MEDIA, MISREPORTING

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY (15:49): Could I firstly just make some comments about the diatribe we heard just a few minutes ago from the Hon. Mr Lucas who, of course, is celebrating his 29^th year in parliament, I believe it is—21 of those in opposition; no wonder he is frustrated. But the reality is, of course, that the disunity is not within the government ranks, but within the opposition. Of course, opposition leader Isobel Redmond is desperate to avoid a reshuffle, because she does not want to offend members of her own party, because she will have to get rid of some of the nonperformers, and we know what occurs when that happens. To put some perspective on his diatribe, it is really disunity in the Liberal Party that he is seeking to cover at the moment.

I want to talk more generally about some of the trends in our society. A healthy democracy is crucially dependent on the availability of information. The better informed the public, the better decision-making will be. As recently as 10 years ago, there is no doubt that governments held a key advantage in the control of information. Indeed, the greater use of parliamentary committees and freedom of information laws developed over the past few decades were in response to what was perceived as this imbalance in the control of information.

What I believe has happened in recent times is that the internet and the rise of social networking has totally shifted this equation. In past eras, when journalists jealously guarded their integrity, newspapers purported to cover events accurately, and they were the main source of information for the public. Stories were checked for fact and, when errors did occur, they were corrected.

Talkback radio, of course, has always been somewhat less concerned with ethics or facts, but there was in past times at least a token recognition that both sides to an issue should be aired. I know that when I was elected a minister back in 2002, misreporting of events then was rare enough to make it worthwhile to respond to such errors, with a letter to the editor, for example. In 2011, misreporting—in many cases, unfortunately, deliberate misreporting—has become so prevalent that it would require an army to correct.

As I discovered a few months ago, when a minister writes to the Editor of The Advertiser to correct a gross error in a letter from a correspondent to the editor—indeed, it was an outright lie—the correction may not be printed. To add insult to injury, in that case The Advertiser then allowed the lie to be repeated in a further letter, with the comment that the original claim must have been true because it was not corrected by me. This decline in newspaper ethics is, of course, partly driven by competition for readership from online media.

I commend to members the recent book Man Bites Murdoch, which was written by a former editor of the Sunday Age and the Herald Sun, Bruce Guthrie, and to anyone who has in an interest in how the Murdoch press operates and what the perception of its proprietor is of ethics. However, fewer people are reading newspapers and still fewer believe what they read, and it is becoming obvious, I think, that newspapers will be obsolete in as little as five years' time.

The alternative source of information, which is online information, presents a much greater challenge to a healthy democracy and an even greater challenge, I believe, to civility in politics. Do-it-yourself journalism, freed from the need to check facts, to obtain alternative views, to obey the laws of libel or to uphold even the most basic standards of fairness and decency, is now becoming the dominant means of disseminating information. Hatred and abuse are increasingly replacing argument in political debate.

Sadly, I believe there are examples where the present opposition, both state and federal, are fanning this trend. If one looks overseas, one can see that violence against politicians is an inevitable consequence of this trend, and I am particularly referring to the United States. The key question for any government now is how you engage with the public on difficult and complex issues. We regularly hear the mantra that we need more consultation on government policies, but what these people really mean by consultation is, 'My telling you what I want and then you doing it.'

Online networking has opened many new opportunities for public engagement, but it has also greatly magnified the capacity for disseminating false, misleading and inflammatory information. We need a much better informed public for big issues of the day, such as marine protection, future population growth, etc.

Time expired.