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The Forum > Article Comments > Public missing out, again > Comments

Public missing out, again : Comments

By John Quiggin, published 20/3/2006

With proposals for media likely to pass into law, the consumer will be the loser.

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Dear John,
I was under perhaps the mistaken idea that the ABC was established to provide an alternative, especially in News and Current Affairs to the comercial channels. If this is so, what is being proposed actually timits our "choice" perhaps this is a little brother to workchoice, which actually does the same.

Is it just me, or is a pattern beginning to emerge here?
Posted by SHONGA, Monday, 20 March 2006 3:45:17 PM
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If the government is serious about rolling out digital televisions to as many households as possible it would allow sport on the multichanneling services.

Sport is the killer content of television. It is a major reason for viewers to buy pay television access. PayTV operators will do anything to keep their sport from free to air. Sport on free to air is so lucrative that the anti siphoning legislation was required to keep it on free to air. We don't have anti siphoning rules for sit coms and home improvement shows.

Yes there would be a once off $80 cost to purchase a set top box. While for many australians this is a significant cost for many others this is the price of a pair of shoes or two cartons of beer. What's more the cost would still be incurred in 2012. Unlike 1012, the 2008 date is conveniently well beyond the term of the current government.

Digital TV is still free to air. If last years ashes was on a secondary channel we'd have had a digital stb in every second household. Keen sports fans would have had more commonwealth games than they could poke a stick at and rugby union fans could actually support their team from their lounge rooms instead of their computers.

None of this however will come to pass. As so accurate predicted by the communications minister we will remain dinosaurs stuck in the analog age for the term of this government . Shame on you minister Coonan!
Posted by gusi, Monday, 20 March 2006 4:06:01 PM
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I don't see a big threat to diversity of media content.

The huge growth of quality blogs (John would probably like a plug here for his own, at http://www.johnquiggin.com/ ), stable ownership structure for The Economist, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, Aljezeera, irreverent or non-commercial sites like Crikey and onlineopinion mean in my view that there will be avenues of expression if we want to vent our opinions, share our deepest secrets or tap into the investigative findings of of darkness and vice.

I see the risks in two different areas.

Firstly, although there has been much said and written in Australia about care and feeding of ethically motivated whistle-blowers, their support site, http://www.whistleblowers.org.au/ , is starved of resources and support. A recent example is the raw deal given to undercover police - State sanctioned whistleblowers, http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/cop-this-lot/2006/03/17/1142582521080.html . On top of this, draconian libel laws mean that much that is true and should be known to the public is left unsaid. (It could be that by harnessing a stream of possessionless indigent students to speak the ugly truth we may get round this and herald the bankrupts as heroes. This technique has yet to be perfected, although Stephen Mayne may now be wishing that it had.)

But the real villains... Continued in next post...
Posted by MikeM, Monday, 20 March 2006 7:59:31 PM
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The real villains domesticly are Trujillo and his three amigos.

We have an ISDN2 broadband link from iiNet, which has its own DSLAMs (network nodes) in increasing numbers of Telstra exchanges and offers multi-megabit download speeds (compared with Telstra's 1.5Mb at best). And of course, for wired access most people use the copper wires that Telstra owns. Half of our street apparently has both Telstra and Optus cable. Our half has neither.

Telstra's "cable to the node" proposal, if I understand it correctly, involves installing "last mile" access that will be a Telstra monopoly.

Couple this with recent suggestions that communication carriers are thinking of imposing charges on content sites, http://today.reuters.com/business/newsArticle.aspx?type=telecomm&storyID=nL22277860 , and the proposed US merger between BellSouth and AT&T, http://blogs.zdnet.com/carroll/index.php?p=1551

The consequences of a monopoly or oligopoly controlling the cyberspace delivery pipes will not be pretty.
Posted by MikeM, Monday, 20 March 2006 8:19:26 PM
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The consumers are already losing.

This should be another warning bell to consumer confidence and the influence of media and the propaganda agendas behind the scenes.
Posted by Suebdootwo, Tuesday, 21 March 2006 1:12:10 AM
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Mike you make it sound like we are changing into another version of Singapore, where the media and unions are tightly controlled and frequently used libel laws deter most people from a career in politics.

Perhaps we can use the numbers of Singaporean immigrants as a measure of freedom in Australia.

I am also with iinet and get all of my news from the net and abc radio. I only buy a paper on saturdays for the tv guide. With all guides ignoring ABC2 even that is testing my patience.

But how do we change politics around? It seems that since the end of the cold war the government uses all it can to stay in power and there is no longer any big picture vision from either political party.

Could we have some sort of "australia stock options" for politicians executeable after 20 years? Or performance based super? I fear democracy is being hijacked for political purposes but I don't see any way around it.
Posted by gusi, Tuesday, 21 March 2006 2:27:12 AM
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gusi,

The only real way to fix it is to throw the b*st*rds out. The trouble is when you look at the alternative lot, you can see that this solution has a fatal flawed.
Posted by MikeM, Tuesday, 18 April 2006 11:24:21 AM
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