John Howard—or perhaps more accurately his Treasurer, Peter Costello—seem to have pulled off the three-card trick, on both the National Party and the public, with changes to the media laws. The trick is primarily concerned with distraction, and nothing could have distracted the Nationals more than the fear of local media monopolies in rural and regional areas, which, under the bill, could have become even more concentrated.
After all of the necessary opportunities for a few National Party figures to grandstand about their concern about more diversity in the country, Peter Costello offered a compromise banning ownership, in a single non-metropolitan market, of more than two "old'' mediums, and then, almost as an afterthought, the same rule in the capital cities as well. The consequence was the quelling of National Party reservations, and the reservation of the Family First Senator, and the passage of the bill through the Senate was assured.
The Government spin was that the concessions were small ones, well worth it in its efforts to "free up'' Australia's media, and to modernise the media industry to take account of new technology, synergies from cross-media ownership, and the abolition of the long outdated rules against foreign ownership.
The truth is that no such result has been obtained. The chief purpose of the legislation, now, as it was from the beginning, is to entrench the commercial television oligopoly held by the major television networks, and to protect them from various forms of competition, including new free-to-air channels or networks, and novel but hardly new technology allowing multi-channelling from new competitors.
The legislation permits—and attempts to regulate—some emerging "new media'', but any development in this regard will probably be soon overtaken by innovation. It has been the notion that the media industry is being revolutionised by new computer and communications technology. By this theory making old rules focused on the "old media"—newspapers, magazines, radio and television—are obsolete and restrictive, inhibiting investment, innovation and the development of that critical mass and efficiency which could take the industry to a new level.
Yet almost all of the legislation's focus is backwards—on the "old media'' and, even so far as new media is concerned, its focus is more on controlling the market than on liberating the industry to market forces. The immediate consequence, with or without the concessions to the National Party, will almost certainly be more market "rationalisation''—which is to say fewer