Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

In continuation, I call the member for Moore.

Tom French (Moore, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

We were talking about some of the largest technology businesses operating in Australia. When these bills were introduced, the proposed charge was 2.5 per cent of relevant Australian digital advertising revenue. The government is now moving an amendment to modestly increase that rate to 2.75 per cent. The change reflects how the digital advertising and news markets have developed since the original benchmark was set, but the important point is this: the government does not want platforms to pay the charge. We would prefer them to do deals with Australian news businesses. The charge is the incentive; the commercial agreement is the objective. Increasing the rate slightly strengthens that incentive.

Commercial agreements under this framework are expected to deliver around $225 million to $275 million each year to Australian journalism. That means stronger newsrooms, better local reporting and greater investment in public interest journalism. It means communities continuing to have people whose job it is to find out what is actually going on. That can occasionally be inconvenient for politicians, but inconvenience is not a defect in journalism. Sometimes it is the product working exactly as advertised.

The legislation is deliberately designed to make commercial agreements more attractive than simply paying the charge. Eligible expenditure with Australian news businesses generally receives a 150 per cent uplift when calculating a platform's offset. For deals with small and medium news businesses, that increases to 200 per cent. In simple terms, spend a dollar supporting an eligible smaller Australian publisher and, for the purposes of the offset, it counts as $2. That also recognises that a small Australian publisher negotiating with some of the world's largest technology companies does not walk into the room holding all the cards.

The framework also encourages diversity. A platform cannot simply do one enormous deal with one major media organisation and consider its responsibility finished. To qualify for the offset, there must be eligible expenditure across at least eight separate Australian news business corporate groups, with limits on how much of the offset can come from a single group.

The objective is not simply to transfer money between a small number of very large corporations. Australians benefit from major publishers, smaller and regional outlets, and new or specialist news organisations. If platforms make those commercial agreements—good—that is the preferred outcome. But if a platform chooses to pay the news bargaining incentive instead, that money goes back to Australian journalism through the News Journalism Payments scheme. Payments will be linked largely to an organisation's editorial capacity.

In plain English, we look at the people actually producing journalism. That includes journalists and photojournalists, editors and producers and other eligible workers directly involved in producing core news content. Freelancers can also be recognised. There is an additional 20 per cent weighting for journalists employed by small and medium news organisations, those working in regional and remote Australia and those working for organisations serving diverse communities. That reflects the reality of producing journalism outside the biggest metropolitan newsrooms. A local planning decision may never make the national news and a council decision may never lead the six o'clock bulletin, but, if you live in that community, those decisions can have a direct impact on your life. National journalism tells Australians what is happening across the country; local journalism tells people what is happening around the corner.

The scheme also provides dedicated support for smaller publishers. Five per cent of revenue raised through the News Bargaining Incentive will fund grants focused on small publishers and startups. Another five per cent will support the Australian Associated Press. The AAP's newswire supports hundreds of publishers around the country, including hundreds in regional Australia, giving smaller organisations access to reporting they could never reproduce on their own.

There are also safeguards. Recipients must maintain the editorial capacity on which their payments were calculated and comply with reporting and record-keeping requirements. Funding can be recovered where those obligations are not met.

This is a scheme designed to sustain genuine Australian journalism jobs, and, importantly, eligibility is based on defined criteria. It is not based on whether a minister enjoyed yesterday's editorial. Government can support the conditions in which independent journalism survives. Government should never decide what independent journalists write. I would be extremely uncomfortable with any system where support depended on favourable reporting. Quite apart from the democratic problem, it would create a terrifying prospect of politicians lining up to argue that a newspaper column had failed to show sufficient appreciation. No journalist deserves that.

The government has consulted extensively in developing this legislation, and that has included digital platforms, news businesses, industry representatives and international stakeholders, including the United States government. There was public consultation during 2025 and consultation on exposure draft legislation in 2026, and 56 submissions were received on the News Journalism Payment Scheme in May this year. The legislation changed as a result. That does not mean everyone agrees with it. In broad terms, news organisations support the package, while major digital platforms and some United States stakeholders remain opposed.

I acknowledge that some of the world's largest technology companies remain unhappy with the proposal. I am yet to encounter a large corporation that regards a new financial obligation as an exciting policy breakthrough. Their concerns should be heard, but this parliament still has a responsibility to make laws in Australia's interests, and the legislation gives platforms a clear alternative: they can acquit their liability at a substantially lower cost by entering into commercial agreements with Australian news businesses. That is the point. The government's preference is commercial investment, not government revenue. We want publishers and platforms sitting down, negotiating agreements and supporting Australian journalists, getting on with it without government having to stand in the middle holding the money. Frankly, fewer situations involving politicians standing between journalists and their money is probably healthy for everyone involved.

Politicians will continue to disagree with journalists. Journalists will continue to disagree with politicians. There will continue to be stories that we think are unfair, questions we think are irritating and headlines we would have written differently. That is normal. Some tension between politicians and journalists is probably a sign that both sides are doing their jobs. A politician should not judge the value of journalism by whether today's paper says something nice about them. The real test is whether Australians have independent people who can ask questions, investigate claims and report what they find.

We cannot pretend that the advertising market of 20 or 30 years ago is coming back, we cannot ignore the market power now held by global digital platforms and we should not accept a future where the only journalism that survives is journalism capable of generating enough clicks to satisfy an algorithm. There is still a place for local reporting, investigative journalism and careful editing. And, yes, there is still a place for the political journalists waiting outside this chamber, hoping one of us will accidentally say something interesting. We need them. We will occasionally complain about them. They will occasionally complain about us. And that arrangement has served Australian democracy reasonably well.

These bills recognise that the digital economy has changed who captures the advertising revenue that once helped pay for journalism. They create a practical mechanism to encourage some of that value to flow back into Australian news. The amendment strengthens that mechanism. A 2.75 per cent charge provides a stronger incentive for commercial agreements, expected to deliver between $225 million and $275 million each year to Australian journalism. If platforms instead choose to pay the charge, that revenue will be returned to the Australian news sector. Either way, the objective is the same: more sustainable newsrooms, stronger local reporting and greater media diversity. That is good journalism. It is good for our communities. Even on those mornings when some of us might prefer not to admit it, it is good for democracy. I commend the bills to the House.

Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026 and the news media bargaining bills. In 1977—in the front room of a terrace house in Subiaco, Western Australia—Bret Christian and his wife Bettye started a newspaper. They had manual typewriters, waxed paper, scalpels, a one-year-old son and what Bret has cheerfully called a weird idea to base a newspaper on news—to find out what was happening in the community and to tell people about it. For five years, they took no holidays. Some advertisers paid in meat, rather than cash. Nearly 50 years on, the Post is still there, still independent and still free. Fifty thousand copies are delivered every week to letterboxes across my electorate, with a new masthead launched just last week into Perth's northern coastal corridor. They have 22 staff, 60 to 70 original stories a week and no wire copy. As Bret puts it, 'A sparrow doesn't fall in the western suburbs without the Post knowing about it.'

I begin with this story because, when we debate media policy in this place, we tend to talk about platforms, revenues and market share. We talk less about what's at stake, which is whether communities can see themselves, hear themselves and hold to account the people who make decisions about their lives.

Let me give you some examples of the impact a small local newspaper can have. John Button spent years in prison, wrongfully convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend in 1963. The Post personally funded the investigation that cleared him, flying a crash expert from the United States to Perth twice to examine the forensic evidence. Ultimately, that evidence swayed the appeals court and Button's conviction was quashed.

His exoneration became the springboard for another Post campaign. Darryl Beamish, a deaf and non-verbal man wrongfully convicted of wilful murder in 1961, was sentenced to death by hanging and served more than a decade in prison for a crime he did not commit. In 2015, the Post published a story connecting an earlier crime to the Claremont serial killings, which loomed large for me and my friends in our late teenage years and was a case that had gone cold after nearly two decades. The public outcry that followed reinvigorated the police investigation. An arrest came within a year. Police have said the story spurred the reopening.

The less dramatic work matters just as much. Reporting on decisions about rates, planning and public money is vital because a decision nobody reports is a decision nobody questions. When the Post started sending a journalist to City of Stirling council meetings recently after its northern expansion, they found council employees had taken over the media desk because no media had been attending the meetings. Years of decisions about public money had been made with nobody in the room to report on them. The same is true of environmental reporting, such as on tree canopy, beach erosion, heritage, wildlife and development decisions. These topics rarely rate a mention in the large media outlets unless they can be framed as a fight against red tape. In my electorate, these stories get aired because the Post runs them together with the things that knit a place together, such as stories about local school achievements and remarkable acts of community kindness—and the Doodlebug colouring competition on the children's page that has thrilled generations of kids who get to see their name in the paper.

We know what happens when a local newspaper disappears. Research from news deserts overseas consistently show that when local papers close, council spending rises, borrowing costs rise and volunteering, local donations and civic participation fall. Local journalism is civic infrastructure. Readers write to the post regularly to say it helps them feel connected to where they live. My mum says she's not sure what she's doing next week until she's actually been through the Post.

