Senator RYAN (Victoria) (15:22): If we on this side are going to be accused of baying and howling in defence of freedom of speech, I plead guilty.
For the modern-day Labor Party to come in here and say this side of parliament is trying to take care of media moguls, given their own history, shows the bankruptcy of their knowledge of their behaviour when they were last in office.
Everyone here remembers what the Labor Party did to the Herald and Weekly Times, Australia’s largest and oldest media group, and it was referred to on Melbourne radio this morning. Because the Melbourne Herald held Labor to account in 1984 and because it attacked Labor for introducing a pension assets and means test which Labor had promised not to introduce, Paul Keating went out and made sure Labor fixed the Herald and Weekly Times. He changed the law to create the so-called princes of print or queens of the screen, all as a means to go after the then independent Herald and Weekly Times, which was the owner of most of the popular mastheads in Australia.
That has been preached about by Labor Party luminaries. That is not a secret, so the Labor Party’s behaviour about appeasing moguls and trying to buy favours is well established.
And Australia, as many people have said for a long time, is at a loss for the loss of the Herald and Weekly Times. Everyone who worked there will tell you what it was about: it was about Labor going after the independent Herald and Weekly Times because they dared oppose the Hawke government and were holding it to account for breaching a promise.
Senator Conroy’s hypocrisy here is equal in doses to what we have had from every other Labor speaker. This is something Senator Conroy said in 2006 and it was tweeted today:
Helen Coonan’s announcements today represent an arrogant Government that’s ramming through the Parliament the most significant changes in 20 years, and they are only going to allow one month of consultations for the public, despite them spending 12 months having private consultations with all the media moguls.
An entire month for the public to consider it, let alone the parliament to consider it, when Senator Conroy is announcing to the people of Australia: ‘We’re going to regulate the media, we’re going to set up an effective licensing regime for journalists and we are going to give you eight days to think about it.’
If you actually raise any questions, if you dare to express a concern about the regulation of journalistic behaviour, then the government will not listen to it because Senator Conroy, wise as he is, has made his decision. This is a vehicle for regulation.
The Labor Party will obfuscate and try and muddy the waters by asserting in Orwellian tones: ‘This is not regulation. We’re not licensing journalists.’ Yet when every significant media player in this country, whether it is Business Spectator, the Fairfax press, the ABC or News Ltd, is saying what a chilling effect this will have on the independence of the free press we know what the real impact is.
This government, to its credit, has never, with its Greens cousins and allies, hidden its agenda. You dare criticise them and they will come after you, except if you happen to go skiing at Aspen, or wherever Senator Conroy went skiing and halved the licence fee. Apparently that is not doing a deal with a media mogul, but imagine if it happened elsewhere. I should say, before he corrects the record, it was snowboarding and not skiing.
This is a threat, because what we have is a threat by the government to use the power it has to pass laws to provide extra regulations for journalists and press organisations if they do not comply with what the government deems to be an appropriate regulatory mechanism. That is the gun to the head of an independent media.
The other side rightly quotes the shield laws. We rightly have long had special rules and principles for a free media. They are not called the fourth estate for nothing, because even though we will all be criticised by them they play the most valuable role in a free democracy.
Freedom of speech, along with freedom of property and freedom of religion—two other rights under threat by this government—is the very basis of a liberal democracy. Freedom of the ballot came along after we had freedom of speech and people could demand it. But that is not good enough for this government. That is not good enough for Senator Conroy, who seeks to regulate the behaviour of journalists, because they have been critical of a government that deserves it.
I could not go past this debate without a couple of Orwellian quotes. In Animal Farm there is a famous character called Comrade Napoleon. If it were parliamentary I would refer to him as Senator Napoleon, but that would not be parliamentary. Comrade Napoleon says all animals are equal. He goes on:
He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
We would be in a free and liberal society which is under threat from Senator Conroy’s vindictive measures.