monopoly provider. Instead, we have the ludicrous situation of the two pay-TV/telephone providers each laying out an expensive fibre and coaxial cable network when one would carry more sound, data and pictures than any home, business or educational institution could cope with. It is mindless duplication and waste that the Government should stop.
Indeed, it could be argued that two of the very few media successes in Australia in the past 20 years _ for a balance of diversity, reasonable Australian content, competition, coverage in rural areas, low cost and employment generation have been the Internet and the introduction of video. They have been the two areas of the media that no government could put its meddling, inefficient, ulterior-motive driven, incompetent hands on.