Dr Mike Freelander has joined the thousands of Macarthur residents who are lamenting the closures of local newspapers this week.
However, the member for Macarthur, a big fan of local papers, says that he is determined to do whatever he can to ensure there can always be trained journalists to tell the stories of the community.
Australian Community Media, the publishers of local papers such as the Camden Advertiser and Liverpool Champion, announced this week that rising printing costs had forced them to close all of their South Western Sydney community papers.
“We need journalists to hold people in authority to account, from councils to state and federal governments,’’ Dr Freelander told the South West Voice earlier today.
“But we also need them to tell all the wonderful positive stories of our communities, our achievements,’’ Dr Freelander said.
He showed me a 1989 edition of the Macarthur Advertiser to emphasise how the local papers had fallen on hard times in recent years and their closure had not come as a big surprise.
“There was real news throughout the paper,’’ he said.
“I think it’s important we try to go back to a bit of that.
“It’s a frightening thing to have a political system that doesn’t have scrutiny – if I’m a dishonest politician I’m laughing.
“It’s really an issue where decisions are made about education, policing, transport, local roads, garbage collection and other areas where there’s no real scrutiny of the people making those decisions.
“And I think that’s very frightening.’’
I asked Dr Freelander what he was going to do about the decline in local journalism.
“As what we can do at the federal government, we can encourage local scrutiny by supporting any local media left to perform those tasks,’’ he said.
“It might not necessarily mean subsidising such media outlets; it may mean making it easier for them to publish online or to be able to employ people such as cadet journalists.
“We’re talking about training people, we should be investing in that, and do that through our local media,’’ he said.
“I’m keen to get Michelle Rowland, the Communications minister, to come out for a roundtable, to speak to people like yourself, Lee Abrahams from the District Reporter, and any other local media we have such as Brian Laul from Good Morning Macarthur.
“The idea is to sit down and nut out ways the government can help the local media.
“I just view it as so important.
“That means scrutiny of me, of our state politicians, of our councils, our bureaucracy, our police, our health system.
“We need that local scrutiny.’’
Something has to be done, none of the major media outlets cover this region and only come here when something bad happens we need local news and a say in our future
This is truly sad. Have we lost the Chronicle as well? There’s nothing like feeling the pages of a newspaper between your fingers.
It may well be that the paper *may* go online, I’m not sure whether it is. However, it’s been proven that prolonged time in front of the screen doesn’t help the eyes.
Thank you for the years of local stories, and news from across our local community.
Wollondilly Advertiser closed last week. Lucky we still have the South West Voice and The District Reporter.