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.

The applications will be made to the Foreign Investment Review Board . Of course they might be rejected, but last year there were 3347 applications and 3301 were approved and the whole tone coming from the government is to allow foreign ownership of the media. So, goodbye Australian ownership.

Then there are the cross-media rules, which presently keep owners to their own paddocks of radio, TV and newspapers in the one market.

These rules have at least given us a variety of media owners, stopped them from being too dominant and guaranteed at least some diversity in opinion.

But it is now proposed to do away with this embargo by giving exemptions or government dispensations.

My first objection to this change is that the dispensations will be given by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), a government agency and an unelected and unaccountable one.

The government is handing over what is essentially the Parliament's responsibility to an unelected body which is virtually the media industry club.

Secondly, the Bill says that the grant of exemptions is to be essentially secret, with no public scrutiny. So we may never know the conditions to which any of the takeovers are subject.

Indeed, the Bill specifically invites the ABA to keep this information secret if anyone's commercial interests could be harmed by disclosure and if that old stand-by, the public interest, could be prejudiced.

Thirdly, in a nasty little clause, the Bill gives four separate rights of appeal to disgruntled media companies if they lose out on any stage of the process. But if an amalgamation is granted , is there a similar right of appeal for anyone who wants to stop it? Oh no.

The whole thing is geared in favour of media companies who will naturally want to get bigger, extend their influence and employ fewer people.

And that raises another worry. The test of whether an amalgamation will be allowed is whether the different media outlets keep separate editorial departments. Presumably this is put in to keep the journalists happy , for fear there might be only one news department in a company where presently there are separate ones for each medium: print, radio and television.

And the Bill starts off in that direction . But the small print says it will be alright if what you have is really just a 'sharing of resources' or, more chillingly, 'other forms of cooperation' between each news medium.

So, journalists beware : your job may disappear in a fog of 'sharing of resources'. Public beware: what you will get if this goes through will be a giant, concentrated news service where tonight's TV news will be tomorrow's leftovers for the press and radio.

It is hard to believe, but the ABA, a government body, will decide if media companies have set up their news and editorial branches in the way the government wants them set up.

What then, has been advanced by the Minister to justify these monumental changes allowing foreign ownership and abolishing the cross-media laws?

Why, convergence, of course , the cliché of the media age that answers all problems. All forms of media are converging together, we are told and will blend into the internet; so let us get onto the international bandwagon.

It is all nonsense, of course ; the collapse of so many internet companies and the $US 58b loss by the AOL-Time Warner marriage alone have shown that big media companies based on convergence spell big trouble and bigger losses.

And is it all so urgent yet? Try this test. Look up 'convergence' and 'internet' on the Department of Communications' own website. The last entry for each of them was four years ago! No doubt about this convergence: it's coming for us at a frightening speed.

But perhaps we ought to slow everything down for a while, before we lose too much of what we value.