Regardless on which side of the mining ‘super tax’ debate you sit, you have to admit that the mining industry takes no prisoners when its profits are threatened by changes to legislation. Unlike Commercial Radio which is content to write polite submissions, lobbying diligently but quietly behind the scenes, and wouldn’t dream of overtly using its own powerful communication resources to challenge the wisdom of proposed changes in the public arena, Mining  takes the fight right up to the government with heavyweight  PR and advertising, threatening the PM with political oblivion if he doesn’t change his tune. So vicious are the claims of the big miners you’d be forgiven for thinking that they were running for election against Kevin Rudd along with Tony Abbott. So successful have they been in suggesting to voters that the Australian economy will collapse if the ‘super tax’ becomes law that the Labor government has been forced to counter with its own ad campaign worth $38 million. Yet, on radio, the miners are outspending it at a ratio of close to 2 to 1.

In terms of size and money, Commercial Radio would not constitute a myna bird pecking at an elephants ear, but like the Miners it exists by exploiting a limited resource that rightly belongs to the Australian people through a licensing arrangement administered by the federal government of the day.

When Radio was less than enthusiastic about taking on the expense of digital conversion, the government simply threatened to open the spectrum to other bidders. Radio capitulated and the rest is history.

It could be argued then that if, say, Fortescue or Rio Tinto made good on their threat to leave Australia’s rich mineral deposits in the ground then presumably others, who would be content to forego a ‘super profit’ for just a pretty good one, would step in and start digging. Yet the mining industry has managed to side-step this notion in consumers minds and instead convince them that the mining companies would happily choose to make Brazilians or Russians prosperous if they can’t get their way in Australia.

When the previous government started tinkering with regional radio in a ham-fisted effort to maintain localism, station owners laid low in the belief that they had no reasonable argument in praise of networking to present to their listeners. They simply accepted the notion that the good burghers of regional Australia saw radio network operators as fat cats who, if left unregulated, would leave their towns without the soul of stand alone stations. Result; commercial regional owners were lumbered with some of the dumbest, most restrictive media ownership rules in the western world.

Compare that to the attitude of the mining industry bosses who, despite populating the pointy end of BRW’s rich list, can confidently make a case for Joe Blow to believe that it would be in his best interests to make them even richer. For this trick, they borrowed heavily from the US right wing, who when confronted with an administration that was actually going to do something to improve that country’s shambles of a health system, were able to convince many of the very people that the new legislation would help most that since it was all a communist plot, they should reject the affordable medical care they so desperately need.

Meanwhile Australia’s television industry recently successfully lobbied communications minister Stephen Conroy for a reduction in license fees worth over $240 million in return for no more than a vague promise to not create less Australian content. Radio also negotiated a drop in fees. But that was a decade ago to compensate for new FM licence allocations that diluted the value of existing ones.

Now as license values are being seriously eroded for reasons not even imagined back then, the biggest concession commercial radio has secured from government lately is a review of the more onerous elements of the regional radio rules concerning trigger events and networking.

What do you think? Should we hope that ACMA appreciates the gentle and civil manner in which the radio industry conducts its lobbying and cuts it a little slack? Or should Radio harden its tactics by taking a leaf out of the mining industry’s book?