14.8.12 Adjournment: Press Freedom in Australia

Mr HAWKE (Mitchell) (21:49): I rise tonight to note something that I think this House should note with great concern—and that is that Reporters Without Borders have recently recorded that in the international ranking of press freedom Australia has slipped from 18 to 30. In particular I want to raise a proposal made in the winter break by the member for Fraser, who came forward—sometimes you do not want to give credibility to these things, but I think this ought to be explored—with the idea of subsidies for the media in Australia. The idea was that the government would issue government and taxpayer funded subsidies to various media outlets based on undefined criteria.

Why would such a proposal be relevant for this House to consider today? It is because this government has an ongoing record of dealing with the media that I think is contrary to the principles of freedom. I want to quote the member for Fraser in relation to this because I think his arguments and thinking as to why you would have subsidies for the media in Australia highlight something. In an article entitled 'The naked truth? Media and politics in the digital age', the member for Fraser talked about all the changes in media in today's world and the economy. We all know about them—the decline of print media and the increase in technology, something that he regards as lamentable. He comes to the conclusion that:

The changes afoot aren’t ideologically neutral: they’re particularly beneficial for populists and libertarians, and confronting for long-game reformers.

The changes he is referring to are a more informed public and better access to information for the individual citizen in the world and in Australia today. They are not ideologically neutral, according to the member for Fraser.

The member for Fraser's solution is to come forward with taxpayer funded money, appropriating money off hardworking people and giving it to people whose opinions presumably the member for Fraser supports. That is something which I think is quite ridiculous. It is akin to the member for Fraser being in this chamber in the era when the motor vehicle came forward for the first time and replaced the horse, saying: 'We will subsidise blacksmithing. We really need to put government money into horseshoes because, if we don't, the horseshoe will disappear.'

This would all be entertaining, quite funny, quite irrelevant and not worth the House's time if we did not have a minister for communications who has spent the last year or two quite seriously attempting to encroach on press freedom in Australia, one of the reasons we have dropped from 18 to 30 in the world ranking of Reporters Without Borders.

The Finkelstein inquiry I think represents a great threat to press freedom in Australia today. In the break we were privileged to see the Leader of the Opposition come forward and give a speech on freedom of speech. Indeed, he committed the coalition to some very important policy responses that I think the media should carefully look at in this country today. You can have a Labor government funded model where the taxpayer will fund you depending on whether your opinion is liked by the government, or you can have a government which will repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in its current form and therefore increase the level of media and individual freedom, allowing people to make the comments that they wish to make. That is a fundamental principle that our democracy has been built on.

I also want to note that in the member for Fraser's long dissertation on the media today, which quoted a series of sources, he talked about nastiness, shallowness and all the reporting that he does not like. His response is not to say, 'I defend whatever you want to say because you should be free to say it.' His response is to say, 'I want to subsidise those opinions that I like with somebody else's money.' It is an ill thought out and poor proposal when you consider that almost every country in Europe is rushing to scale back its subsidies of the media because of the great waste of taxpayers' money that they have produced. No country could be a better example of that than Italy, where politicians are actually funded to print their own newspapers. The Monti government is busy at the moment implementing stringent cuts to make sure that it saves the hugely wasteful expenses that we have seen in socialist countries in Europe in the funding of opinions that the government supports.

In plenty of academic papers, which I do not have time to go into here today, the argument and the thesis have been put forward that government funding of the media—subsidies, in effect—produces worse journalism and less diversity and choice. For the member for Fraser, in a pluralistic and free democratic country with a great press and individual freedom, to come into this House using the privilege that he has to speak freely in this chamber to lament the freedom of the press and say we should fund it with somebody else's money—he has no interest in earning it or in where it comes from—I think is regrettable