NDIS Minister Bill Shorten has given an impassioned pledge he will not go “dying of the night without fighting back” for free-to-air media as he dismisses the “zealot anti-gamblers”.
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The Albanese government is facing pressure to impose a total ban on gambling advertising on free-to-air TV to keep faith with former Labor MP Peta Murphy, who died last December after leading a bipartisan committee that said a partial ban would not work.
The federal cabinet plan centres on a partial ban using a cap of two gambling ads per hour on each channel until 10pm as well as a ban on the ads for an hour before and after a live sports event, as revealed by this masthead last week.
Speaking on ABC Radio National, Shorten defended this approach, saying no government had been tougher.
“I don’t buy that, but what I also buy is, in the pluralist system, if we don’t have free-to-air TV, what happens is you’re going to get your news from Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook,” he said.
“I am not going to go into the dying of the night without fighting back against international tech giants giving us their extreme, unfiltered views with no accountability.
“Free-to-air TV is at least a voice of diversity in a world where we’re getting a lot of misinformation, so you know.
“It’s to say to some of the extreme you know zealot anti gamblers, I understand what you’re saying, I can agree with a fair bit of what you’re saying but I’m also saying, ‘Please stop and think about the view that we don’t want all our news coming from Facebook.’ ”
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