The Productivity Commission’s report on broadcasting should be the catalyst to clean up the mess created by both major political parties. The history of Australian broadcasting law over the past two decades has been a litany of sycophancy, favouritism and fear. The major parties have lived in dread of offending the big media players, lest they be savaged in political coverage. The result has been mogul-specific laws rather than laws based on broad public-interest principles. The only time any balance has entered the policy debate is when the two big players have had such divergent interests that the major parties, out of fear of offending either, have favoured neither.
The result has been a highly concentrated media with a high degree of foreign ownership — the antithesis of the stated policy aims of both major parties and the broadcasting law itself.
The most recent pandering came with the Government’s enactment of its digital television policy. The Government handed the extra spectrum to the existing three commercial networks for virtually no cost and with no requirement on their part to diversify services. The result will be the same old content only broadcast in much higher definition and higher quality picture. The increase in quality of the picture is far higher than needed and higher than most Australian households will be able to afford. It would have been better to have insisted that some of the spectrum go to extra services and/or a fourth network, but such a plan would have offended the three existing networks, causing the major parties to fear on-air reprisals if they supported such a thing.
Under the Government’s digital proposals (most of which were supported by Labor when it came to the crunch) the viewing public will miss out and the networks will keep their cosy, concentrated and highly profitable advertising markets. The excuse is that the networks need time and money to invest in the new digital technology.
No other industry would get so protected by government from the advent of new technology.
The Productivity Commission has now sensibly advocated an end to this favouritism. It supports a freeing up of broadcasting to allow the entry of new players, including foreigners, subject only to the rules that apply to any other industry.
It supports and end to the cross-media-ownership rules. Given how ineffective they have been in preventing the concentration of media ownership, they could hardly be missed. Instead, monopoly tendencies would be dealt with like any other industry. And given the convergence of media technologies the rules are becoming irrelevant. The networks and the ABC already publish the equivalent of newspapers on the internet.
The commission recommends the repeal of the ban on a fourth network. It suggests that spectrum should be auctioned competitively by tender and that once bought there be no requirement for high definition broadcast. Rather the broadcaster would decide how much of its spectrum should go to extra quality and how much would go to extra channels.
The commission wants to relax Australian content rules, but not abandon them.
It has also proposed codes of conduct (including reporting ethics) with enforceable penalties. That would be bonus for the viewing a listening public.
Most of this is very sensible and obvious, but we must not hold our breath. The damning thing about the Productivity Commission’s recommendations is that they appear to be aimed at serving the viewing and listening public rather than the broadcasting moguls. The sad history of Australian broadcast law tells us that the major parties are more interested in the latter than the former.