There's an awful inevitability about Australia's cross media ownership rules. The big media players eventually get what they want by wearing down the government of the day and latching on to whatever opportunity comes their way.
This month the government handed them the reform they've long craved while Senator Nick Xenophon attempted to win some concessions as the legislation passed through the Senate. We can assume Australia's media market will now become even more concentrated. What we don't know is whether Xenophon's trade offs will do anywhere near enough to protect public interest journalism and media diversity.
Let's briefly recount the sad history of Australian media reform. In 2007 the Howard government began the unravelling of Paul Keating's cross media regulations, which had been in place since the early 1990s and allowed media companies to own just one form of media — either TV, newspapers or radio — in the same market. The old rules weren't perfect. They didn't stop Rupert Murdoch controlling 70 per cent of the circulation of Australia's metropolitan newspapers. But they did at least stop Australia's media companies consolidating horizontally and gobbling up one another.
That changed in the final year of the Howard government, when amendments allowed media companies to own two of any medium in the same market. The one-out-of-three rule became the two-out-of-three rule. A minimum voices test was put in place so that there had to be five distinct commercial media owners in the cities and four in regional markets.
But look what happened; Southern Cross Broadcasting, which owned powerful commercial talk stations across the country, was acquired by Macquarie Media and on-sold to Fairfax. So in Melbourne, 3AW and The Age were absorbed into the same company — and eventually the same building — where they started cosying up to one other.
To see the perverse effects of the 2007 reforms take a look at Perth, where Kerry Stokes' Seven West now owns the popular Seven Network as well as the only metropolitan daily newspaper, The West Australian, along with its chain of suburban and regional papers. He also acquired the city's only Sunday paper, The Sunday Times. He also owns Pacific magazines and several websites, including Perth Now.
But following these latest reforms, in which the two-out-of-three rule became an effective free-for-all, Stokes is allowed to keep shopping. He can now pick up some radio stations in Perth, to complement the regional stations he already owns in