That points to something else that local journalism does. We live in an increasingly siloed society with less exposure to different ideas and ways of seeing the world. A local paper is a shared mirror. When neighbours read the same stories, follow the same council decisions and celebrate the same local wins, it builds a sense of community that transcends politics or ideology. A local reporter is personally accountable in a way an algorithm never is. Unlike a social feed engineered to show us only what we already believe, a good local paper offers a right of reply, publishes the letters that criticise it and gives both sides of an argument.

This is why I welcome the intent of this package. The rapid growth of digital platforms has stripped revenue from Australian journalism, and the previous bargaining code failed the moment platforms realised they could walk away from news altogether. The news bargaining incentive legislative package is a serious attempt to fix that—a charge on the latest platforms' Australian digital advertising revenue, which they can offset by striking commercial deals with Australian news businesses.

I commend the government for moving on this, but I am concerned that these bills, as drafted, may not deliver for the small, independent, regional, multicultural and First Nations news organisations that keep so many of our communities informed. They risk making Australia's media concentration worse rather than better.

The problem lies in how the two halves of this scheme fit together. A platform faces a charge of 2.5 per cent or perhaps 2.75 per cent of its Australian digital advertising revenue—a levy, in effect—which it can offset entirely by striking deals with Australian news businesses. Whatever the platform doesn't offset, it pays. That money then splits two ways: 90 per cent is distributed as payments to registered news businesses according to their journalist head count, and 10 per cent is set aside for grants, with five per cent allocated to the Australian Associated Press and five per cent to a separate grant stream.

So, there are three doors. Behind the first, a platform chooses who it does a deal with. Behind the second, you receive a share of the levy based on the journalists you employ, but only if there's levy money to share. Behind the third is a grant. Now consider who walks through each door. A platform must strike a minimum of eight deals to satisfy the scheme. Australia's largest media companies own dozens of outlets between them. One WA player alone publishes 22 mastheads. A platform could comfortably reach eight deals without a single independent publisher being party to any of them and then walk away with its obligations discharged.

We should not pretend the market will sort this out. When the Post engaged lawyers to write to Meta and to Google, Meta and Google ignored them. That's the negotiating dynamic these bills assume will function. This is the crux of the issue—every dollar a platform offsets through deals with the major publishers is a dollar that never reaches the levy pool, which means it never reaches the payment stream and never reaches the grant stream either.

The two doors left open to small publishers are only funded by the platforms not doing deals. More deals with big players means less for everybody else. Meanwhile, the third door is extremely difficult to access. The grant stream is set at five per cent of levy revenue and is available only to organisations that are not eligible to participate in the payments scheme. In practice, this is those organisations too small to register under the code—below the $150,000 revenue test.

In Perth, our independent suburban newspapers—the Post, the Fremantle Herald, the Examiner newspapers covering Armadale and surrounds, and the Midland Echoare all above that threshold but also below the negotiating table. If public money flows overwhelmingly to the largest players while independents fund themselves entirely from their own revenue, we are not levelling a playing field; we are tilting it towards the big players.

An unintended consequence of this legislation could be to make our media concentration even worse. Nobody will see the results for years, because we take local journalism for granted right up until the moment it's gone.

So I will move three amendments during consideration in detail. The first is a series of amendments to ensure that small publishers get a share of deals. A platform should not be able to claim the offset unless at least 12.5 per cent of its qualifying expenditure for the year goes to small news businesses, defined as those with an annual income under $20 million. This is not a heavy impost on companies of this scale. And, given that small and medium publishers account for about 16 per cent of market share, this is a reasonable requirement. But, importantly, it will guarantee that the smallest publishers are part of the deal-making rather than spectators to it.

Second is a grant pool that means something. I'll move amendments to lift the grant stream from five per cent of levy revenue to 15 per cent, with the Australian Associated Press stream unchanged at five per cent—a total carve-out of 20 per cent. Five per cent is a gesture, which is likely to be ineffective; 15 per cent can sustain journalism in communities that will never be commercially attractive to a global platform.

Third is grant eligibility that reaches the publishers who need it. I'll move to open grants to organisations with annual income under $20 million, whether or not they participate in the payments scheme, with priority given to those who don't. This closes the gap that currently strands independent, suburban and regional outlets, which are too big for the safety net but too small for a seat at the table.

These amendments are not radical. They're the minimum required for this scheme to live up to its own stated purpose. A functioning democracy needs more than eight large news organisations telling its story. It needs the local paper in the regions, the multicultural broadcaster reaching communities in languages, the First Nations media service and the community station down the street. Communities deserve to be seen and heard. Shared perspectives from the places where we live and work are how we come to understand the people around us, how we build social cohesion and how we participate in our democracy.

Bret Christian has been running a newspaper for almost half a century, through every confident prediction of print's imminent demise. He says this legislation would kill independent media, or it could save it. Which one of those it is will depend on what we do in this chamber.

With these amendments this bill will have a greater chance of throwing independent media a lifeline. I've put these amendments to the minister's office, and I implore the government to engage on them in good faith. This is important legislation to protect a vital part of our liberal democracy and social cohesion. I commend the bill with my proposed amendments to the House.

Jo Briskey (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Across my community there are residents who have lived in the same suburb for 20, 40 and some even 60 years, and in that time they have watched the media landscape drastically change around them. Their local paper—which, for many, was the Moonee Valley Leadergot thinner, and over time it's been absorbed by the Herald Sun. This experience is not unique to my community. In fact, it is one shared across the country.

The paper's closing is the visible part. What goes with it is a council meeting that very few sit though anymore, the local sports results that most don't witness live, and the planning decision made without anyone outside the room knowing it was on the agenda. None of that stops happening when a paper closes; it just stops being reported on. This did not happen because Australians tuned out; it happened because of revenue. The advertising revenue that once paid for the reporter sitting in the courtroom moved to a smaller number of very large global businesses that don't employ anybody to cover a local council meeting.

Journalism is expensive. And I do not say that to diminish it, because the expense is a function of the craft. Somebody has to be paid to sit through hours for the six paragraphs, to keep calling a company until it answers, and to know the difference between what a spokesperson has said and what has actually happened. It is skilled work, learned over years, and it cannot be done quickly or cheaply by somebody who has not learned it. That is the difficulty at the heart of this debate. There has never been more content produced in this country, yet there have never been fewer people employed to find things out. Those are two entirely different things, and we have spent something like 15 years confusing them.

We know from experience that the market will not correct this on its own, and it is worth being precise about why. The value of that reporter's work is not captured by the person who pays for it. The beneficiaries are not only the readers of the article; they are the neighbours who never see it, the residents who hear about it second-hand and the people who conduct themselves differently because somebody is in the room taking notes. Public interest journalism is a public good in the strict sense of the term. Everybody draws on it and almost nobody pays the full cost of producing it. Goods of that kind are always undersupplied when they are left entirely to a market. They are undersupplied in Australia now. That is the justification for our government taking action here, and it is not a partisan one.

This is not an argument about villains. No business should be penalised for having built a better advertising product, and these bills do not do that. What they do is give effect to a principle this parliament settled some years ago—that, where a platform takes value from Australian news, it should contribute to producing it. This was settled in March 2021 under those opposite with the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, and the code worked. Deals were struck, money went into newsrooms, journalists were hired on the back of it and public interest journalism in this country is stronger today than it would have been without it.

However, despite that step forward, the legislation had a flaw. It was that every obligation in the code depended on a choice the platform controlled: carry Australian news and you bargain; stop carrying Australian news and the obligation disappears. A platform that did not wish to bargain had an exit available to it, and one of them took it. The sustainability of Australian journalism cannot rest on whether a global company decides in any given year that news is not worth carrying. The news bargaining incentive closes that exit. It applies a charge of 2.5 per cent to the Australian digital advertising revenue earned by significant search and social media services. The liability attaches to the advertising, not to the news, which means that withdrawing Australian news no longer withdraws a platform from the charge.

Our government's preference is to collect none of it, but we are not seeking to soften the policy. We are rather seeking to strengthen it. A platform can reduce its liability by doing deals with Australian news businesses. Every dollar it spends under an eligible agreement is credited against what it owes at 150 per cent or $1.50 off the bill for every dollar spent and 200 per cent or $2 on the dollar where the agreement is with a small or medium publisher. Spend enough across enough agreements and the liability disappears altogether. Reach the agreements and the liability goes. Decline to and the charge is paid and returned to the sector in full through the news journalism payment scheme. There is no version of this in which the money ends up anywhere other than Australian journalism.

How it's returned is the most consequential decision in the package. The payment scheme does not allocate on audience. It does not go on clicks, how much a masthead publishes or how effectively its proprietor argues its case. It goes on how many journalists an organisation employs, freelancers included, along with photojournalists, videographers, the data and visual journalists and the editors and producers directly involved in producing the news. Importantly, an organisation that takes a payment must maintain that employment over the relevant period. The money cannot be taken and the newsroom quietly thinned out afterwards. That design reaches something the rest of this debate largely misses. Content is now abundant and close to costless. Reporting is neither. A masthead can be kept alive on syndicated copy and republished releases at almost no cost, and it will look from the outside much the same as it always has. What it will not have is anybody at the local council meeting. If we want that person there, a wage has to be paid. A scheme that counts wages is the only kind that reaches them.

