The Greens’ call for a media inquiry won’t get up, and nor should it.

There’s a key difference between politicians inquiring into how we regulate media, and inquiring into the media itself. The issues the Greens want addressed veer over into the latter. And the potential for favours, anticipation of future reward and get-squares is too great. Moreover, the whole thing will look like a Murdoch-bashing exercise. The problems of Australian media aren’t confined by any stretch to News Limited, especially when you take into account that newspapers are a declining, ageing medium with significantly less influence than the major television networks in shaping voters’ perceptions.

But more to the point, the two key issues to emerge from both the phone-hacking affair and the way News Ltd’s newspapers debase and defile public debate in Australia — the need for a statutory right to privacy and an examination of media diversity — are already the subject of separate processes. The government has yet to outline how it will respond to the ALRC’s 2008 recommendation about the need for a statutory right to privacy (strongly opposed by all the mainstream media, not just News Ltd). The phone-hacking scandal and the growing threat of super-injunctions in the UK couldn’t have come at a better time from that point of view — anything less than Labor adopting a statutory right to privacy (with a public interest exception) will look a profound misjudgment.

And as previously noted, the remit of the convergence review covers media diversity. There’s more potential from an independent review of diversity than from a Senate inquiry, although the last serious independent review of media regulation, the Productivity Commission’s Broadcasting review in 2000, was simply ignored by the Howard government.

The right to privacy is the easier issue. The ALRC has made its recommendations; either the government accepts them or it doesn’t. If it does, it can seek to legislate. It is likely the Greens would support a right to privacy. Tony Abbott, because he’d oppose motherhood if Labor proposed it, and because he’s keen to retain News Ltd’s favour, would oppose it. It would be down to the crossbenches.

Diversity is a more complex issue because, whether you’re an embittered veteran of the media regulatory wars or a misty-eyed neophyte who thinks a “public interest test” would solve everything, sooner or later you run up against the problem that Australia lacks media diversity and the only way to get it back is to force some of the six big media groups that dominate the Australian media landscape to divest some assets.

That’s a step well beyond anything previous parliaments have been prepared to come at — telling the Murdochs, or the Packers, or the Stokes, or the Gordons, that they’ve got to sell some newspapers or broadcasting licences or shareholdings. And, I’d venture, there’s no way either of the major parties would ever contemplate forcing divestiture.

That’s the threshold issue for media diversity. At best, politicians will only ever preserve the diversity we’ve got left, not go out and create some more.

There’s an analogous problem, though, with regional media diversity. People living even in large regional centres have significantly less media diversity than people in the capitals. Radio, particularly, is almost devoid of local content — regional radio is rife with networked, sometimes out-of-state content, ruthless minimum wage employment and cosy deals between notional competitors. While the Howard government made a half-baked effort to save regional radio content at the behest of the Nationals, its de facto solution was to fill the hole left by the abandonment of regional communities by radio licence owners with the ABC.

The ABC takes local communities seriously, takes its role as an emergency broadcaster very seriously, and has long effectively married local radio with local online sites. Its regional radio network expanded under the Howard government courtesy of additional funding for regional content.

Unlike forced divestiture, additional resourcing for news and current affairs for the ABC is not merely within the government’s control — it doesn’t even need to legislate for it beyond a budget bill — but politically acceptable, except inevitably to the Friends of the ABC, whose Fair Trade soyaccinos will surely froth with fury at the notion of “tied funding”. It’s a second best option, but in the absence of more voices, improving the publicly funded voices is the next-best option.

The ABC’s news and current affairs coverage is extraordinarily patchy and frequently acts as an echo chamber for News Ltd. Radio National Breakfast routinely relies on that day’s edition of The Australian to shape the program’s political coverage. The ABC’s online news coverage is often sloppy, with opposition press releases frequently run almost verbatim as news. Insiders’ “conservative” panellists are primarily drawn from News Ltd outlets, which ignores the substantial number of far better conservative and libertarian commentators outside their pages. And its “Online Investigative Unit” seems obsessed with replicating News Ltd campaigns against Labor, from the BER to the NBN. A substantial injection of permanent funding might enable the ABC’s editors and producers to lift their game and contribute more effectively as an independent news outlet.

Where would the funding come from? Well, for starters, dumping the Australia Network would free up a substantial amount of funding.

As has been made plain by News Ltd’s long-running  campaign against the ABC, and James Murdoch’s splenetic and, in the context of recent events, comic railing at the BBC in his 2009 MacTaggart Lecture, the Murdochs fear and despise a well-funded, independent public broadcaster. For anyone interested in media diversity, that’s a clear guide to a diversity strategy.