The Federal Government is preparing new legislation on media ownership to be introduced in the first session this year. The legislation will change the existing laws which limit each individual foreign investor to a 15 per cent holding in a free-to-air television network, 20 per cent in pay TV and 25 per cent in major newspapers. They also limit a proprietor from owning both a newspaper and television station in one market.
The great difficulty with media law changes in Australia is that governments of both sides of politics fear upsetting the major protagonists. Past experience shows that any government brave enough to propose changes that would affect the interests of major proprietors get savaged. It means that reform that puts the public interest first has escaped Australian Parliaments. Occasionally a compromise goes through, when the major proprietors see it as not offending their interests. In the period of the Hawke Government the present laws were framed so that, in the words of Paul Keating, one could either be a prince of print or a queen of the screen, but not both. At the time Kerry Packer was concentrating on television and Rupert Murdoch on print, so it suited them.
Times have changed. Mr Packer has since intensified his ambition to control the Fairfax newspapers and Mr Murdoch has his eye on setting up a fourth commercial television network.
It is clear that the present rules have failed in achieving diversity of ownership in the media. However, it would be difficult to argue that this has resulted in a lack of diversity of opinion between and within media outlets. Indeed, the fact that so many different opinions are expressed in the same outlet, indicates that diversity of ownership is not a pre-condition for diversity of opinion.
If Mr Packer were to gain financial control of the Fairfax chain, it would make little difference to diversity of opinions being expressed. Indeed, with the extra cash he could inject into it, it might increase the space available for more opinion and more news coverage. And who knows he might set up some new newspapers to challenge Mr Murdoch’s News Ltd’s monopoly in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin.
Similarly, a fourth television network would be another outlet for more diverse coverage of news and opinion.
Moreover, the injection of some foreign capital might see more media outlets and therefore more diversity.
Labor says it is committed to guaranteeing diversity of ownership. Well it has missed the boat. The regime set up by Labor enabled the greatest concentration of newspaper ownership the nation has ever seen.
The Government wants to ensure that if a newspaper and television or radio were operated by the same proprietor, they would have to have separate journalistic operations and maintain existing levels of locally produced news and information. That would be a welcome change. As Canberrans have seen over the past two decades, local news and information on television and radio has fallen, irrespective of ownership rules.
Irrespective of what happens on the ownership front, the Government could at one sweep increase diversity by changing its strict digital-television regime that dictates that the three commercial and two public broadcasters use the lion’s share of their spectrum to put out just one super high-definition signal instead of letting them put out up to five standard-definition digital signals with five times the diversity. Standard definition is used in Europe and the receiving sets are cheaper than high-definition.
If Communications Minister Richard Alston is serious about new technologies providing diversity, as he professes, this is the first step.