The Federal Government failed again in the past week to stand up against media monopoly in Australia.
Two deals by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd display the weakness of government to act in the public interest in the face of large vertical monopolies. One is the pay-TV deal it signed with Telecom and the other is its attempt to set up a rugby superleague.
They highlight five corrosive elements of present media policy: foreign and cross-media ownership; threats to Australian culture; disadvantage to people outside the capitals; inefficient duplication of resources; and governmental reliance on process and legalism rather than results.
In Murdoch’s Weekend Australian (he and Fairfax own nearly every major daily in the country) the lead story was “”Telecom, News in $4bn pay TV deal.”
It ends Paul Keating’s much vaunted “”Prince of Print; Queen of Screen” statement, when he pledged Labor would unravel Liberal policy that allowed cross-ownership.
And in a break-out story underneath we had the heading “”Arthurson’s position shaky”. Ken Arthurson is chair of the Australian Rugby League which refuses to bow to Murdoch’s pressure to create a Superleague. The story was just the opinion of one of The Australian’s writers saying the Arthurson style is outdated _ a case of the Murdoch press abusing its position by pushing Murdoch’s own business and undermining his opponents.
What of the pay TV deal? It will be a 64-channel cable network in competition with Optus’s 64-channel cable network. So the country is to have two cable networks. Surely, one network with two carriers would be less wasteful and ample for anyone’s TV needs. But that would have required government action which would have upset the media barons who might rile against the government and threaten its re-election chances.
Moreover, the two consortiums will determine the content of these networks. You will watch Mr Murdoch’s league.
What provision, if any, will there be for the experimental, the low-budget, the irreverent and the diverse, the producers of which need access to a network?
And where will these networks go? Into the homes of the major cities where the profits are. No-one is going to run cable into regional Australia for a long time.
The co-incidence of the superleague and pay-TV deals should be a warning. Murdoch wants league because it is played in Britain, France, New Zealand and the South Pacific. It is international and therefore pays bigger bucks. It will be watched by Murdoch’s British audience and will no doubt be supported by his British newspapers.
Too bad for Australian rules. Murdoch plans to build a league stadium in Melbourne to drag away that audience. And no doubt the glamour and pay of his league stars will slowly entice the kids away from Aussie rules.
It is a prime example of the undermining of Australian culture.
It is early enough to nip it in the bud. But what was the Government’s response?
A spokesman for Communications Minister Michael Lee said the government provisions to ensure elite sporting events remained on free-to-air TV only meant (ital) existing (end ital) competitions. It did not cover new competitions. (Even if the new competition is based on the old one’s enticed-away players.)
What sort of gutless, semantic legalism is that? And that has been the history of Labor’s media policy _ allowing mates and moguls to do what they like within the letter of the policy and the law, irrespective of the flagrant breach of its spirit.
If Lee and his ministers have not got the courage to act, the Labor caucus should. It should unravel these networks of vertical monopolies) before we get the reverse of what a good policy should provide.
We should have an efficient single carrier with a great diversity of content. Instead we are headed for two carriers and little diversity in content.
In short, the events involving Murdoch over the past week reveal the weakness of the past decade of the Government’s media and communications policy which if it does not correct through fear of retribution, demonstrates the policy’s ultimate corruption.
To have created the policy might have been a bungle; to continue with its after its demonstrated danger is immoral.