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

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.