Senator BROWN (10:40 AM) —I move amendment (1) on sheet 3002:

Madam Temporary Chair, I know you have a particular interest in this matter. Following the debate last night in which you took part, I drew up this amendment to help in the understanding of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2002. The term `local' appears in quite a few places and the debate last night made it clear that there was no definition of what that word meant. You were saying that `local' should be confined to news services and other services generated in the locality—it might be Cairns, it might be Launceston, it might be Kalgoorlie—whereas the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts was indicating that, no, a much wider definition was held by the government so that if a local member of parliament, for example, were visiting Kalgoorlie from Cairns then the coverage of what happened in Kalgoorlie might be classified as local news, and it opens the definition of `local' to enormous elasticity. You could find that the local news service actually had a huge component of news gathered in adjacent regions, in other rural localities, for example, and under a number of pretexts judged by somebody to be of local interest when in fact it is very subsidiary in terms of the local regional interest and importance. So this is a simple definition: `local' has the meaning of `generated in that locality'. It is very simple, very concise, everybody understands what it means, including the proprietors, and this fuzziness is taken out of the bill as it stands.