Media Funding

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (15:26): A free, objective and well-resourced media is an essential foundation for democratic societies. Journalists provide the transparency and public scrutiny of public actors, including trade unions, corporations, business and political organisations and parliaments. I rise today to emphasise the importance of their role in our society and the government's fundamental responsibility to adequately fund our public broadcasters.

In Australia, it has traditionally been the public media that has fiercely pursued issues that often the corporate media outlets are hesitant to cover. An example would be on 28 June of this year, when ABC journalist Patrick Martin published a story about the alleged rorting of the country members' allowance in South Australia. The forensic examination of publicly available records, freedom of information request documents and other information uncovered a number of significant issues that we are all now well aware of.

The story and subsequent reporting on the issue has now claimed three ministers, a Legislative Council president and a government whip. It has led to an ICAC investigation and potentially further parliamentary and public scrutiny. The story joins a list of significant investigative journalism our public broadcaster has brought to the homes of Australians. From the greyhound industry's culling of greyhounds, war crimes allegedly committed by SAS soldiers or the parliamentary misconduct of Mr Eddie Obeid, our public broadcaster has continued to provide fearless reporting on significant issues affecting our state and our nation.

Photographers, editors, reporters, film crew, administration staff, marketing and communication officers, social media specialists, graphic designers and other professionals dedicate their careers to public interest reporting and holding the powerful in society to account. They deserve their role in our democracy to be recognised and respected, but unfortunately they get just the opposite from Liberal governments around our nation.

Everyone here, I am sure, will remember Tony Abbott standing up and telling the nation on the eve of the 2013 election that there would be no cuts to the ABC or SBS. We all know how that went. At his first budget, Tony Abbott and his Liberal government slashed the ABC's budget by $254 million. Since then, the Liberals have cut the ABC budget by $783 million, including the Morrison government's most recent $84 million cuts in the last budget. As journalist David Hardaker put it in Crikey recently:

The government will give nothing, despite the ABC pouring massive resources into covering the bushfires [and informing Australians during that crisis] and despite the hundreds of employees who find themselves out on the streets in a recession.

These funding cuts are also coupled with the axing of the two out of three cross-media control rules and the 75 per cent audience reach rule. Effectively, that means fewer journalists and less media diversity in our country.

Our public broadcaster and the Australian people do not deserve this. The federal government's slashing of funding to the ABC, deregulation and giving taxpayer-funded handouts to Rupert Murdoch's corporations, whilst attacking individual journalists calling for their sacking, is a disgrace. Perhaps the biggest disgrace was the extreme political attacks, led by our Prime Minister, on Emma Alberici, a talented journalist who was forced out of the ABC at the prompting of the Prime Minister.

When the public broadcaster is underfunded, the pursuit of journalism turns into clickbait stories, opinion articles, self-proclaimed bloggers and fake news, rather than a well-informed, well-researched and long-form media, which in the age of misinformation that we are in now is so very important.

The funding cuts and deregulation and inappropriate use of taxpayer funds have very serious consequences indeed. In the last two years we have seen those consequences, with 500 jobs axed at Newscorp, Channel 10 cancelling Adelaide broadcasting, Channel 7 sacking staff, Channel 9 cutting regional news services and 1,100 jobs slashed from the ABC.

In 2018, the Senate Select Committee on the Future of Public Interest Journalism made eight recommendations to enable a future for the media. One of the committee's presenters university researcher Dr Denis Muller argues the importance of a well-funded media, stating:

…if we value public interest journalism…I think we've reached the point where there is an unanswerable case for government financial intervention using a mechanism which guarantees independence of the media from government.

In a free and open democracy, every citizen must have access to an independent, free and fair media. I would like to thank members and organisers from the CPSU and the MEAA for their advocacy and support of journalists and the media.