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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
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PARLIAMENT (JOINT SERVICES) (WEBCASTING) AMENDMENT BILL

Introduction and First Reading

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (10:33): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to amend the Parliament (Joint Services) Act 1985. Read a first time.

Second Reading

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (10:33): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

It gives me great pleasure to move the Parliament (Joint Services) (Webcasting) Amendment Bill 2010, the first bill I have had the opportunity to move as a member in this house. This bill, simply put, will make parliamentary proceedings accessible to the public at large through the live streaming of those proceedings on the internet.

This is a straightforward bill. It contains two provisions, in effect; the first is that the proceedings of the House of Assembly and the Legislative Council should be made available through live transmission, either in audio or audiovisual form, to members of the public at a website maintained by the parliament.

I should point out that we already have a website maintained by the parliament (www.parliament.sa.gov.au), and we already have audio streams of the proceedings of the house and the council that are currently streamed through the television sets in this building. Connecting the two could hardly be an easier task, at no cost outlay. It could be enacted this afternoon were the government inclined to do so.

On the advice of the parliamentary drafters, though, I have been extremely generous in the suggested time frame, and the bill requires that it come into operation four months after assent. This would provide more than enough time to deal with every conceivable technical issue.

When I raised this issue during the adjournment debate in September, the Speaker suggested that video cameras will be installed in this chamber in due course. Of course, we have heard this refrain for a number of years now, and in the meantime every other parliament in every other state and territory in Australia, indeed, most parliaments in the world and a number of our local council chambers here in South Australia, have managed to install this facility, so I am not holding my breath. The bill, therefore, requires that the existing audio be put online immediately, with the video to follow when cameras are installed.

Frankly, there would be 100 politics and media students studying across the road who could stream our proceedings with their iPhones in return for a reference and some course credit, but my point is that there are no technological or financial hurdles to the implementation of this bill. Indeed, the required technology is so mundane that it was around during the last millennium. The second provision in the bill requires:

...that nothing prevents material transmitted in accordance with subsection (1) from being further transmitted by a person or organisation on another website.

This provision simply ensures that any media organisation, political website or special interest website that might seek to reproduce the live or delayed feed of parliamentary proceedings, should face no impediment in doing so. If they wished to do so, this would enable the ABC, for example, to stream our proceedings through digital radio for their listeners who might be missing Matt and Dave later in the morning. Adelaidenow could stream it on its website, to join the tweetings of Dan Wills and Sarah Martin.

The APAC public affairs TV channel has already signalled an interest in delivering a delayed broadcast, if the footage were available. Even the Premier's media unit could put a stream up on the Premier's website, although regular visitors to that website might be shocked to find out that he is not the only member in this house.

Responsibility for the oversight of these two provisions will rest with the Joint Parliamentary Service Committee. This bill introduces a new section 28A into the act which defines that committee's powers. I am sure that the JPSC will enjoy its association with this new role, in addition to the other roles and responsibilities the committee has in the presentation of this institution to the public who we are all here to serve.

So, to be clear, the Parliament (Joint Services)(Webcasting) Amendment Bill 2010 sets out a viable framework for this parliament to increase its level of accountability to the public by way of making our debates directly available to anyone with their own internet connection or access to one through a public library card.

Why is this important? Well, if anything we are doing in this place is important then I believe that it is crucial that it be done in an open and transparent manner, and through media that is accessible to the South Australian public who elect us and on whose behalf we enact legislation and pass budgets.

I think that members are kidding themselves and dealing themselves into irrelevance if they do not recognise the deep-seated public interest in some of the debates that take place here. Many members of the public care passionately about issues such as euthanasia, the future of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide Oval, the government's desalination plant, the forward selling of our forests, the closure of the eating disorders unit at Flinders Medical Centre—

Mr van Holst Pellekaan: Country health.

Mr GARDNER: —country health, the member for Stuart reminds me—or, indeed, the possibility of the government allowing mining, or not, at Arkaroola. Over 2,000 constituents in my electorate of Morialta and the neighbouring electorates of Hartley and Norwood, have gone to the trouble of circulating and signing petitions against the government's funding cuts at the Norwood Morialta High School where their children are being educated. I thank the member for Norwood for his strong work and advocacy on behalf of his constituents.

Some of these are complex issues, but we hide our discussions and debate behind a veil that is no longer appropriate, or defendable, in this day and age. It unfairly shields us from scrutiny by our constituents and it alienates many of those constituents who may wish to contribute to the public debate. This is no longer defensible.

A member of the public who might wish to make a fully informed contribution to the public debate on one of these matters would, naturally, want to be fully aware of the nature of the debate in this parliament. Their options are currently very limited.

First, they can come into the public gallery to witness proceedings. That is fine for those for whom this is convenient, but, for a start, it cuts out anyone who is not in Adelaide. In recent sitting weeks we have witnessed the fury of thousands of residents of the South-East of our state who have come in buses and trucks to show their anger about how the government is treating them. The hundred or so who were able to fit into the public gallery to watch question time were only able to do so on the day they had taken off work, closed their businesses, given up their income and gone to the expense of coming up here. On any other day of the year when their issue is discussed, they are unable to view or hear proceedings for the simple reason that they do not live in Adelaide, and that prevents them from being able to see the government held to account.

The public gallery, at times, can also be limited by space. During the debate in the Legislative Council on the proposed euthanasia legislation late last year, we saw that gallery filled near to capacity with interested citizens. It would be a disgrace if anyone were to be turned away from viewing those proceedings—proceedings on their behalf and which they pay for. Of course, the public gallery is inaccessible for the vast majority of the South Australian population whose work and family commitments, their frailty, disability or lack of transport make a trip to North Terrace to see the parliament out of the question.

