The Australian Communications and Media Authority has found that the licensee of 2KM breached a condition of its licence by failing to broadcast ‘required particulars’ immediately following an advertisement for the Federal Government’s First Home Owners Boost.

The ACMA received a complaint on 24 February 2009 about the advertisement broadcast on 2KM. After investigating the complaint, the ACMA found the licensee to be in breach of subclause 4(2) of Schedule 2 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (the BSA), which requires licensees to also broadcast information (referred to as the ‘required particulars’) immediately following an advertisement that contains political matter.

The ‘required particulars‘ must include the name of the person authorising the broadcast of the political matter, the office location of the person who authorised the matter and the names of every speaker who makes a statement that forms part of the political matter. In addition, the ‘required particulars’ must be broadcast in the same language as the political matter.

In this instance, the political matter was spoken in Arabic.

The breach relates to the licensee’s failure to announce the office location of the authorising person and the name of the speaker in Arabic.

The licensee has acknowledged the breach and has advised that it has educated its staff of its obligations in relation to the broadcast of political matter to ensure that breaches of this nature do not occur in the future.

This is the first breach for the licensee of this licence condition recorded by the ACMA. In light of the steps taken by the licensee the ACMA will take no further action at this stage.