The debate that dare not speak its name

Australia’s democracy survived by 37 votes to 32 tonight, when the Senate insisted that Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer not be permitted to overwhelmingly control Australia’s media.

Not that you’d have known it by watching the debate. Just about everyone was careful not to name the names, or the fear. It was put in terms of ‘the public interest”, or, as Brian Harradine, the grand old man of the Senate, put it, “to the heart of diversity and indeed of democracy”.

Everyone who’s anyone is scared to state the stark facts. The Labor Party is scared that the combined media power of Packer and Murdoch could destroy their chances of winning an election. Media players either fear for their jobs if they speak out or are trying to position themselves to be given senior roles in the new media landscape. Despite the almost incalculable importance of the Senate debate this week for Australia, no mainstream print media except the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age has run an opinion piece stating the case against the bill.

Yet the Labor Party, the Democrats and the Greens opposed it outright. Three of the the four independent Senators whose votes the Government needed wanted to pass the bill, either to allow cash strapped regional media players to bulk up by letting them own newspapers and television in the same market, or to scrape together a few extra bucks for the ABC.

But in the end, despite enormous pressure, all four independents had the courage and integrity to stop the Howard government so obscenely extending the media dominance of Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch into almost complete control.

Harradine’s amendment was simple. No proprietor would be permitted to own a television station and a newspaper in a mainland capital city. Without that amendment, Rupert Murdoch could have bought a television network, adding to his dominance of our print media. Kerry Packer could have added Fairfax to his Nine Network. These men are the wealthiest, most powerful and most feared men in Australian life. Their power is so great that successive Prime Ministers have sought to curry favour with one or both of them in the hope that with their help they can retain government. It is very rare for either main party to reject their demands.

The cross media bill, if passed, would have seen these two men control our two national dailies, two of our three commercial television stations, virtually all our business magazines and our two preeminent news internet sites. All other media players would be reduced to picking up the crumbs from their table, and none – not even the ABC – would dare to scrutinise their business activities or their media performance. The two men would control the news cycle and the news slant (when they so wished). Cross promotion and cross packaging of advertising could crush any other player and tie up news exclusives as a matter of routine.

No government could dare offend them. No business group could dare take them on. One of the world’s most powerful media moguls and Australia’s richest, most powerful man would run Australia.

The independents strongly urged communications minister, Senator Alston, to accept the bill with the Harradine amendment. It would allow foreign money to flow into our media and it would allow regional players to get bigger and more financially secure. They reminded Alston that he’d said that it was the regional players who were desperate for the bill, not the big two, who were already “entrenched”.

Senator Harradine noted that without his amendment, a TV proprietor with a potential audience reach of 70 percent (Kerry Packer” could sell to a newspaper group with 70 percent of the audience (Murdoch). Such reach and power “is totally unacceptable to the public interest.” He noted that the Government’s own Productivity Commission reported in 2000 that it had a strong preference for more, not fewer, media players, because of “the likelihood that a proprietor will influence the content and opinion” of his publications. This was a matter of “major concern”, the Commission said.

Yet Alston replied that the Harradine amendment “goes to the heart of the legislation”, and that without it the bill was dead. His only response to the fear of total dominance was that “those not interested in change pretend that diversity of numbers are the be all and end all of the game”.

The government has lost the game, for now,. But Packer and Murdoch are now desperately close to their goal, and each time the battlelines are drawn between the interests of the big two and the public interest there are an ever-diminishing number of Australians with a public voice or with any power who are prepared to take the risk of taking them on.

Indeed, we are now in the position that very few ordinary Australians were even aware what fate could await them tonight if the Harradine amendment had not passed.

But the respite could be brief. The government may set up the bill as another double dissolution trigger, meaning it could pass it in a joint sitting upon the reelection of John Howard. Or some of the independents, already shaky, could go weak at the knees.

One can’t help feeling that the end game is very, very near.

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