While the commercial radio industry is pleased with the changes to the regional local content rules announced last week, some do not think it goes far enough and that the industry should keep lobbying for the complete removal of these regulations. Experienced industry consultant and lobbyist Des Foster speaks to radioinfo, praising CRA for its success so far, but saying the industry needs to go even further because this legislation winds the clock back to the bad old days of over-regulation.

Foster, who represents various regional stations in his consultancy, says: “Full praise to CRA and especially to Joan Warner for convincing the Government to make a bad law less bad. But it is still bad law, and the industry should not give up on getting rid of this misguided and ill-considered legislation altogether.”

Why is it bad law? Foster says there are three reasons:

Firstly, because it was enacted in haste and without sufficient thought in a backlash over what was perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be a failure by some sections of the industry to honour their implicit obligations to the communities in which they operated.

Secondly because, if there had been a failure of that kind, it could have been rectified by other means. History will show that the abject failure of the previous regulator, the ABA under David Flint, to deal with this issue is one of the main causes of the present state of affairs. So also is the failure of the government to face up to the issue when it arose nearly a decade ago.

It is not as though they were unaware. Flint brought up the issue at a CRA conference, and a House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications was moved to hold an inquiry into regional radio in 2001.

Thirdly, the new local content provisions are contrary to the scheme of the Act. Regional commercial radio stations are now treated as though they operate in a broadcasting vacuum, with no national stations, no community stations and no narrowcasters.

“At a time when the ABC’s managing director is talking of doubling ABC networks within two years, and when community broadcasters proclaim their increasing contribution to localism, it makes no sense to impose across-the-board quotas on one sector of broadcasting.

The Broadcasting Services Act requires all licensees to provide a service that, when considered together with other broadcasting services available in the licence area (including another service operated by the licensee) contributes to the provision of an adequate and comprehensive range of broadcasting services in that licence area.

The way to establish whether that condition is being met is to examine the circumstances of each individual case.

What this legislation does is wind the clock back to a regulatory regime which belongs to the nvarchar(15)een-seventies,” says Foster.