The way you demonstrate the value of work is that you count it and you pay for it. The support also has to spread. A platform needs eligible agreements with at least eight different news organisations before it can access the offset at all, and no single agreement may account for more than a quarter of its liability. One very large cheque written to one very large company does not discharge the obligation. That requirement matters in an electorate like mine, where a great deal of the news reaches people through outlets that were never going to be at the negotiating table on their own.

There is no single answer to how people in my community consume news media. While many rely on the national mastheads, in some households the news comes in Greek and the paper is the Neos Kosmos. In others it is spoken and written in Italian on El Globo, published and produced in Brunswick West, which tells you something in and of itself. Community media does not organise itself by postcode; it organises around the community it seeks to serve. And that community is spread across most of Melbourne.

Nobody in Avondale Heights picks up El Globo because of where the office happens to be. There is the Indian Link. There is the Viet Times. A great many of my constituents receive their news through the SBS in Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Somali—in languages no commercial newsroom in this country was ever going to service on its own. Those mastheads have been reporting on Australian life in Australia for Australians—some of them for more than half a century. They do not have the audience numbers to make a global platform nervous and they were never going to be dealt with on their own terms. That is why payments under the scheme carry a 20 per cent loading for journalists employed by outlets serving culturally and linguistically diverse communities and First Nations communities alongside those working in regional and remote Australia and at small and medium publishers. That correction is deliberate, and it is the provision in these bills that will matter most to the people I represent.

At the other end of the scale is the local paper. Across Melbourne, the genuinely independent local title has become an unusual thing. Star Weekly still covers our councils, our Saturday sports and our schools. The Flemington-Kensington News is produced by a not-for-profit, largely by people paid very little or nothing at all for a couple of suburbs most of the country could not place on a map. That is why five per cent of any revenue raised is set aside for grants to precisely that kind of publisher and a further five per cent goes to the Australian Associated Press, which supplies the copy that keeps a great many small newsrooms functioning at all.

What my constituents watched happen to one paper has been happening to an entire industry at the same time. Titles close or are absorbed into something larger and edited from an office in another city, and it's not because journalists have become worse at their jobs or readers have become less interested. It is what happens to an industry when the revenue that sustained a diverse version of it disappears and only the larger operators are left, because they can carry the cost. The result is fewer owners, fewer newsrooms and less scrutiny of the decisions that shape people's lives. These bills will not reverse that on their own. They are, however, the first serious attempt this parliament has made to direct money back toward the small, the local and the diverse rather than watch all of it pool at the top.

Recently, I was speaking with a young woman in my community—Gabby, who is studying journalism. She told me that a number of people have told her that becoming a journalist would be very difficult, because there are not many jobs in journalism, no jobs in the industry she is studying to join, no jobs in the craft she is working to learn. Twenty years ago that conversation would have been very different, because 20 years ago there were newsrooms across Melbourne for someone like Gabby to get a start in. What troubles me is that the advice that she is receiving is not entirely wrong. A generation of young Australians is being told sensibly and by people who care about them to think twice about entering an industry this country cannot do without. A scheme that pays according to how many journalists a newsroom employs is in the end about whether there is a job waiting for Gabby after she finishes her study.

There are things these bills cannot do, and we do ourselves no favours by pretending otherwise. They will not bring back the mastheads that have already closed or give those residents that I began with the standalone Moonee Valley Leader. They will not undo two decades of contraction or return a reporter to every council chamber in the country. They will not settle how Australians will be getting their news a decade from now. What they do is narrower and more useful. A platform can no longer make its obligations disappear by making news disappear. The preference for commercial agreements is clear, and the incentives are weighted heavily towards reaching them—including recognition of the good-faith agreements struck since 1 January last year, because businesses that did the right thing early should not be worse off for it.

When money does move, it moves according to how many people are employed to do journalism, with the largest proportional benefit going to the smallest, most local and most linguistically diverse newsrooms that we have. For my community, local and diverse media is still the great contender. It is how people have come here from somewhere else, got a hold of the place they come from and make sense of the one that they live in now, and it is how a suburb keeps track of itself. Here is what this bill means to my community. It is whether the Greek language paper is still publishing in five years. It is whether somebody is still sitting in the Moonee Valley council chamber on a Tuesday night, taking notes. It's whether a young person like Gabby, who wants to be a journalist, has a newsroom close enough to home to give her a start.

The choice from here belongs to the platforms. They can sit down with Australian news businesses and reach agreements and put money into newsrooms, which is what our government wants and what these bills are built to produce, or they can decline, pay the charge and see it go to Australian journalism regardless. What is no longer available to them is the third course: taking the value of Australian news while contributing nothing toward the cost of producing it. That is a modest thing to ask of some of the largest companies in the world, and it is not a modest thing for newsrooms on the other side of it. A country that stops producing its own journalism does not stop consuming news. It consumes somebody else's news about itself produced elsewhere and accountable to nobody. It is the outcome these bills are written to avoid, and communities like mine will benefit greatly from what they seek to produce. I commend the bills to the House.

Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026 and related bills. This package of bills introduces the news bargaining incentive, the NBI, to support the sustainability and diversity of the Australian news sector by reinforcing the news media bargaining code. The bill aims to incentivise commercial agreements between digital platforms and Australian news businesses. The NBI will impose a 2.5 per cent charge on the Australian digital advertising revenues earned by a digital platform from their significant search or social media services. Platforms can offset this liability through eligible expenditure on commercial agreements with news businesses at a rate of 150 per cent or 200 per cent for deals with smaller news businesses.

The News Journalism Payments Bill will distribute any revenue raised by the NBI to eligible news organisations based on the number of journalists they employ. This proposed NBI has the potential to provide much-needed support for the public interest journalism in Australia. It's necessary because the original news bargaining code was ultimately undermined by a fundamental loophole. Platforms could avoid their bargaining obligations simply by removing news from their services.

The aim of the legislation is to safeguard Australian journalism and the vital role it plays in our democracy. A healthy democracy depends on people having access to reliable, independent and diverse news sources, but the way we consume news has changed. The latest data shows that 73 per cent of Australians used an online platform to access news in 2025, compared with 54 per cent who accessed news via television. Print newspapers were used by just 15 per cent in 2022. Young Australians are even more digitally dependent. Among Australians aged 18 to 24, 48 per cent use TikTok for news and 60 per cent have never used newspapers ever for news.

The reality is that large social media companies have taken audience and advertising revenue from news media, and, unlike news media, they have not reinvested that revenue back into journalism. Advertising revenue that once paid for local journalists, photographers and editors has moved overwhelmingly online, and a significant share of that revenue now flows to foreign tech companies. The result is that Australian media now has reduced resources to cover federal, state and local politics in depth, depriving citizens of the ability to know exactly what is going on. The cuts and closures of local news outlets have led to fewer regional issues, stories and perspectives being reported and, worryingly, less accountability reporting at the local level.

The changing nature of news has seen local dailies cease weekday print editions and move primarily online. At a time of growing disinformation and the increasing dominance of big tech, it's more important than ever that our media serves the public interest and that we have media diversity. We must proactively help maintain our small independent publishers who have connections with local communities and report the local news. Local publications like the Tawny Frogmouth, Northern Beaches Advocate, Pittwater Online News, Manly Observer, Northern Beaches Living, Beaches COVERED and Pittwater Life are all in my electorate of Mackellar. That's why I support the principle behind these bills.

The government's NBI is an important step to ensure that the world's largest digital platforms contribute to the Australian news ecosystem from which they derive enormous value. The original News Media Bargaining Code was an important reform, but it contained a fundamental weakness—a digital platform could avoid the ultimate consequence of the code by simply removing news from its service. We saw exactly what that meant in 2021, when Facebook abruptly blocked news content in Australia. Manly Observer editor Kim Smee has spoken about this and the importance of social media for local journalism, particularly for delivering rapid information about major events such as floods, fires, police incidents and other emergencies. A potential news ban is not simply an inconvenience. It can affect community safety.

The Manly Observer is an important reminder that this debate cannot be simply reduced to Google and Meta negotiating with the largest media companies. There are independent journalists and local publishers across Australia whose entire relationship with their audience can be affected by a decision made in a corporate office on the other side of the world. Our government must ensure this legislation does not leave independent publishers as collateral damage in a dispute between big tech and big media.

Rather than making the platforms obligation dependent on whether it carries news, the government is seeking to create a durable incentive for platforms to negotiate commercial agreements with Australian news publishers or otherwise pay a charge. This principle has support across a broad section of Australian media. The ABC, SBS, News Corp, Nine, Network 10, Southern Cross Media, Australian Community Media and Guardian Australia have described the legislation as a critical step towards securing the future of Australian news. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance also supports the objective of requiring digital platforms to contribute to Australian journalism, and there is evidence that Australians themselves understand the problem, with 64 per cent supporting the imposition of a tax on large social media companies to fund public interest journalism and support local media.

