Senate journalism committee calls for media tax benefits and law reform while ducking tech giants’ role

I wonder who will be the adjudicator of who gets the gong to be on the list of reputable media outlets. . If it’s a bunch of people on a Committee you bet it will be creepingly dominated by the left Would ACA on Channel 9 (although not subscription) be considered reputable public journalism? Of course, it does but probably wouldn’t make the cut by a typical Qangos Committee.
As for Google, The Committee did the right thing up to a point. Google is just another “web based” newsagent chain. Australia was served for over 100 years by the Google equivalent being the 4,000 odd newsagents who displayed virtually all regularly published print. They took a 25% cut of RRP, and returned remainder and got a credit for it, making the newsagent chain for the hundreds of magazines on display, a net cost of at least 25-30+ of cover revenues for publishers. What Goggle should be crimped on, is repurposing material without publisher approval either by their audience or directly scraped by Facebook or Google. Australian Media protection from Google/Facebook et al only requires a strengthening of copyright and repurposing laws. Any legislation should make the control of content easily enforceable in a timely, and cost efficient manner.
Where the money for journalism –sitting is wasted and incorrectly spent (geographically where needed) buy the ABC and SBS. Overall, the question of the ABC/SBS is hardly easy. They are, in a democracy, not something a Government should own or be involved in. However at a minimum the Committee should have recommended that to liberate monies from their budgets (c38% in FY17 of the 3 FTA network budgets) a form of anti syphoning be required of these two bodies that they not compete with taxpayers fund against the FTA networks for overseas programming. All first rights to show overseas programming should be first bid only to the FTA’s. Only that which FTA’s don’t buy, should then be bid for by a joint ABC/SBS buying agency. This ensures that where the networks are willing to spend their viewers’ ad dollars on overseas programs, the ABC/SBS do not compete with tax payer dollars. The budgets savings for ABC/SBS should then be reinvested in regional and national Australian media content –whether journalism, entertainment or infortainment.
The regional areas of Australia are starved for content and journalism befitting their population and contribution to national exports, and weight in the Australian economy. 35% of the population live in regional areas, yet TV ad spend is only 20-22% of the FTA pool and on 2013 ACMA data, regional TV only has dollars left to spend of c10% of FTA national news budgets. This 35/22/10 waterfall is something the ABC/SBS budgets should address by way of quality local journalism. It would be better to split the ABC into metro and regional operations with the regional HQ in say Toowoomba to ensure the “togetherness” with regional outlooks are embedded in the management structure.
I note that overseas programming spend is not detailed in either the ABC or SBS annual reports, however overseas time based content is. SBS overseas programming is well over 40% rising to the high 90’s for their food network. We don’t need taxpayers money spent on this when Australian journalists are being sacked left right and centre. What’s the use of supporting Screen Australia if the ABC/SBS spend an undisclosed amount supporting overseas product?