We know the Opposition is suffering from Fightback-induced myopia, but must it resile from visionary statements in every field of governmental activity? Must the fear of a Labor attack on any blueprint about anything paralyse it into a bland and band-aid approach to everything.
Sure, abandon those elements of Fightback which damn elecgtoral; success: the GST and Darwinian industrial-relations and health policies. But in a field where Labor’s policies have been a demonstrable shambles of putting self-interest before national interests, Australians deserved a better effort than John Howard’s statement on communications policy this week.
The statement does not address the fundamental mistakes made by Labor over the past 13 years. Mr Howard was correct to label Labor’s policy as one of ad-hoc arrangemnts to suit various major players who might help Labor politically from time to time. That policy, of course, has not even achieved the aim of sweetening media players to help (or at least not disfavour Labor), and in its wake lies a policy shambles that has not served the Australian public well.
What has Mr Howard offered? He has abandoned his plan to privatise Tesltra totally; rather committing a Coalition Government to selling only a third of it and in doing so to restrict foreign ownership to only 35 per cent of that third and any individual foreigner to 5 per cent. Timed local calls are out and cross subsidies for rural users would remain.
The Coalition would not sell Australia Post; would hold a inquiry into cross-media ownership; and give local councils more power over mobile phone towers and pay-TV cable-laying.
But this is band-aid stuff. It addresses some immediate and loudly expressed specific concerns but it does not deal with the fundamentals. The Coalition could have and should have put forward a visionary and detailed plan in the one field where Labor is so vulnerable.
It could have recognised that the media and communications industry is different from other industries and that parts of it require natural monopolies for greater efficiency.
On the media side, the news media determine so much of what Australians know, think or feel about local, national and international matters. Very few Australians, for example, have met Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, Paul Keating or even their local councillor. Yet they have opinions … usually quite strong ones … about them. Those opinions come almost exclusively through the news media (or perhaps indirectly through acquaintances who have formed their opinions from media coverage).
The news media form such a fundamental part of opinion-making and therefore the national destiny that they cannot be treated as any other business. There is a moral dimension to media ownership. In the past, that was reflected by broadcast licensing requirements that the licence holder be a fit and proper person. It has been reflected in social requirements for children’s, education and news programs and Australian-content rules. These have steadily been eroded as the three Australian television networks chase money through ratings. The quality of local news has been eroded as the misguided aggregation policy made local channels ciphers for the networks and split into three the amount of locally generated advertising revenue available to finance local news. So outside cities of more than a million people, we get three third-rate news services instead of one passable one. This has been done in the name of competition.
The Coalition is silent.
With the press, Labor’s policies have resulted in every major paper in the country bar two being controlled by just two foreigners.
The Coalition is silent as to how this could be unwound.
A lot of attention about communications policy in Australia has centred on cross-media ownership. This is because it involves the big players: Packer, Murdoch and Black. Packer and Murdoch have made a mockery of the cross-media law. They have exceeded the plain-English intention of the law. Equally, the Candadian company CanWest has made a mockery of the plain-English intention of the foreign-control limit of 15 per cent in a television station. CanWest describes its 57 per cent ownership as an “”economic interest”.
The Coalition, which earlier said it would abandon cross-media rules, said only that it will have an inquiry.
It is fairly lame stuff. It was being seen to do something about what voterland might see as the big bad ogres of the Australian media scene, without proposiong anything that would actually achieve anything.
Indeed, the earlier policy of not worrying too much about cross-media ownership at least had the virtue of co-inciding with what its likely to become technological reality, and it would have been sensible if it had been combined with some policy that concerned itself with overall levels of communication ownership and foreign influence.
Obession with cross-media ownership will be out of place with converging communications technologies. Of more import than whether someone owns both a newspaper and a television broadcasting licence in one city, is the far more insidious monopolisation that is coming with ownership of the means of cable delivery into the home and ownership of huge amounts of text, picture and sound that will go through that cable.
What did we get from the Opposition? Only a band-aid about selling a third of Telstra and regulating local calls and rural subsidies. It has some supergficial electoral appeal, but does nothing to wind back the monopolisation and foreign ownership increase that occurred under Labor.
The Coalition simply does not address how Murdoch, through the Foxtel-Telstra partnership, is grabbing partial control over large amounts of the phone network that were, and should have remained, a public asset.
On pay-television and competition in the phone market, the Coalition does not appear to understand the issue. Like Labor, it does not understand that it is foolish to divide the markets into pay TV on one hand and telephones on the other. Rather , it should divide them into delivery infrastructure (how it is delivered) and content (what is delivered).
The distinction between the transmission of a conversation (sound) and text (fax), on one hand, and the transmission of a television signal (sound and picture) and electronic newspapers (text) is artifical. You can put either just as easily down the same cable.
When that is understood, it follows that it was stupid to permit those who own the infrastructure to get into bed with those who control the content, because they create a vertical monopoly. We now have two vertical monopolies: Telstra-Foxtel and Optus. It is not real competition.
Real competition would have been created if we had had one owner of the infrastructure (Telstra) and a dozen or more content providers (of phone, pay TV and other services). And one cable could carry dozens of content signals it with ease.
It would not matter if the single infrastructure owner was public, private or a combination. That would have saved the ludicrous waste of Optus laying out expensive cable to compete against Telstra-Foxtel.
Similarly with the mobile phone network. Sure, let’s have three competing service (content) providers, but why have three infrastructure networks with three towers on every hill?
What does the Opposition offer? Band-aids. Councils will have a greater say in how these three inefficient organisations will place their unnecessary towers and councils will have a greater say over how Optus lays its unnecessary cable. There is no long-term policy on how to reverse the worse of Labor’s follies.
The issue should never have been privatisation for its own sake. Nor should policy have been been predicated on dismantling every monopoly in favour of notional (NOTIONAL) competition which only delivers anti-competive duopolies. Communications policy demanded a rare combination of vision and practicality; instead all we have had from both sides is myopia, and from Labor, self-interested expediency.
Before the election, the Coalition should go back to the drawing boards and construct a coherent picture of where it would like to see Australia’s converging network in 10 years times … both technologically and economiclly.
Putting electorally soothing band-aids over one or two sore spots is no substitute for that. After the compromising and undermining of the ideals of diversity, standards, competition and efficiency in commuinications by Labor, Australians deserve a presentable alternative. They have not yet got it.