Turnbull signals support for licence rebate for TV networks
Australia’s free TV networks have begun lobbying for a permanent discount on their broadcasting licences following last year’s $250m rebate from the Government.
And shadow media minister Malcolm Turnbull has signalled to Mumbrella that he is also sympathetic to the networks as the rise of IPTV has taken away their previous monopoly.
In an interview with Mumbrella editor Tim Burrowes, Turnbull – shadow minister for communications and broadband – said: “The TV broadcasters have a very good argument – and it goes like this: When the broadcasting licences were first granted… the broadcasting licences were real monopolies, they were oligopolies. The only way you could get sound and pictures into somebody’s house was over that bandwidth. Now of course that’s changed dramatically so the television companies are entitled to say ‘what we are licencing today is not the same as it was so many years ago’.
“They do have a point.”
Turnbull’s comment were made in an interview shot on Friday, which will feature at greater length in an episode of The Mumbo Report from Studio 33 next week.
Today, Free TV Australia – which represents the free to air networks – began its own campaign for a permanent rebate with an opinion piece in The Australian written by CEO Julie Flynn. In it she argued:
“The existing licence fee system for free-to-air TV has been in place since 1964 and has not been reviewed since 1987.
“Today’s media market looks nothing like 1987’s and there is no justification for leaving licence fees at 1987 levels.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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The lobbying is in the context of the Convergence Review – this is a massive exploration, even if the outcomes might end up being small. On the other side of the coin to Flynn you’ll have people arguing for the forced transfer of TV to broadband, freeing up even more broadcast spectrum for other uses.
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If they don’t think the license fees are value-for-money any more they can always hand them in.
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