But if this legislation is going to succeed, we need to be clear about what we're trying to safeguard. Australia already has one of the most concentrated media markets in the developed world. We cannot design a new funding mechanism that inadvertently makes the concentration worse. There is agreement among independent community, multicultural and regional media organisations who support the principle of NBI, but they warn us that design matters. The Local & Independent News Association, the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia, Digital Publishers Alliance, Disability Media Australia, Independent Multicultural Media Australia, the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasters Council and the Public Interest Journalism Initiative have all raised concerns about the potential for the scheme to entrench existing media concentration. These organisations are asking parliament to make this legislation work. We've seen improvements in the legislation, but we need more safeguards.

These coalition partners have proposed that at least 25 per cent of the deals should be with small and medium publishers. Without it, a platform can rationally choose to negotiate with the largest media. The result would be more money flowing to the organisations that already have the greatest market power and less money flowing to the publishers that need the most support.

This will undermine our media diversity. The incentive must actually incentivise platforms to deal with smaller publishers. The coalition of independent media organisations has argued that the differential offset for small and medium publishers needs to be substantially greater. The Digital Publishers Alliance has specifically called for a minimum 200 per cent offset for all small and medium publishers.

The government has made welcome changes to the scheme, including increasing the loading for regional journalists, small and medium publishers and media serving underrepresented communities from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. This is a positive step, but parliament should continue to scrutinise whether that differential is actually large enough to change the commercial behaviour of platforms. A safeguard is only useful if it changes outcomes.

The government has proposed a grants program for small publishers and start-ups with revenue below $150,000. Again, this is welcome, but the organisations representing independent media have argued for a more substantial and structural funding stream. The Digital Publishers Alliance has proposed reserving 15 per cent of the MBI revenue for small and medium publishers.

The reality is that we have communities around Australia where there are no local newsrooms. When a local newsroom disappears, it's not simply a business closing. It means fewer journalists scrutinising local government, fewer reporters investigating planning decisions, hospital services, environmental issues and community safety and fewer people telling the stories of the community itself. It means a loss of information and a loss of local identity.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance estimates that more than 200 regional and community newspapers have ceased printing or closed over the past decade, with more than 20 closures in the last 18 months alone. That is a staggering loss of local accountability and local knowledge. We should not allow the NBI to become a mechanism that funds the larger publishers, while the news deserts continue to expand.

This legislation must also protect multicultural, disability, First Nations, community and other underrepresented voices. A healthy media ecosystem is not simply one with lots of mastheads; it's one with lots of voices. People need access to journalism that reflects their communities, their languages, their experiences and their concerns. The increase in the loading for media serving underrepresented communities is welcome, but we should measure the success of this legislation by whether those voices become stronger, not simply by how much money is paid out.

We must also ensure the legislation is futureproof. The way Australians consume information is changing rapidly. Today, Australians increasingly encounter information through artificial intelligence systems and other digital services. The Digital Publishers Alliance has warned that the legislation's definitions need to be capable of adapting to these changes, including the growing role of large language models and AI services.

This is vital. We should not pass legislation today that is already designed around yesterday's technology. If a new platform becomes sufficiently powerful to capture audiences, advertising revenue and the value of Australian journalism, the regulatory framework should be able to respond. We need a statutory review mechanism and a capacity to update the definitions as technology evolves.

Finally, we must have transparency. The public should be able to know whether this scheme is actually working. How many agreements are being made? Which types of publishers are receiving funding? How many journalists are being employed or retained? Are news deserts shrinking? These should not be unknowable questions. The government needs to report publicly and regularly on the outcomes of the MBI because if we are asking the Australian community to support a major intervention in the digital economy, Australians deserve to know whether it is delivering the public benefit promised.

The future of Australian journalism matters, because the future of Australian democracy depends on it. The measure of success cannot simply be how much money is raised. The measure of success must be whether that money produces more journalism, more journalists, more local reporting and more diverse voices. The government has made the important improvements to the legislation, but parliament must remain vigilant. We need safeguards to ensure that a meaningful share of commercial agreements goes to small and medium publishers; that the incentive for platforms to deal with those publishers is strong enough to overcome the imbalance in bargaining power; that a meaningful proportion of any levy revenue is directed towards independent, regional, multicultural and community journalism and the creation of new voices; that the scheme is transparent and independently evaluated; that the legislation is future proofed so that emerging technologies cannot simply exploit a new loophole; and that the government continues to monitor the impact of platform decisions on access to trusted news that Australians rely on. We should be ambitious about protecting the public interest by safeguarding Australian journalism and the vital role it plays in our democracy.

Renee Coffey (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

At their core, the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026 and related bills ask a simple question: who pays for the work of journalism? Australian reporters find the stories, editors test every claim and photographers and videographers capture the evidence. Producers turn hours of interviews into clear accounts that people can trust. Large digital platforms gain users, attention and advertising income from that work. These bills ask those platforms to make a fair commercial contribution.

Good journalism costs money to produce, and it takes trained people, time, legal care and a newsroom willing to pursue facts. A social media post can travel around the country in seconds, but the reporting behind it can take days, weeks or months. Our democracy relies on reporting that helps people judge governments, test claims and understand decisions made in their name. It strengthens unity in our community and holds powerful institutions to account. Public interest journalism is a public good, and Australians deserve access to diverse, high-quality, independent and locally produced news. That work needs a sound financial base. These bills support its long-term future.

I want to take a moment to recognise someone I feel very lucky to call a friend: Nance Haxton, the Wandering Journo. Nance has spent her career going where the story leads, asking difficult questions and helping people be heard. Nance's start was actually in a now defunct local paper in my area, the South-East Advertiser. She is now a two-time Walkley Award winner for excellence in journalism, and closer to home she was named Summerville House's 2022 Old Girl of the Year. Summerville House, a school, sits in South Brisbane, in my electorate of Griffith, so I was especially pleased to see Nance receive such warm recognition from her old school community.

As she accepted that honour, Nance spoke with great honesty about the choices and experiences that shaped her life in journalism. She talked about her early days as the ABC's only reporter in Port Augusta and about the reporting that earned her her first Walkley. She said:

I remember hearing on the police scanner that a riot was happening in Woomera… so I drove up there, an hour on the Stuart Highway, to this little speck on the desert map.

No one in town would talk to me except the guy who ran the petrol station.

I asked if he would let me on the roof of the petrol station so I could see what was happening at the detention centre, and in that outback kind of drawl he said, 'Sure, love.'

So that's where I sat, on the roof, on my own, watching the riot unfold, sending reports to national ABC programs on a crackly mobile phone.

Her second Walkley recognised an investigation into barriers faced by people with an intellectual disability in South Australia's justice system. Nance said:

My proudest moment from that harrowing investigation was actually not the Walkley Award—it was that my stories led to parliamentary inquiry in South Australia, to further investigate why the justice system was failing, society's most vulnerable.

And that led to the South Australia parliament changing legislation, and closing the loophole that prevented people with intellectual disability from giving evidence in a court of law.

That is public-interest journalism at its best. It reaches people locked out of public debate, tests systems that resist scrutiny and can change a law and change a life. Nance's career shows what journalism can achieve when a reporter has the time, skill and courage to follow a story. The next generation needs the skills to test information, identify credible sources and make sense of the news around them.

That brings me to a personal story from my own family dinner table. Founded by Bryce Corbett, Squiz Kids teaches media literacy to primary school children and is a proud Griffith success story. I first met Bryce many years ago when he worked at the Australian Women's Weekly, and it was wonderful to reconnect with him in my current role and hear about his work. One evening, my husband and I were having dinner with our two young boys when I noticed how closely they were following our conversation about a current national issue. They are now aged 11 and 13. They shared their own views, they offered facts that we did not even know and they even corrected a few things that we had said. They were confident, curious and informed.

I learned only later that the Squiz Kids program was running at my sons' primary school. I loved that moment of realisation, because it showed me what media literacy looks like in the life of a child. Squiz Kids helps young people understand the news, question what they see and separate fact from rumour. Reliable journalism needs an audience that can recognise and test it. Those skills start young. I was so proud to see that already in my two boys and, I know, thanks to Squiz Kids, thousands of young people across Australia are developing these skills.

My electorate of Griffith is home to a remarkable group of newsrooms, broadcasters and media workers. At South Bank, the ABC's Queensland headquarters carries Queensland stories across the country. SBS has its Brisbane office in the same precinct, connecting our city with a national service built around language, culture and belonging. NITV has Queensland based staff telling First Nations stories through First Nations eyes. Those journalists bring knowledge, trust and lived experience to their reporting, giving Queensland communities a direct voice in a national newsroom.

In Kangaroo Point, radio 4EB broadcasts in more than 50 languages from five studios, with more than 700 volunteers helping to put those programs to air. Earlier this year, I had the joy of visiting 4EB with the Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs, the member for Bruce. We saw how the station helps people stay informed and connected. For many people who have made Brisbane home, 4EB offers news, settlement information and a familiar voice in their own language. Its broadcasters can explain a storm warning or a government decision in words that listeners can understand and trust.

Across Brisbane, 4ZZZ has backed independent music, culture and community reporting for more than 50 years. The station gives local artists their first interview and gives community voices a place on air. In our broader Brisbane community, QNews reports on the lives, rights and experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community. Scenestr began in 1993 and continues to document our music, arts and cultural life. Today, Scenestr is Australia's only national entertainment print media group, publishing separate titles for different states. The publishing company also prints its sister title, Frooty, Australia's widest circulating LGBTQ+ title.

