Media laws changes planned
From AAP
09jan02
THE Federal Government hoped to introduce new laws overturning cross-media and foreign ownership restriction into parliament within coming months, a spokesman said.
Present laws prevent media owners from controlling television stations and newspapers in one market while foreign ownership limit individual holdings to 15 per cent in free-to-air television, 20 per cent in pay TV and 25 per cent in main newspapers.
The Government wants to ditch foreign ownership restrictions and to allow exemptions to cross-media laws.
Under the Government's model, exemptions would be granted if organisations guaranteed diversity of opinion by maintaining separate newsrooms and by television and radio maintaining existing levels of locally produced news and information.
Either the Australian Broadcasting Authority or the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would police exemptions.
Communications Minister Richard Alston's spokesman said consultations with the industry had been under way since the November election.
"The Prime Minister (John Howard) indicated after the election that the government would like to move forward on foreign and cross so we've been talking to media organisations since then and we'll obviously continue to do so in coming weeks," he told AAP.
"The question now is in the detail.
"We are for example providing exemptions to the cross-media rules if media companies give certain undertakings and we need to work out the details of those, how it will be regulated in terms of who will oversee it and the like, so we're working those sorts of things through.
"We've referred to them (the exemptions) as separate and distinct editorial processes ... so we obviously have to define what that means."
Maintaining locally produced news and information would only apply to radio or television cross holdings as newspaper sales relied on continuing to generate local content, the spokesman said.
He said the Government hoped to introduce legislation early in the parliamentary year, though next month's sittings, the first since the election, would likely to be too soon.
"It may be hard to get it in by then," the spokesman said.
"We haven't put an absolute date on it, but the first thing is we want to move as early as we can.
"The second thing is we do have to finalise details and get legislation drafted so that takes a bit of time."