You can be either prince of print or queen of the screen, but you cannot be both, Paul Keating once boasted about Labor’s media policy. It was a policy to encourage diversity, prevent foreign ownership, encourage competition and to prevent cross-ownership of the Australian media. Well, there was further mud in the eye for Labor this week as the Prince of Print, Rupert Murdoch, swallowed Australis and became the dominant figure in the provision of pay television in Australia … a veritable Queen of the Screen. Australis delivers by MDS (line of sight land transmission) and satellite. Combined with Foxtel’s cable delivery it will give virtually saturation coverage in the major cities. (The smaller towns and rural areas have never counted in the Government’s or the corporate world’s view of pay TV.) As a result of the deal, Mr Murdoch is now the Prince of Print, Queen of Screen and king of Australian media policy.
As this happened, the powerless Minister for Communications, Michael Lee, Pilate-like washed the Government’s hands of insisting on any of the four key elements to a wholesome media policy. Mr Lee said that it was up to the regulatory authorities to determine if the merger … read takeover … would go ahead, as if media were equivalent to margarine production. This was less than a month after the same Minister impotently sat on his hands while the ABC’s pay television venture was cut out of the action by Mr Murdoch’s Foxtel and Kerry Packer’s Nine Network. It would not be proper for him to intervene in the level playing field to support the Government’s instrumentality, he argued.
Australia will now have only two pay TV providers … Foxtel and Optus. No matter. Ersatz competition is alive and well. In the name of competition, the Australian Government has insisted that there will not be one cable network, but two. So the clever country is to allow two cable networks to be laid out at the cost of $4 billion each. And despite all earlier assurance of little or no duplication, they will both aim straight for the most profitable connections — in the big capitals. Many houses will have two cables and most others will have none. They will compete vigorously to give us an almost identical diet of US-based movies and news and whatever Australian sport they can buy or bribe into giving “”exclusive” manufactured coverage. Television will not be covering existing sporting events; events will be manufactured for pay-television coverage. Labor policy, of course, was to continue to guarantee free-to-air access for major sporting events … no matter that the big players are in the process of replacing the major sporting events with ones they have manufactured themselves.
Technically one cable could do both jobs with plenty to spare for many other channels to provide diversity. The Government could and should have insisted on one cable owned by itself with perhaps other private interests who have no interest in providing content. It then could have ensured competitive and diverse content by dozens of providers which was the object of its policy.
Federal Labor’s media policy over the past 13 years has been an unmitigated disgrace. Every development brings further concentration of ownership and/or more foreign ownership.