Each of these outlets serves a different audience and records stories that a generic global feed will miss. Local news tells us what a council decision means for our street. It explains a flood warning, follows a court case and introduces us to people building something good. Media diversity means people with different experiences deciding which stories deserve attention. It brings reporting in more languages from more suburbs and for audiences rarely served by the mass media. The value of journalism remains clear, but the business model that has funded it has changed sharply. Between 2006 and 2022, commercial broadcasters' share of Australian advertising spending fell from 43 per cent to 17 per cent. Much of that income moved online, into a market led by a small group of global platforms. Those platforms now capture a large share of digital advertising revenue, yet many Australian news businesses remain under intense financial pressure.

Companies such as Meta, TikTok, Google and LinkedIn operate services used by millions of Australians. These are multimillion-dollar multinational technology companies with immense commercial power. Australian journalism adds value to their platforms every day, giving people a reason to open an app, search for information or share a post. News keeps users engaged, and that attention supports digital advertising profits. The media outlet pays the journalist, funds the investigation, carries the legal risk and employs the photographer standing in the rain during a flood. The technology company gains value from the finished story appearing across its service. The bargaining imbalance is clear. A small Australian publisher enters any negotiation with far less money, data and legal power than a global platform. Without action, Australia risks losing local and regional news services, leaving fewer journalists, less media diversity and fewer people keeping watch over decisions made in our name. If platforms derive value from Australian journalism, they must help sustain it so that Australian newsrooms and journalists receive their fair share.

In 2021, the previous coalition government introduced the News Media Bargaining Code, which produced roughly 30 commercial agreements between Google, Meta and the Australian news businesses. But weaknesses in the original design of the code soon became clear. A platform could remove news from its service and avoid the bargaining obligation, leaving Australian publishers without payment and Australians at risk of losing access to trusted reporting. The Albanese Labor government is addressing this. This package strengthens the existing code by addressing that gap and keeping it effective as digital services, and the way Australians access news continue to change. Our model is practical and market based, with a clear preference for platforms and Australian news businesses to reach commercial agreements.

The News Bargaining Incentive applies a 2.5 per cent charge to Australian digital advertising revenue earned by search and social media services that meet the thresholds. Eligible agreements receive an offset equal to 150 per cent of their value, rising to 200 per cent for agreements with small and medium news businesses. That higher rate gives platforms a strong commercial reason to negotiate with smaller publishers, including outlets servicing local and diverse communities. A platform must hold eligible agreements with at least eight news organisations before it can access the offset, and no single agreement can account for more than 25 per cent of its total liability. Those rules encourage deals with a broader mix of Australian media organisations and limit the chance that a few agreements with the largest publishers absorb the full amount.

The principle is fair. A platform that derives its value from Australian news must help sustain it either through direct commercial agreements or by paying an incentive charge. The scheme recognises eligible good-faith agreements entered from 1 January 2025, allowing them to offset their news bargaining incentive liabilities from the commencement date. A platform can choose to pay the charge, but every dollar collected will return to the Australian news industry through the News Journalism Payment Scheme.

The News Journalism Payment Scheme puts journalists and newsroom jobs at the centre of its design. An organisation must appear on the register of eligible news businesses from the Australian Communications and Media Authority before it can seek a payment. Payments will follow a statutory formula based on the number of journalists employed, including freelancers, so an organisation with more journalists receives a larger payment. This reflects the greater investment that organisations make in public interest journalism. Basing payments on newsroom employment keeps the focus on people who gather facts, test evidence and produce reporting that the public can use. A 20 per cent uplift will apply for journalists employed in regional or remote Australia or by small and medium news organisations. It will cover journalists working for outlets servicing diverse communities, including First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse communities. This recognises the higher cost of employing journalists across regional and remote Australia, and responds to the financial pressure facing smaller publishers and community focused newsrooms.

Five per cent of the revenue raised from the News Bargaining Incentive will fund a separate grants program to help small publishers and start-ups grow their businesses and produce news for local communities. Small publishers often work with few staff and tight budgets, yet they can be the closest to the communities that they cover. A separate five per cent grant program will support Australian Associated Press, which makes a unique contribution to the production of local Australian news. The AAP supplies its newswire to more than 400 Australian publishers, including more than 300 in regional areas.

The design protects editorial independence, as ministers do not choose which stories deserve support. Payments follow clear rules linked to newsroom employment, registration and public interest news production. Government support for journalism must never purchase praise or soften scrutiny, and a strong and independent press will question every government, including this one. Labor believes work deserves fair pay, and journalism is highly skilled work the value of which does not vanish after a headline appears on a search page or a social feed. The news media bargaining bills put that principle into law.

For communities like my community of Griffith, the result we seek is clear. We want reporters in local newsrooms, producers behind microphones in studios across Brisbane and editors with time to check the facts. We want First Nations stories told by First Nations journalists. We want multicultural communities to hear trusted information in the languages spoken at home. And we want young people to grow up curious, informed and ready to question what they see. Australian democracy needs journalists with the time and backing to do their jobs, and Australian communities need newsrooms that know their people and places. These bills help secure a sustainable, diverse and independent Australian news industry by backing Australian journalism, Australian newsrooms and Australian jobs.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

There wouldn't be a parliamentarian who loves newspapers more than I do. I can say that with some justification because I recently converted one side of my double garage at home into bookshelves to hold the latest lot of bound newspapers of the Daily Advertiser from Wagga Wagga—a publication I once edited, between 1991 and 2002, and a publication for which I worked for 21 years, between 1981 and 2002. I've dedicated part of my home to bound editions of said publication. Thankfully, my wife, Catherine, allowed me to do that. They are a very good resource, and they are a very good resource because they tell the history of not just Wagga Wagga but the Riverina over the past six decades or more. I refer to them often.

I am saddened by the way the newspaper industry has gone in recent years. So many print editions have fallen by the wayside. I understand and recognise that the ways and means people get their news have changed, and newspapers are not charity: they cannot keep printing editions that are not being read when so many people, once avid print newspaper readers, are now going online for their daily news dissemination. That said, the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026 and related bills are important. They build on what the coalition did in government to help the newspaper industry, particularly through funding journalists in regional areas.

It does worry me that many of those journalists in regional areas do not receive the training they once did because, even if papers do have them, there are just not the older journalists or subeditors who were once on those newspapers. I recall when I was on the Daily Advertiser, when I edited the Daily Advertiser, our print deadline was two o'clock in the morning. Our first journalists were on board very early in the morning, so we had journalists on almost every hour of every day. I still recall phoning in from a telephone box with a story about a Temora fire at about four o'clock in the morning and arriving back in Wagga Wagga at five o'clock in the morning as the printed edition was coming off the local press, housed in the Daily Advertiser building at 48 Trail Street.

Those days are gone. The Daily Advertiser is now printed interstate at Wodonga. The editor, acting editor Xavier Mardling, as I understand, lives in the same locality. The paper is printed interstate, the editor lives interstate, and many of the views come from this town, in fact—from the Canberra Times, academics and other people in Canberra. It is not the local paper it once was, and more is the pity. The Daily Advertiser has not hired as many general local news journalists as would be expected for a paper of its size and history—and it goes back to 1868. Again, it's such a shame. Once upon a time, you'd get a good local person, they'd go through a cadetship, you'd train them and they would stay at that paper. These days many of the journalists come from capital cities—Sydney and Melbourne, in the Daily Advertiser's case—and cut their teeth, and they then leave, some after only a few months, seeking fortune and fame in capital city newsrooms. It's such a shame. You don't get that continuity. You don't get that good local knowledge.

That's not to say that the Daily Advertiser isn't a good newspaper. It's still publishing six days a week, Monday through to Saturday. And whilst it doesn't carry the line that it used to from John Milton, that 1600s English writer—'This is true liberty, when freeborn men, having to advise the public, may speak free'—it still campaigns on local issues, with homelessness being one of them at the moment. It still keeps people to account, including me, and that's a good thing. Certainly, as Voltaire said—and I'm paraphrasing, of course—I mightn't like what they say, but I'll defend, to the death, their right to say it. It's as true today as it was when he said it all those centuries ago. I am pleased that the Daily Advertiser is still publishing a daily newspaper, because it is important.

I want to praise somebody in the newspaper game whom I have great respect for, and that is Hartley Higgins. I contacted him tonight in relation to this bill. His Provincial Press Group publishes, amongst others: the Cowra Guardian, which was established in 1903; the Grenfell Record, 1866; Young Witness, 1864; Boorowa News, 1874; Harden Murrumburrah Express,1947; Tumut and Adelong Times, 1860; Tumbarumba Times, 1904; the Gundagai Independent, 1898; the Temora Independent, 1887; and the Narrandera Argus, 1880. These publications are all in the Riverina or close to it, and they are still providing the parish-pump news that people respect, know, regard and want.

