CANBERRA, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has urged the Senate to use the six-week sitting break to consider changes to outdated media laws, saying that jobs were at risk after one of Australia's three free-to-air television networks declared bankruptcy this month.
In comments published in Wednesday's newspapers, Turnbull publicly urged Senate colleagues to back the government's reforms, which would repeal rules disallowing media moguls from owning more than two of a newspaper, radio station and television network in the same market.
Turnbull said repealing the "utterly outdates media ownership laws" would allow big media players to buy out the recently-bankrupt Network Ten allowing it to survive, saving countless jobs in the process.
"They were written in a time when the internet didn't exist. When pay-TV didn't exist," Turnbull said in comments published on Wednesday
"We've got that media reform package in the Senate now and we're urging the senators to support it."
"If the (opposition) Labor Party cares about jobs, they'd back it in, because as all of the TV executives have said, if we can change these outdated laws to allow the media groups to merge and consolidate and support each other in very challenging times, where the real competition is not each other, it's Google and Facebook."
Labor is vehemently against scrapping the two-out-of-three law, claiming it would eliminate diversity within the media and encourage a monopoly or duopoly in the market.
But Turnbull has said scrapping the "1980s laws" would "consolidate and strengthen" the free-to-air TV landscape.
"There are hundreds of jobs at risk at Ten and the way to protect them, the best thing government can do, is to make the laws 21st-century laws, not 1980s laws," Turnbull said.
