The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has moved to head off a party-room backlash over media reform, stressing he wants regional broadcasters to continue to face regulations forcing them to produce local content.



Turnbull said on Sunday he was sympathetic to industry calls to scrap the audience “reach” rule and cross-platform ownership restrictions – a development that would allow ownership in the Australian media market to become even more concentrated.

Ownership in the Australian media market is already among the most concentrated in the developed world.

Some industry analysts believe further relaxation of the ownership rules along the lines flagged by Turnbull would allow News Corp, the dominant local media player, to acquire a free-to-air television station, the Ten Network, to add to its already substantial print media and pay television interests.

Turnbull’s signal on Sunday sparked a rapid backlash among regional MPs. Nationals and regional Liberals have long campaigned for rules that, firstly, prevent further concentration of ownership; and secondly ensure that local television and radio stations continue to employ people and produce daily local content.

The communications minister on Monday clarified that his weekend signal concerning deregulation was about ownership, not about content. Turnbull emphasised his remarks did not mean he wanted to bulldoze the local content requirements.

Turnbull said he was inclined to follow the recommendations of a joint parliamentary committee which examined the “reach rule” last year. He said that multi-partisan committee recommended that there needed to be “a clear definition of local content established” in order to ensure regional viewers continued to watch locally devised programming if media regulations changed.

“It’s important to recognise that local content is a separate question to ownership,” Turnbull told the ABC on Monday morning. “Content is a separate issue to ownership.”

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, addressing reporters in Sydney, said the government would not be rushing on media deregulation. “Even when we do seek to change regulation, it will be in a deregulatory direction because that’s the instinct of this government,” he said.

“But we’re not interested in picking unnecessary fights, we’re not interested in taking sides between one commercial operator and the other, so we’ll be consulting with the community, we’ll be consulting with the sector. We hope that a consensus might emerge as to the way forward, but at the moment we are doing what sensible governments do; we are talking to people, assessing what they think the issues are so that we can then gauge the most intelligent way to respond.”

Nationals senator John Williams on Monday morning emphasised that local content was a do or die issue for regional MPs, and the rules needed to be serious.



“I don’t care who owns a television station, what percentage of the market they’ve got, but I do care about delivery of local news to local people,” Williams told the ABC. “I was very pleased to hear Malcolm say there will be no changes to ... the local content rule, which is the most important thing to me.”

Australian media companies, some under acute commercial pressure, have been lobbying for more scope to merge in order to achieve economies of scale. Australian broadcasting regulations prohibit a person controlling a commercial television licence, a commercial radio licence and a newspaper in the same area. A single owner cannot control commercial television licences reaching more than 75% of the Australian population.

The changes being flagged by Turnbull will of course require not only internal cohesion, but broader parliamentary support.

The Gillard government bought itself a bout of open warfare with the media industry as a whole, and News Corp in particular, when it proposed an overhaul of regulations that would see media mergers governed by a public interest test, and a new regulator.

Labor under the previous government was preoccupied with ensuring concentration of media ownership in Australia did not get worse.

The opposition has clearly dumped that policy, and is now adopting a holding pattern. The evident distancing from the previous position adopted under Julia Gillard and Stephen Conroy gives the Coalition some hope it can achieve its objectives without having to round up crossbenchers.

A spokesman for the shadow communications minister, Jason Clare, said on Monday: “We are consulting with the industry on these and other media regulation reform issues.

“We will consider their views, the views of the public and the specifics of any proposal put forward by the government before confirming a position,” the spokesman said.

Turnbull argues the media landscape has been entirely redrawn by technology – he believes the internet has made redundant the old arguments about regulation to ensure diversity and plurality.

On Sunday, he said: “My view is the arrival of the internet, and the additional diversity and avenues for competition that it brings, really says we should have less regulation and more freedom.”

On Monday, Turnbull said the internet had given consumers an unprecedented capacity to “narrowcast” – in essence, to curate their own preferred news services and sources, and acquire information on demand.

Australian consumers now had access to services from around the world, as well as from new digital entrants in Australia, such as Guardian Australia and the Daily Mail. “The internet is very diverse, it’s extraordinarily democratic in that respect,” Turnbull said.

But this argument did not convince Williams.

Asked about Turnbull’s comments on the internet changing the media game, Williams said: “No, it hasn’t. Many people in regional areas do not have computers, especially our elderly.”

Williams said people in the bush did not want to stream services over the internet, they wanted to gather in front of the television to watch the nightly news.