And it's not just births, deaths and marriages; it's all the local information. And that is the shame about the bigger regional papers now owned by ACM—Australian Community Media, Antony Catalano's organisation—because I think sometimes those larger newspapers have drifted away from the real local content that made them such a must-read every morning. Whilst the Daily Advertiser and the Border Mail are still publishing sport, general news and the like, in recent years we have noticed a decline in the number of avid and ardent readers of those publications. As I said, I'm so pleased that they are still publishing. Long may that continue. I'll do everything I can to make sure they continue to exist, and I support their initiatives as part of being an advocacy group to lobby the government for a better deal, certainly regarding the right of their journalists and their publications with the metadata and with the payments of the stories that they own, that local content that they have produced and that the ACM group has spent money providing. It should not just be lifted and utilised elsewhere without a down payment, without suitable recompense.

In Hartley Higgins's correspondence with me tonight, he said:

We have never known business so tough, not just as publishers but as small to medium businesses (SMEs); it seems that governments of all colours—

and I'm reading it as he said it—

don't fully understand SME's plight of falling revenues yet confronted by rising costs and wages, and benefits.

I would say to Hartley that indeed, in that respect, I certainly know how hard they're feeling it. I am a former small-business owner, I am a former newspaper editor and I very much understand that. He went on to say:

CPA—

the Country Press Association—

which represents 240 publisher members, has worked tirelessly for the last three years presenting to government (ministers and departments) to promote not only country newspapers but the future of regional journalism, with ethics and standards.

Having succeeded in convincing the government of the need and application of the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) legislation, it's now become evident that organisations who are not committed to, or in some cases not capable of producing public interest journalism, have joined a throng of potential participants in the scheme, if it's successful.

He went on to talk about strong in-principle support from the organisations behind it. He also talked about the risk of changes that undermine core objectives and the like. He's worried, as well he might be and as newspaper publishers are. They're worried because they are not just contributors to the media market. They are very much part of the fabric of those country communities, particularly those in the regions. Capital cities will always have theDaily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, the Advertiser in Adelaide and the like. They will go on. But it's the little newspapers in communities that are big enough to provide a good cup of coffee yet small enough to still care that are still a vital component of the day-to-day life. Local print adds to the flavour of local life, it reports on the news, and it's trusted. And that applies to the Daily Advertiser in Wagga Wagga and to all of those other publications I mentioned.

We saw in Queensland some time ago, during COVID, that so many of those publications just went by the wayside. Those communities are not the same because they don't have their local print newspaper, whether on a daily, a tri-weekly or a bi-weekly basis. Some of them have been replaced or supplanted by free throwaways, but those are not the same as a paid publication with journalists who may have done their journalism training in a far-off city, in a metropolitan area, or who may be locals doing a cadetship.

I implore those country editors—the ones who actually have a say and are not just being told what to do from on high, perhaps from a conglomerate in a far-off capital city—to look at employing young local people, even school leavers, because they can add potential to your organisation. If you can give them the training and guide them, they will produce the results. And your publications will have so much more respect. The Temoras, the Gundagais and the Narranderas of the world are endeavouring to do that. I have to give credit to Hartley Higgins and his organisation, PPG, because they are endeavouring to train the next generation of journalists. Hartley has probably forgotten more about newspapers than most people will ever know. He's somebody I respect, he's somebody I will listen to and he's somebody whose publications are worth advertising in.

And advertising is also a vital component. These newspapers are competing in a media market that has never been like this before. So many people these days choose to advertise online, and it's taking away some of that component that was once only the domain of print journalism, print newspapers. We need to acknowledge that, and we also need to acknowledge that government—at federal, state and local level—should do everything it can to advertise in these local print newspapers because you never know the value of something until you lose it. That's certainly the case with newspapers.

When you're doing research—dare I say 'family trees'?—and looking to authors who are writing history books, particularly local history books and histories of local sporting clubs, the only place that you can go to for reference for that material is your local newspaper. That's why Trove is such a well-resourced thing, and that's why it needs funding too so that it can get more of those country newspapers into digital form so that people can read them online. If we lose those papers, good luck trying to find that information. Good luck trying to find it in the future when a company that perhaps goes online stays online and then falls apart. It'll go offline and nobody will ever be able to retrieve that information.

So legislation is important. It is also vital that, to enhance the legislation, we adopt the amendments put forward by the shadow communications minister. But I say again: please, we need to help our newspapers in every which way. If you can buy a local newspaper and read it, you never know what you might find in it, and if we lose them, we'll be much the poorer as a society and as country communities.

Ash Ambihaipahar (Barton, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I used to roll my eyes when people older than me would say, simply: 'Delete the internet.' They would argue that social media plays on our short attention span, our desire for entertainment over information and, too often, our pettiness over our commitment to truth, accountability and public interest. At the time, I did not really want to hear it. I'm a millennial. I grew up with the internet, and for me, it was a way to connect with friends, discover new music, post photos from a night out in Hurstville and share what I was doing when I went overseas to work in the United States. But social media today does not feel like that anymore. It is not really social. It is competitive. It's harsh. It is designed to keep people scrolling and, too often, keep them angry enough to keep arguing in the comments.

I accept that, as users, we all have a responsibility to engage with these platforms ethically and carefully. We should look out for our fellow users as well, and we should look out for our neighbours. But those of us in this place also have a responsibility to regulate how social media works and to ensure these platforms are not allowed to shape our public life without accountability. And that is why I'm proud to be part of a government that has introduced a social media ban for under-16s, is looking at a digital duty of care and is strengthening the news media bargaining incentive, which is what we are here debating tonight with the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026 and other bills. So, no, we are not deleting the internet, but we are creating an online world that serves us rather than itself.

One consequence of the attention economy is that it has weakened the fourth estate. It has changed the way local stories are told, shared and sustained, and I think it has changed that for the worse. Our local papers are struggling. Local journalists are battling to keep their publications afloat and to reach people online. In their place we see dozens and dozens of local creators competing for the same attention, and in that environment, the easiest way to engage the algorithm is often to make people angry. I can't stand that, but that is the reality that we're dealing with.

At the end of the day, those who benefit from the hard work of these creators are the platforms themselves. More Australians are relying on social media feeds for news, searching, scrolling and following whoever offers the most timely and personalised service. So newsrooms are employing new types of journalists, video editors, designers and story editors to grab attention. Yet again, the platform is the one benefiting from this activity. What we're talking about today is a law that ensures that digital platforms that benefit from Australian news content contribute to its long-term sustainability. It's about making sure news is not cannibalised by the attention economy. It's about supporting public interest journalism and protecting Australians right to know.

Quality journalism is costly to produce. It takes time to investigate a story properly, check the facts, speak to the people affected and make sure the public is getting information they can trust. That work matters. It is how people find out what is happening in their community, how local issues get attention, how citizens form their own views and how they hold people in public life to account. But the money that used to help pay for that work has changed. For a long time, newspapers and local publishers relied on advertising revenue to fund their journalism. Now much of that advertising money has moved to a smaller number of global digital platforms. Those platforms make money from keeping people online, and they often benefit when Australian news is shared, searched for or discussed on their services.

If these platforms benefit from Australian news, it is only fair that they help sustain it, otherwise we risk a media environment where careful reporting is pushed aside by whatever keeps us scrolling the longest. That is not the same as being informed. It's not the same as being connected. A healthy democracy needs more than content. It needs public interest journalism that tells local stories, connects people and helps citizens understand decisions made in their name.

The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code was a world-first initiative. It took effect on 3 March 2021 and helped secure commercial agreements between digital platforms and Australian news businesses. But digital and news markets have continued to change, and advertising revenue has kept moving from traditional news businesses to large digital platforms. The News Bargaining Incentive responds to that change. It applies a 2.75 per cent charge to Australian digital advertising revenue earned by significant search and social media services, but the government's clear preference is for the platforms to avoid paying the charge by reaching commercial agreements with new businesses.

The design of the scheme encourages those commercial deals. Platforms can reduce their liability through eligible agreements with offsets of 150 per cent or 200 per cent for agreements with small and medium news businesses. To access the offset, platforms must have agreements with at least eight eligible news organisations, and no single agreement can account for more than 25 per cent of their total liability. That encourages a broader mix of deals across the sector, including with Australian media organisations of different sizes. Any revenue collected through the NBI will be returned in full to the Australian news industry through the News Journalism Payment Scheme.

The bills also recognise good-faith commercial agreements entered into since 1 January 2025 by allowing them to offset MBI liabilities. Payments under the News Journalism Payment Scheme will be based on the number of journalists an organisation employs, including freelancers. Eligible roles include journalists, photojournalists, videographers, data and visual journalists, editors and producers directly involved in producing core news content. That recognises the essential work journalists do in investigating, analysing, reporting and producing the news Australians rely on, especially during the transition to digital first.

There will also be a 20 per cent uplift for journalists employed in regional and remote Australia by small and medium news organisations and by news organisations serving diverse communities, including First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse communities. This recognises the additional challenges faced by regional, smaller and community focused publishers. Payment recipients will also be required to maintain journalist employment over the relevant period, ensuring the scheme directly supports Australian journalism jobs.

Five per cent of NBI revenue will be dedicated to a separate grants program to support small publishers and start-ups to grow their businesses and produce news for local communities. A further five per cent will be allocated to a separate grants program for the Australian Associated Press, recognising its unique contribution to local Australian news content. Together, these bills strengthen the news media bargaining code, support commercial investment in Australian journalism, return any incentive revenue to the sector and help secure a sustainable, diverse and independent news media industry for the future.

