Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has announced a minimalist package of media regulatory reforms with the goal of rapid passage through Parliament as the government runs out of time before the election to deliver a comprehensive response to the Convergence and Finkelstein reviews.
The package consists of:
- A new public interest test for media mergers of national significance. Media companies from the commercial television, commercial radio, subscription TV platforms (e.g. Foxtel), subscription TV news channels, newspapers and online news services (with subscribers) will be caught by the new test if they are above a certain size in terms of readership (understood to be 30% of an average metro commercial evening news bulletin audience, orcurrently around 59,000). The test will require any mergers to be assessed against the requirement that they do not result in a substantial lessening of diversity or the public benefit outweighs the reduction in diversity.
- A new print/online media self-regulatory framework in which industry self-regulatory bodies will be required to demonstrate a capacity to enforce current media standards.
- A Public Interest Media Advocate who will determine the capacity of self-regulatory bodies to enforce standards and implement the public interest test.
- As promised, a permanent halving of the commercial television licence fee rebate.
- A referral to a joint parliamentary committee of proposals to remove the current 75% reach limit and to add program outsourcing to the issues that determine control of a television licence;
- Referring (back) to the Australian Law Reform Commission the issue of a statutory right to privacy;
- A permanent allocation of spectrum to community television.
- Updating the ABC and SBS charters to reflect their online and, where appropriate, international activities.
Conroy was blunt about why the 75% rule removal had been referred to a committee: the outbreak of dissension among the metro commercial free-to-air networks meant the proposal needed to be considered further, but that if a quick consensus could be reached on it the removal would be added to the legislative package. Both Seven and Ten have retreated from support for the removal of the 75% reach rule with news Southern Cross Media has been considering a merger with the Nine Network.
Conroy was blunter still about the government’s interest in finessing the package past the crossbenches and through the Senate, saying it won’t be “bartering” over the legislation and if it isn’t past next week it will drop the package.
The government has thus presented the Greens, which have been pushing hard for rapid action on media reform, with a fait accompli — either support the government’s reforms or see nothing happen at all before, as seems likely, the Coalition is returned to power.
COMMENT:
After months of debate and endless predictions that it was about to be released, this is a minimalist reform package from Labor. The public interest test — the nature of which won’t be revealed until we see the legislation later this week — will overlay the current ownership restrictions, although it will embrace a wider range of media groups than the current media ownership laws, which are confined to major newspapers, commercial television and commercial radio (and which doesn’t include national dailies The Australian and The Australian Financial Review, which currently aren’t caught by radio licence area-based ownership restrictions).
For the first time, subscription television and online publications, if sufficiently large, will be captured by media ownership laws. The test also adds a third regulatory layer to the media merger approval process — mergers now need to be considered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the Australian Communications and Media Authority and the new Media Advocate.
In exchange, the commercial television networks get their permanent licence fee reduction, with the notional quid pro quo of Australian content requirements that are already below current multichannel local content levels. A final judgment on the public interest test awaits the detail of the legislation, but it will be hard to avoid the core problem of a subjective, qualitative test — the uncertainty that attends the test for media companies, consumers and people opposed to individual mergers.
Conroy has also minimised, but by no means eliminated, the chances of a stoush with newspapers by opting for strong requirements for a newspaper/online self-regulatory régime, with the incentive of protection from existing privacy laws, rather than imposing any government regulation or funding a new mechanism.
Conroy has also sought to address a problem that has particularly vexed Labor — the growing News Limited influence over the Ten Network — by proposing that provision of news and current affairs programming be added to the legislated criteria in the schedules of the Broadcasting Services Act by which ACMA might determine that a party providing news and current affairs programming is a “controller” of a television licensee, even if they don’t own any part of the licensee or have a board presence. This is a subtler way of addressing the issue than simply banning it or seeking to impose intrusive, bureaucratic rules on media outlets as the Howard government did with local content on radio, but Conroy has played it safe by sending it off to a committee.