The great majority of the public has the opportunity to read Hansard, it is true, but they must be prepared to wait two days for it to be published. At any rate, reading Hansard is utterly different from being able to view the chamber and this hardly provides a resolution that adds to free public debate. In reality, for almost everyone, the only way to get objectively presented news of the goings-on in here is through the good offices of our local media establishment.

Sometimes our press gallery here in Parliament House and the news services they are attached to get a bad rap—unfairly, in my opinion. I note that, after a bad opinion poll recently, the Premier felt the need to describe the newspaper that had delivered that bad news as 'Pravda for the Liberal Party'. Indeed, whenever things are going badly for the government, it always seems that some journalist or other is at fault for some wacky, outrageous story they have run that invariably turns out to be true a few months later.

Those who complain that the media do not report the news as it is, or that they focus on the wrong message, or that they trivialise politics, should ask themselves how credible this argument is when we do not even give our constituents the opportunity to hear or view our debates directly without that filter of the media. I actually think we are pretty fortunate in South Australia in that we have plenty of talent in our press gallery. Just one example: public figures addicted to spin and talking points should do themselves a favour and get hold of Nick Harmsen's report on the Adelaide Oval last night.

We should not forget that news media are constrained by the limits of their medium. My grandma used to joke with me, 'Isn't it funny, there's always just enough news to fill a newspaper every day or a news bulletin at night?' Nick Harmsen and his colleagues only get the airtime for one or two stories each night at most. Naturally, our journalists cover the stories that they can, but on a busy day important discussions do not make it to air, while on a slow news day even a humble backbencher's activities occasionally make it onto the television. At the end of the day, our television stations come into the parliament—

Mr Pengilly interjecting:

Mr GARDNER: Some more humble than others, member for Finniss. Our television stations come into the parliament not out of some civic duty to provide a comprehensive guide to important public debates in the parliament but to get footage for one, or maybe two, state political stories for that night's TV news. The cameras are here for half an hour, or maybe an hour, each day during question time, and that is generally that. However good our journalists may be, there is no substitute for allowing the public unfettered access to hear and view our debates. Not only will this engender greater social and political inclusion from a public currently alienated by a secretive government but I suspect it would also lead to higher standards in this place.

Another of our outstanding local journalists, Tom Richardson, provided some valuable analysis on this issue through the Indaily media outlet on 10 December:

It is disappointing that the standard response to behavioural lapses in the chamber is less about seeking to curb the outbursts and petty name-calling and more about limiting the degree to which the general public gets to witness the unedifying spectacle.

The fact is that members of parliament in chambers that are open to wide public scrutiny must account for their poor behaviour to their constituents. That is not to say that it will put an end to interjections or robust debate, but it does mean that, if someone is going to say something out of order and behave in that way, then it had better be funny or they had better have a good excuse that will wash with the electors who call their offices.

One particular practice I would love to see shown up is the inane nonsense of ministers reading unending, longwinded answers to questions written by their own officers, sometimes over 10 minutes long, and looking up from their script only to deliver personal attacks on the opposition. It looks juvenile and foolish, but they do so safe in the knowledge that hardly anyone is watching and the more time they can take up the less opportunity there is for their ministerial colleagues to be scrutinised by the opposition's questions without notice.

Tom Richardson went on in his piece to raise concerns with the instructions given to outlets only to film or photograph members who are on their feet, saying that this leads to 'disinterest from TV networks to put resources into covering parliament, since they are so limited as to what they can actually cover'. He wrote this in December, which was before the current, extraordinary situation, whereby, when the state Treasurer is answering questions from the opposition about the state's finances or, indeed, when he is answering Dorothy Dixers from his own backbench, our television cameras cannot even film his face as he answers these questions. Tom Richardson goes on to write:

...disinterest from the general public, for whom nightly television news is one of the very few forums that allows a glimpse of our democracy in action. But it's not the media's job to protect them [MPs] from themselves. As far as I'm concerned, when an elected representative is in the chamber, they should be accountable. If they are passing notes, or grumbling to a colleague, or throwing insults across the chamber, or thumbing through a newspaper, that is fair game.

The bill I am introducing today makes no attempt to change the standing orders, but I do agree with Tom insofar as this: when we come into this chamber to make a contribution, we are doing so as representatives of the tens of thousands of South Australians who have elected us. The words we say, the votes we take and the way in which we conduct ourselves here should necessarily be public property.

We have technology available that would immediately provide an exponential increase in the level of accessibility to and accountability of the parliament, and this bill would require its use. I see the Hon. Tammy Franks sitting in our gallery, and I know she calls this sort of thing 'digital democracy'. Frankly, I am not so into catchphrases myself, but I am pleased that the Greens support accessibility and accountability in the parliament, and I am sure that Family First and the other Independents would do so as well.

If the government seeks to oppose the bill, or indefinitely adjourn it, we will remain consigned to parliamentary processes that had already been around for more than 100 years by the time of Federation. I therefore urge the government to support this bill. If it does not, it must face up to the question: what is it exactly that the government is trying to hide? All across Australia and all across the world, even in some places that do not merit description as a democracy, citizens are able to view and listen to their representatives as they speak and act on their behalf. South Australians deserve no less.

Mrs GERAGHTY: For the member's information, we must adjourn your bill now. It is not because we are worried about anything; it is procedure.

The SPEAKER: The member would be very aware that there is a stream of Twitter that is going out and it is published on the net, which is bordering close to breaking standing order 133—Complaints against media.

An honourable member interjecting:

The SPEAKER: We won't mention members.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mrs Geraghty.

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