I want to focus particularly on the uplift for small and medium organisations and for publications that serve diverse communities. In Barton, people have always relied on smaller papers to understand what is actually happening around them. This includes papers like the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader, as well as in-language publications like the Middle East Herald, the Greek Herald, the Nepali News and the Australian Chinese Daily. The journalists often know the area, live in the community and understand the local issues because they are part of the fabric of the place.

We often talk about social cohesion. We talk about people feeling disconnected, about not knowing their neighbours and about communities feeling more fragmented than they used to. I think the decline of local journalism is part of that story. If the only stories appearing on your phone are about people and places on the other side of the world, it becomes harder to feel connected to what is actually happening down the road. How are you supposed to know what your neighbours care about if no-one is reporting on the school fundraiser at Carlton South Public School, the local sports club, like the St George basketball team, making the grand final, the council meeting where they're deciding on the future of the Beverly Hills town centre masterplan, the new small business or the community group looking for volunteers? And, honestly, how are you supposed to know what your rates are paying for if there's no local paper keeping an eye on council? I joke, but all of these small things really matter.

Local journalism is one of the ways communities hold institutions to account, but it's also one of the ways we find each other. It tells us where the meetings are, where the festivals are, what is changing in our streets and who is doing good work nearby. Therefore, when more and more of what we see is decided by international algorithms, it is no wonder people can feel isolated in their own feeds. That is why I hope the support provided through this bill helps local organisations move and grow in the digital space while still maintaining the quality of their print journalism. I want to keep seeing publications like the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader in my inbox and on the stand at a news agency, because without local papers we do not just lose stories; we lose some of the connective tissues that help the community see itself, understand itself, scrutinise itself and celebrate itself.

In concluding this speech, I want to reflect on some of the words of the Hon. Doug McClelland, a Barton legend and the first minister for media in Australia. Doug turned 100 years old just the other week, and I thought it was only appropriate to cite his speech 'Creating an Australian awareness' delivered for the AN Smith Memorial Lecture in Journalism at the University of Melbourne in 1973. He said:

Australia is entering a new and challenging future as an independent decision making power. It is becoming an inner-directed society. Creativity and planning on a national and individual level should emanate from our own ethos.

I realise that in this age of internationalism we must welcome a free flow and interchange of information and ideas, but in this area, as in any other, we must look to developing our individuality related to our own environment, heritage, outlook and problems. We need to encourage freedom to initiate, originate and experiment…

…And finally, let me point out that the policy of open government that we aim for is one of participatory democracy.

The right to elect Government is meaningless in practice unless ordinary citizens are given the knowledge upon which to base their judgements.

That remains true today.

Australian journalism underpins the work we do in this place. It gives people the information they need to judge us, question us and understand the decisions being made in their name. It is vital to our democracy and to who we are as a nation. Our Australian story should be told by Australian voices, Australian journalists and people who know our communities from the inside. If we want that story to survive the pull of the algorithm, we have to back the people who report it. We have to fund Australian journalism properly. That is why I'm proud to support legislation that does exactly that.

Mary Aldred (Monash, Liberal Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

As regional Australians, we know that you should never have the misfortune of mistaking courtesy for weakness, and that is the approach that many regional newspapers take. I want to read a quote that sits above the editor's desk at the Warragul and Drouin Gazette. It's been there for about 127 years, since Albert Harvey was the editor. It reads: 'A good local newspaper is one of the best public assets that any district can possess.' This really sums up what local journalism is all about.

I want to recognise Yvette Brand, the editor of the Warragul and Drouin Gazette. I'd like to recognise Liam Durkin, the editor of the Latrobe Valley Express. They've been going for 61 years. I'd like to recognise Michael Giles at the Sentinel-Times. They've been going 52 years. Michael travelled up to Canberra from Leongatha when my predecessor gave his maiden speech, and he travelled up to Canberra again last year when I gave my maiden speech. That's how seriously he takes his role of sharing news and events from our community. I'd like to recognise Eleanor McKay at the Phillip Island and San Remo Advertiser. That's been going for 128 years. Those things matter. Those journalists matter. They have professional standards, they have ethics and they take their job really seriously.

We have some amazing journalists because we've got some amazing local newspapers who have mentored, trained, identified, fostered and developed that talent, and a number of those journalists are now working at a national and international level. I want to see a future for regional journalism in my area. I associate myself with the remarks of my very esteemed colleague the member for Riverina in his contribution.

Regional newspapers have an important role. They tell stories, they celebrate triumphs in the community and on the sporting field, and they take note of tragedies, of bushfires, of floods and of natural disasters. It's very important to hear local stories with local voices prepared by local journalists. There are some threats to that. The Gazette News, which is funded in a very partisan way by the Climate 200 teal movement, is one such threat, and those journalists do not share in the same professionalism that fair dinkum regional journalists do put so much effort and investment in. My contribution shall be brief, but I did want to put on the record how much I value the local journalists and newspapers in the Monash electorate, and I think that will suffice for my contribution.

David Moncrieff (Hughes, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Public interest journalism is an essential pillar of our vigorous Australian democracy. The fourth estate has been at the heart of some of the most pivotal moments in our nation's history, witnessing events as they play out and reporting back to us at home. It is impossible to separate the story of our nation from the journalists who recorded it. From the reporting of Sir Keith Murdoch on the beaches at Gallipoli in the First World War to the investigative reporting of Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson, whose work exposed systemic corruption and laid the groundwork for the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland, to the local radio broadcasters and regional print media who gave critical evacuation orders in the Black Summer bushfires, documenting the bravery of our firefighters and giving voice to affected regional towns across the South Coast.

It's not just the big headlines. Local newspapers like St George & Sutherland Shire Leader, South West Voice and Good Morning Macarthur cover events in my electorate of Hughes and give voice to communities that often go unheard, telling stories, advocating for their interests and holding local authorities to account. They represent the unique experiences and identity of the suburbs and of the small towns and the bush. They cover the council meetings where plans are made, celebrate the local weekend footy scores and honour the passing of local heroes. Community news outlets are critical to facilitating shared narratives and fostering local history right across Australia.

Public interest journalism speaks truth to power and strengthens social cohesion. It can challenge decision-makers, but it can also be a bulwark for facts and sobriety. In the modern media landscape, information is often fragmented and fractured. In some ways, this is a good thing. Independent news can provide a diverse array of viewpoints that challenge powerful interests that claim a monopoly on truth, but, too often, algorithmic echo chambers play to people's prejudices, driving division and polarising public opinion. Social media can promote outrage over reasonable disagreement and sensationalism over respect for knowledge, threatening the bonds between Australians that are core to our common life.

The word media comes from the Latin medius, meaning middle. Public interest journalism is not only a medium of communication; it also forms a crucial part of the independent centre in Australian civil society. As social media drives fragmentation in the way that Australians get their news, the economics of digital platforms work in the other direction. Agglomeration effects have driven concentration and given big tech companies like Meta, Google and TikTok substantial market power. Quality journalism is costly to produce, and the commercial revenue that supports Australian news businesses has faced a steady decline. For decades, the business model of local journalism was simple, stable and self-sustaining. Newspapers functioned as two-sided markets. On one side, they provided essential local news to readers. On the other side, they provided local businesses, real estate agents, classified advertisers and job recruiters with direct access to a captive local audience.

This steady flow of advertising revenue was enough to cover the operations of local newspapers, but the advent of the internet and an increasing concentration of large digital platforms dissolved this model. When a small business in southern Sydney wants to advertise, they no longer always place their ad in a local newspaper. Often, they're instead setting up a Meta account and placing targeted ads, sitting back as the user impressions accumulate.

A small number of global digital platforms now capture substantial digital advertising revenue while many Australian news outlets face financial pressures that threaten the viability of their business. Large digital platforms hold substantial bargaining power over Australian news outlets, reducing the financial benefits that Australian news businesses can extract from their advertising. Media diversity goes much deeper than the major outlets. It lives in the suburban newsrooms, the regional weeklies and the local digital publications that serve communities across Australia.

A subscription based funding model is typically not enough to sustain local papers and regional news services. While a handful of major publications can build digital paywalls with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, smaller, regional publishers operate in markets with smaller populations. They are often unable to reach the critical mass of subscribers that make their operations commercially viable. Low subscription conversion rates are often barely enough to cover salaries, superannuation, equipment and insurance for a handful of full-time journalists before accounting for legal costs, web hosting or distribution.

Without adequate funding, too many Australians risk losing the local papers and stations that are critical to media diversity, regional representation and local knowledge. In the Sutherland Shire, we have the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader, and I remember a time when that was at every household and widely read. It is still a really significant institution in our community and does some amazing work, but its spread is not what it used to be. It is now behind a paywall, as this media organisation adjusts to a new economy. That has presented some real threats to media in the local area of the Sutherland Shire.