Moreover, by referring a statutory right to privacy back to the ALRC, which looked in vast depth at privacy in 2009 — there have already been four inquiries over the last five years devoted wholly or partially to privacy including that one — Conroy is safely deferring the issue off beyond the election. But a statutory right to privacy, coupled with a public interest exemption, remains the most significant omission in Australia’s media regulatory framework and one that courts and judges are likely to increasingly address themselves without waiting for media-wary politicians to act.
The update to the ABC and SBS charters, which some of us proposed within government a decade ago, is long overdue. But the decision to permanently allocate spectrum to the pointless and irrelevant community television sector is a disappointment — that spectrum is better off opened up to the market to see what competition brings.
Overall as a response to the Convergence Review — which proposed a genuinely innovative and forward-looking set of reforms to both the substance and the framework of media regulation — it’s probably best forgotten about. The Convergence Review, it seems, will join the many other significant reports on media regulation that have been ignored by governments.
So let’s say TEN keep going down as they have been, would the new Public Interest Media Advocate decide that rather than losing a 3rd Commercial TV Network like TEN altogether, that it would be in the public interest to allow Foxtel to buy it and run it as there Free To Air Network (like Sky did in New Zealand with Prime).
What is the logic of halving the licence fees for TV stations and then doubling the licence fees for mobile phone companies. The fees for mobile spectrum is a direct cost for the consumer and is passed on directly to consumers, where as TV licence fees are passed on to the advertisers if possible. This is a labor government looking after the big end of town while pretending to look after consumers.
The bastardised Kennedy refrain, ” Ask not what you may expect from Murdoch but rather ask what you may do for Murdoch” should be aptly added to the Australian slang lexicon
Is the threshold for being considered significant for merger and acquisition purposes to be benchmarked by an average metro commercial evening news bulletin audience?
I had the impression that the reforms are at least in part required because of the declining relevance of things like the evening news bulletin. If that audience is to decline, the benchmark will get relatively lower over time, capturing smaller and smaller operators.
It strikes me as an odd measure to use, perhaps even representing the opposite of the point of all this.
Regulation of an struggling industry that is important to democracy benchmarked on the number of people who are interested in helicopter footage of a traffic jam. Woo!
Mr Keane ought to familiarise himself with the facts about the not for profit community broadcasting sector before offering his opinion on community television. There are thousands of community program makers across all sectors of society including the CALD sector, plus universities and TAFE colleges (students & lecturers alike), and viewers who would strongly disagree with his sentiment about community television (CTV). Not to mention the many volunteers who through open public access to free-to-air television have been able to learn the craft of television production, materially improving their resumes and then been able go on to working in the mainstream television and production industries, either behind, or in some cases in front of, the camera.
To clarify, community television only uses bandwidth for one standard definition channel, potentially leaving space on the same spectrum for three or four more channels (as technology currently stands), which, as he rightly suggests, can be ‘opened up to the market to see what competition brings’ in the future. However, opening up the spectrum for multichannel use on a national basis would require an immense investment of transmission infrastructure. Given that the existing commercial network operators have already sought and gained concessions on their licence fees, it is clear that there is not the money in commercial broadcasting that there used to be. A fourth commercial network is unlikely to be viable in a marketplace where the Ten Network is already struggling for viewers and is regularly beaten in the ratings by the ABC. It would be a bold media company indeed that started the process of rolling out a transmission chain across Australia in the hope that they might gain a foothold in an already very competitive television landscape.
CTV does not receive any financial support from the government. Aside from access to a minimal amount of broadcasting spectrum, the provision of community television costs the government nothing. Its broadcasters survive on their wits, doing the best they can in the extremely heavily regulated environment in which they operate.
The primary purpose of community television is to provide public access to the dominant medium of free-to-air television, allowing interested members of the community to conceive, write and produce television programs that are broadcast to thousands of people. Viewers gain value from having a television service available which is a distinct alternative to other television channels. Community television provides program content that the audience cannot see elsewhere, within the familiar and accessible format of free-to-air television. Community television is an important and worthwhile part of the Australian free-to-air television broadcasting landscape.
But then that’s the CTV sector’s opinion! We should let the many thousands who participate in making and watching community television have the final word.