Once again, the Federal Government’s communications policy is shown to be fundamentally unsound. Last week’s announcements on televisions news services will result in less diversity, less competition and less public broadcasting.
It was revealed that Kerry Packer Nine Network and Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB would join forced to produce a 24-hour television news service for pay-television operators. The Seven Network has been asked to join as an equal partner. The joint venture has already signed up Australia’s two major cable operators … Optus Vision and, not surprisingly, Foxtel. Foxtel is jointly owned by Mr Murdoch’s News Limited and Telstra. Mr Murdoch also owns 14.9 per cent of Seven. Galaxy … the other major pay TV operator is also to be offered the 24-hour news service.
It means that the public broadcaster, the ABC, has no means of delivering its 24-hour news service which it was developing with Fairfax.
The Minister for Communications, Michael Lee, says it would have been improper for him to have involved himself in the ABC’s negotiations. He argued that it would have been unfair for the Government to prefer its own organisation. That may be so when looked at in isolation. But it does not absolve Mr Lee from the resulting mess. He and his Government put the law and policy in place that have allowed this extraordinary and unacceptable concentration of media ownership.
One also has to bear in mind that Telstra is spending $4 billion in rolling out cable to carry pay television and at the same time Optus is also spending $4 billion to roll out duplicate cable also to carry pay television. That is not competition; it is unnecessary duplication. The upshot is that the clever country has two companies laying virtually duplicate cable to carry … so far … the products of only three pay TV companies. Worse, the two companies laying the cable each have large shares in one of the three the companies providing the programs and both Mr Packer and Mr Murdoch have large print empires in Australia.
In short, the Government botched it. It allowed existing free-to-air players to take over pay TV by latching on to the cable providers. Far from diversity being achieved by Paul Keating’s suggestion that people could not be both princes of press and queens of the screen, the Government has allowed the big two to dominate print, free-to-air and pay TV. In doing so it has allowed the public broadcaster to be frozen out of pay TV.
This has all been done in the name of competition. It has achieved only show competition, not real competition.
A decade ago, the Government should have created a single government-controlled authority to create a single cable network. It should have reserved some space on that for public and special broadcasting of national, educational and cultural sigificance. It then should have openned the remaining channels (dozens of them) to competitive tender. That would have achieved competition, avoided duplication and given rural and regional Australia a cable service which will be denied them while the commercial providers compete in the major cities. Federal Labor should cringe with embarrassment at its incompetence and folly.