From experience, Australian media policy must be a mogul-free zone

My most alarming experience as Minister for Communications was to return to the office one day to find Kerry Packer sprawled out on my sofa like a beached whale and ready to give me the benefit of his many and varied opinions on media policy.

And very lively, original, blunt and amusing opinions they were.

As if the Packer bluster were not enough, I also had the patrician hauteur of assorted Fairfaxes , the gargantuan takeover appetite of the Murdochs and the smart-aleck arrogance of Christopher Skase to deal with.

It was all good fun.

But I quickly learnt that the worst thing a Communications Minister could do was what the present Minister, Senator Alston, seems to be doing – fashioning broadcasting policy to fit in with the convenience of the media owners.

Broadcasting policy, I decided, should be a mogul-free zone.

And that is the real vice in the proposed new laws to abolish the embargo on foreign ownership of the media and the cross-media ownership laws. They will benefit media owners (and are pretty clearly intended to), but no-one else and certainly not their employees or the public.

The new laws will make it dead easy and irresistibly tempting for the moguls to sell out to foreign interests or amalgamate with each other or even to do both.

Together, they are a formula for the foreign takeover of most of our media industry.

Just as bad, they will do nothing to promote competition or allow new entrants. Not that any of this should be much of a surprise, since the government set its face against the new players we could have had with the advent of digital TV.

First, then, to the foreign ownership embargo and its abolition. We have always wanted to own our media in this country, as most other countries do, for it is the biggest single influence on forming our national identity and culture.

But the proposed changes abolish the specific ban on foreign ownership in the media and lump it in with the breakfast foods and whatever else is up for sale and where takeover decisions simply become foreign investment approvals. And we all know how easy they are to obtain.