Senator Rex Patrick says he is trying to ensure that small and country news organisations get a say at this week’s Senate committee hearing into the news bargaining code.
Crikey understands executives from Google, Facebook and news executives are due to face the hearing on Friday at the exclusion of other smaller and regional publishers.
But Patrick, who is a member of the committee, said he was confident those voices would be heard at a second hearing, and that the committee was yet to finalise the hearing schedule.
“Another hearing that will take place shortly after,” he told Crikey.
Sign up for a FREE 21-day trial and get Crikey straight to your inbox
The world-first legislation would impose a mandatory code of conduct on digital platforms that would force them to negotiate with Australian media companies on a payment for displaying news content on Google and Facebook.
The bill was tabled in Parliament in December and is currently before the Senate standing committee on economics.
The six-person committee is chaired by Liberal Senator Slade Brockman and deputy chair Labor Senator Alex Gallacher and includes Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, Nationals Senator Susan McDonald and Labor Senator Jenny McAllister.
Google responded to the bill by burying links from traditional media outlets this week in what it said was an “experiment” on 1% of its Australian users, attracting strong criticism.
Country Press Association chairman Bruce Ellen said he was hopeful his organisation would be able to have a say on the bill.
He said the organisation’s main concern, as raised in its original submission to Treasury, was the last-minute inclusion of the ABC and SBS to the code.
“We don’t believe that ABC and SBS should be included in this code,” he said. “The code was predicated on the declining revenue that had been occurring in commercial businesses because of the dominance of Google and Facebook. That’s what drove the code. The ABC and SBS don’t have those [commercial] imperatives.”
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg added the public broadcasters to the code in November after they were initially excluded by Australia’s competition regulator because they were taxpayer funded.
Meanwhile the US has attacked Australia’s “extraordinary” plan to make the tech giants pay for news.
In a submission to the inquiry on January 15, the US said the proposed legislation was “fundamentally imbalance” and requested Australia suspend any plans to finalise the bill.
Leave a comment
It is quite bizarre the extent to which the LNP government and (digitally challenged) legacy media players, dominated by NewsCorp, 9F and Seven, will go to serve their own interests and business mistakes made; minor players beware.
This is not about journalism but the type of corporate and political behaviour observed in less developed nations with corporate entities acting as a privileged rentier class demanding that the government caters to their need for income support, through leveraging power and strong personal and/or dependent relationships.
Further, any legislation could be easily bypassed if Google/Facebook, in a relatively minor market, just avoid news content….. versus preferred model of favouring independent news media and ignoring the big players…..
Great example of corporate welfare for the top end of town with unclear if any positive outcomes for anyone……
It is not as if current big news does that great a job. There is a stifling lack of diversity and a right wing bias. Let them whither. The algorithm could privilege left and independent media, and god knows we need more of that.
Google scholar is a superb search engine. Much better and easier to use than many traditional databases and eliminates the need to decide which database is likely to record the journals reflecting the topic in hand. It would be hard to replace…