Senator ALSTON (Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) (10:54 PM) —I have endeavoured to show that you cannot actually determine where the story comes from.

Senator McLucas —Yes, you can.

Senator ALSTON —No, you cannot.

Senator McLucas —I know the journo.

Senator ALSTON —As I have explained, you could have a stringer based in Cairns who goes out, finds out the story, interviews people, films them, reports them, records them in every shape or form, sends that story up the line to Townsville, and it comes back into the Cairns market. If that happened, you would say that story was generated out of Townsville—would you?

Senator McLucas —No, the journo lives in Cairns.

Senator ALSTON —Then I do not know what you mean by `generated'. Do you mean locally produced?

Senator McLucas —Yes, made.

Senator ALSTON —All right. If the story is going to be about Cairns and if it is not fiction, one would have thought that you need to have someone in Cairns to be able to give you that information. In order to satisfy a requirement for local content, one would have thought that you would need to know what was going on in Cairns. If someone produced a story out of Cairns and then spread it around the state, it would not satisfy local requirements in areas other than in Cairns. They might show it, but it is not going to count. Local means local. If you are a resident of Cairns, what counts for you are stories about Cairns. How they are actually produced is not what is relevant for these purposes. It might be relevant if you want to insist that every element of the production phase occurs in Cairns, but I do not think you can micromanage media businesses in that way. What you can do is insist that the stories be locally relevant and, if they are, you have satisfied the requirement.

I table a supplementary explanatory memorandum relating to the government's amendments to be moved to this bill. The memorandum was circulated in the chamber on 23 June last.