When a local newspaper in an outer suburban or regional community goes under, it wounds the civic ties that hold communities together. Municipal accountability vanishes as local councils allocate millions in ratepayer funds, with their deliberations occurring in a vacuum of accountability. Gone is the local court reporter, ensuring that the justice system is visible, transparent and fair. No-one is there to tell the story of the local charity drive, the achievements of the high school netball team or the local small business putting in the hard yakka to serve their community.

These 'little platoons', to quote Edmund Burke, the local groups we hold dear and the nostalgia we hold for our home are often the most vital expressions of patriotism and love towards our country and our neighbours. The stories of these little platoons are the stories that get overlooked by big media conglomerates consumed by the daily spectacle of partisan politics. National news networks lack the local knowledge or the economic incentive to care about health access in Menai, traffic in Moorebank or outstanding school achievements in Ingleburn. These are the lived experiences that matter to the people in Hughes—the quiet Australians of the outer suburbs busily tending to their local community.

Quality local journalism builds trust and social capital. It creates a shared sense of place and mutual obligation. It's what threads new developments into connected communities. By allowing local media to financially starve, to pursue mergers and takeovers for survival, we risk losing the quiet local voices amidst the loud din of national headlines and political personalities.

The bills that are before us today are about making big tech companies pay their fair share to Australian news businesses. They are about ensuring the sustainability of Australian journalism today and into the future. The news bargaining incentive introduced in these bills will encourage digital platforms to make commercial deals with media organisations for use of their content, and, if they don't, they will be subject to a 2.5 per cent charge on their digital advertising revenue made in Australia.

To reduce this liability, significant search and social media services can enter into eligible commercial agreements with large news businesses for offsets of 150 per cent, or up to 200 per cent for deals with small- or medium-sized news businesses. Platforms must have agreements with at least eight eligible news organisations to access the offset, and no single agreement can account for more than 25 per cent of their total liability. This encourages platforms to reach a broader mix of deals across the sector, including with Australian media.

The carrot-and-stick approach outlined in these bills will encourage big tech companies to strike deals with Australian news businesses that will continue to fund quality journalism into the future. If they do not, revenue collected from the charge imposed will go towards supporting the production of core news in Australia, administered through the News Journalism Payment Scheme. The News Journalism Payment Scheme is designed to support the production of core news in Australia. Under ACMA's definition, this includes:

Content that reports, investigates or explains:

Of the revenue collected from the charge, 10 per cent of overall funding will be set aside for grants, as well as five per cent for the funding of the Australian Associated Press and five per cent for small organisations unable to enter into deals through the scheme.

Revenue raised by the news bargaining incentive will be allocated to eligible news organisations based on the number of journalists they employ. This recognises that the greater the number of journalists employed, the more substantial the investment in public-interest journalism. Using journalists as the basis for payments reflects the essential work they do in investigating, analysing, reporting and producing the news that Australians rely on.

These bills also expand the definition of a journalist to include other essential roles, including photojournalists, videographers, data or visual journalists, editors or producers and freelancers and volunteers for low-revenue organisations that produce core news content. News production isn't the preserve of a sole scribe hammering away at their typewriter. It's a complex and highly integrated system. Expanding the definition of journalism recognises the critical role that these jobs play right across the value chain and is properly reflective of modern news production. Payment recipients will be required to maintain journalist employment over the relevant period, ensuring the scheme directly supports jobs in Australian journalism.

An additional uplift of 20 per cent will also be applied to journalists who work in regional and remote areas, for small- to medium-sized news organisations and for those working in news organisations that cater to diverse communities. This is reflective of the challenges that many smaller local papers, especially those in regional communities, face in employing journalists. Five per cent of any revenue raised by the news bargaining incentive will be allocated to a separate grants program focusing on supporting small publishers and startups to scale their businesses and produce news for their local community.

This approach is practical and market based. It encourages digital platforms and Australian news businesses to strike mutually beneficial agreements, while guaranteeing the funding for smaller news outlets that is critical to sustaining choice and diversity. Large digital platforms extract massive commercial value from Australian journalism, but the asymmetries in bargaining power between global tech giants and Australian news outlets have meant that, for far too long, digital platforms have not contributed their fair share, while Australian news businesses have gone broke.

Public interest journalism is not a nice to have. It is a necessary element of a flourishing democracy and common life in Australia. I spoke earlier around the reach of the St George & Sutherland Shire Leader, which has declined, but I remember a time when there were other papers in the Sutherland Shire as well. There was the Engadine Pictorial News, which didn't get spread quite as far as the Leader did, but there was a diversity of media coverage, and that is the kind of diversity of media coverage that this bill is fostering.

These bills ensure stability and a secure funding pipeline for Australian journalism, supporting commercial investment and returning incentive revenue to the secure. They will help to support a dynamic and diverse Australian news industry well into the future. I commend these bills to the House.

Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Social Services) | Link to this | Hansard source

For the information of honourable members, I present a correction to the explanatory memorandum to the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026.

In accordance with the resolution agreed to on 17 August 2026 and amended on 18 August 2026, I require the sitting to be extended until the conclusion of the speech by the member for Adelaide, following which the question on the second reading amendment moved by the member for Lindsay will be put.

Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to be standing here in support of the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026, because a strong democracy depends on a strong, independent and sustainable news media. It depends on Australians having access to trusted information, quality public interest journalism and local reporting that keeps communities informed, governments accountable and democratic debate healthy.

Yet the media landscape has changed dramatically over the last decade. Digital platforms have fundamentally transformed the way that we access information and consume news. While these changes have delivered enormous benefits, they have also reshaped the economics of journalism. Advertising revenue that once supported our local newspapers, city based newspapers, metropolitan newspapers and country newspapers has increasingly shifted towards large digital platforms. As a result, many Australian news organisations have come under growing financial pressure, particularly those serving local and regional communities. This really does matter because, when journalism declines, communities lose more than just news; they lose scrutiny of local decision-making, they lose coverage of local events, and they lose stories that reflect who they are, what they value and what makes their communities unique. Ultimately, our democracy is weaker for it.

The news bargaining bill before the House represents an important step towards addressing this challenge. I think back to the way we sourced our media. You'd look at the TV news every night at six o'clock on ABC, 7, Nine and 10, and then you would look at your local papers. In Adelaide we had the Advertiser. We also had the Afternoon News,which went a long time ago. But we also had something really important, which was our metropolitan newspapers, which reported on issues by dividing the state up into regions, including the metropolitan area—north, west, east and south—and would report on local issues.

There'd be, as we heard the member for Riverina say earlier, a record forever and a day. You could go back 20 or 30 years and find that particular record, which is really important also for our history. Today you can put something online and take it off tomorrow, and no-one would ever even know that it was there. After a little bit of digging around, I picked up an article from 29 September 2004. That's nearly 22 years ago. It says: 'Steve committed to the electorate'—and this is a local paper reporting on this—'Steve Georganas isn't going anywhere any time soon. "Win or lose, I'll still be here after the election," the Labor candidate claimed. A local resident for 45 years, Mr Georganas has run for the seat twice before. He hopes residents will recognise his passion for the electorate.' It goes on and on. That was the 2004 election. There's a record of it.

It was a local paper that reported the following week on my opponent, which happened to be Simon Birmingham. He wasn't successful at that election, but I was. It just goes to show. Little, local issues—a local newspaper telling its community who the candidates were, what they stood for and what their commitments were. There's a record from 22 years ago, and it's there. You just go online onto News Corp and find it. It's important for our history to keep records of all of these documented news stories. Mine's only a minor one, but there are obviously big issues that should be kept.

The news media bargaining bills before the House represent an important step in addressing the challenge of how our media has changed. These bills are about supporting the long-term sustainability and diversity of Aussie journalism. They recognise a simple but important principle: when digital platforms derive significant value from news content, there should be a fair framework that helps support the journalism that creates that value. That's why this legislation encourages digital platforms and Australian news organisations to reach meaningful commercial agreements rather than relying solely on government intervention.

The framework in this bill creates strong incentives for negotiation and partnership. Platforms can reduce their liability by entering into eligible commercial agreements with Australian news businesses, rewarding direct investment in Australian journalism. This is a practical, market based approach that supports both innovation and accountability. The amendment before the House is modest in scale but significant in effect. By increasing the news bargaining incentive charge rate from 2.5 per cent to 2.75 per cent if a digital platform's advertising revenue is attributable to Australia, we are recognising how significantly digital and media markets have evolved since the original benchmark was established in 2021.

This bill is also about ensuring our regional areas have that viable media, and it's ensuring that future generations inherit a media landscape that is diverse, independent and sustainable. A strong democracy requires an informed public, strong communities require local voices and a strong Australia requires strong journalism. When we support local journalism, we're supporting local communities. We're maintaining our history. When we protect independent reporting, we strengthen the accountability. When we invest in trusted news, we invest in the health of our democracy itself and in the health of diversity, ensuring that we receive media content that is truthful and independent, that we have a thriving democracy, and that people are accountable—especially politicians.

Milton Dick (Speaker) | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this, the honourable member for Lindsay has moved as an amendment that all words after 'that' be admitted with a view to substituting other words. The immediate question is the amendment be agreed to. A division is required. In accordance with standing order 133, the division is deferred until the first opportunity the next sitting day.

Debate adjourned.

House adjourned at 21: 59