Page 3002 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 15 August 2018
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this body does not seem to have the same level of interest as Chris Steel has in the federal Liberal Party council meeting.
Mr Steel, if he has this real passion, as he demonstrated, for the Liberal Party, can make an application to join the Liberals. Our constitution says that if you want to join you have to have resigned for more than 12 months from another party, so you are going to have to sit on the crossbench for at least 12 months if you want to join the Liberal Party, but that will give you an opportunity to finally sink your teeth into a federal council meeting and get to witness the joy of that occasion your very self.
Really, this is irrelevant. It is just more backbench Labor Party grandstanding. There is no appropriation. There is no jurisdiction whatsoever for the ACT Assembly. That is why it is a waste of time.
MS CHEYNE (Ginninderra) (5.17): The fact that the opposition leader has just said that the ABC does not matter to us, does not matter in this place and is irrelevant to Canberrans simply because it is not a line item in the budget says it all.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong) (5.17): The Greens will be supporting this motion today, and in doing so we join with our federal colleagues in opposing cuts to the ABC. I think all members need to recognise that any cuts to the ABC will be detrimental not only for Australia but also for Canberra. Further cuts to the ABC will represent a loss to independent journalism, sports coverage and political scrutiny, as well as being specifically detrimental to the ACT and to the people we represent in this Assembly. In that regard I fundamentally disagree with Mr Coe’s analysis that this is not relevant to the people of Canberra.
Ms Cheyne started to touch on it quite nicely. I think that if the only things we are ever going to debate in this place are things that are line items in the ACT budget, we will be much the poorer for it. And in fact I think this is entirely relevant to the people of the ACT. We know from the ratings that the ABC is a significant source of information, entertainment and, I guess, listenership and viewership for our citizens.
The motion asks all members to stand against cuts to the ABC and also specifically invites the members of the Liberal Party to share their views or the position they took at the Liberal Party federal council, given that there was this motion passed calling for the privatisation of the ABC. The motion also invites the leaders of all three parties to write a joint letter to the federal Minister for Communications, Senator Mitch Fifield. I am happy to sign up to such a letter. I am sure that between us we can find some suitable text, and I will look forward to seeing the track changes as that document goes around.
The ABC’s funding has been cut by a quarter of a billion dollars since the coalition won the 2013 election promising no cuts to the ABC. Sections of the Liberal-Nationals coalition have long called for the privatisation of the national broadcaster. Make no mistake, privatisation will amount to cuts to programming, content and staff at the ABC. As a public broadcaster, the ABC has a very different role from commercial broadcasters, a role that would be at risk if it were to be privatised. Like other coalition policies, the short-sighted cuts to public broadcasting
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