ADJOURNMENT

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (20:36): It's obvious the media recently declared war on One Nation, and tonight I ask the obvious: what's really going on? Over the last 20 years, the mainstream media's market penetration has crashed. Broadcast television fell from a peak of 56 per cent of adult TV usage in 2006 down to just 20 per cent today.

For young adults aged 18 to 35, it's even lower, at just 12 per cent. Many still watch their favourite program online, mostly sporting telecasts. What they don't watch are commentary shows, social engineering and opinion for hire.

The last five years have seen the cancellation of commentary programming: 10 News+, The Project, 7NEWS's, early and late editions, SBS's The Feed and ABC's Q+A. The Q+A format, where one leftist host and four leftist talking heads invite a conservative to be ritually sacrificed each week no longer resonates. This is why the media's woke agenda has now been injected into sport, usually through welcoming the audience to their own country, men in women's sports and woke commentary talking points.

No opportunity is lost in the media's quest to replace balanced, factual reporting with woke propaganda, at dramatic cost to the media's shareholder value. In 2006, Channel 9 was worth $7.5 billion. Today, Channel 9 is worth just $960 million—less than a billion.

Channel 7 fell from $4 billion 20 years ago to just $115 million today. For accuracy and fairness, by the way, both values are inflation adjusted. Channel 10 was worth $1.5 billion 20 years ago and today is on the books of owner Paramount at just $20 million.

Movies suffered, with theatre attendance over the last 20 years falling 50 per cent—an inevitable outcome of gender and race swapping of lead roles; the compulsory inclusion of a gay storyline and a transgender character; the endless negative portrayal of men; the refusal to show a happy, loving nuclear family; and generally propagandising the woke agenda while pretending it's entertainment.

Let's move on to newspapers. News Corp was valued 20 years ago at $85 billion worldwide. Today, it's worth just $14 billion, including REA Group and Dow Jones.

Fairfax Media was valued at $9 billion in 2006. Twenty years later, it was forced to sell to Channel 9, whose value of $960 million today includes Channel 9, Fairfax Media, Stan and Domain Real Estate. Again, I'm using inflation adjusted figures to compare 2006 with 2026 for fairness and accuracy—things Fairfax does not extend to us in One Nation.

Last week saw what is a low point for Australian journalism. The Sydney Morning Herald falsely reported Senator Hanson had used party funds to keep a luxury hotel room vacant for six days while visiting Italy and played up the waste of donations. This ignored the facts.

Firstly, the $5 million donated in the Fire the Liar campaign has gone into a term deposit, gathering interest until it's needed for the next federal election. Secondly, the story was false. Senator Hanson immediately provided receipts to show the room was not booked in this period and cost One Nation nothing.

Rather than admit its mistake, the Sydney Morning Herald replied with a headline saying 'Hanson feuds with media, concedes using party funds for luxury hotel'—no apology and no correcting the record, just a story and a headline which doubled down on their lie. This is not journalism; it's partisan propaganda. If this continues during the next election, it will clearly and patently be election interference.

What was a scandal was Minister Bowen spending $345,000 of taxpayer money in the last 12 months alone on junkets to Brazil, Denmark, Finland, USA, Germany and Fiji—and on and on the list goes. How does a minister with a domestic portfolio spend $100,000 more on overseas trips than the Minister for Foreign Affairs and $110,000 more than the Minister for Trade?

How? These trips were designed to promote Minister Bowen's personal gains on climate change and, in part, his attempt to chair a UN climate change group. Instead of questioning this expense in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and a budget deficit, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story portraying Minister Bowen positively for not claiming any family travel as part of these junkets.

Fairfax Media has lost 90 per cent of its market value and still can't help itself. A company that was properly run would not be allowing injection of journalists' personal and political vendettas into a supposed news story. It would have presented the facts without partisan attacks and left the public to make up their own minds.

Our media have skipped the whole balanced and impartial part and gone straight to telling you who to vote for. Conservatives make up 50 per cent of their potential audience. One Nation alone is 30 per cent.

To alienate, ridicule, insult and lie to half their potential audience at a time of falling market share, falling profits and eroding shareholder value is business suicide. The fable of the scorpion and the snake was written for the Australian media, hopelessly ensconced in their urban bubbles, preaching to an ever-shrinking base of champagne socialists raging at the dying of wokeism, a perfect demonstration of the classic logical fallacy: they do not see the world as it is; they see the world as they are.

Conservatives can turn, by the way, to the Spectator and the Epoch Times for accurate news and current affairs. If you haven't discovered these publications, have a look. Meanwhile, a casualty is media's credibility.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority says the proportion of Australians who explicitly distrust the news rose from 25 per cent in 2016 to 32 per cent last year. That's a huge proportion of Australians—one in three—who do not believe what the newspaper or television tells them. This figure will grow as the truth around Australia's COVID response emerges.

The media went all in on promoting baseless COVID policies, using what can only be described as 'fear porn'. I called for caution in Australia's COVID response in a letter to Prime Minister Morrison in April 2020, pointing out the fatality rate was simply not what the Chinese suggested. At that time, Anthony Fauci, in his private diary, recorded his comments to the American CDC saying COVID was 'acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility' and would have a fatality rate of between 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent, not the two to three per cent publicly claimed.

Zero point two per cent to 0.3 per cent is in line with the 0.1 per cent fatality rate of an average influenza. It's 0.13 per cent for a more serious flu. The current known fatality rate of the original COVID strain from 2019-20 worldwide is between 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent, exactly what Fauci privately predicted in February of 2020.

Fauci was called last week to testify to the US Congress as to why his private diaries had the correct appraisal of COVID while his public pronouncements were entirely the opposite, whipping up unfounded terror and fear, and to inquire why he advocated measures like social distancing, masking, lockdowns and screens at check-outs, all which had no scientific basis.

He pleaded his fifth amendment right to not answer based on his fear of self-incrimination 113 times. Nothing says 'I am guilty and will lose my immunity if I lie to you' more than what he did. The committee has now held Fauci in contempt.

This he would rather than to admit under oath that the actions he took, the same actions the Australian media enabled with their fear porn, had no scientific basis. Fauci knew that at the time. These were actions taken to sell pharmaceutical products which were disproportionate to the health risks of COVID but which made big pharma rich.

There was an opportunity to wind all this back in November 2021, when the omicron virus arrived in Australia and the fatality rate from COVID fell. The omicron fatality rate was between 0.03 per cent and 0.1 per cent; that's way less than the flu. Nonetheless, at the time, the excess mortality rate was going through the roof—and we know it was not due to COVID.

The unfounded fear that Fauci fomented meant that advocating for the cessation of vaccination would have been hard to explain, despite the fact that American and Australian health regulators knew that Pfizer had misled the public on its shoddy, skimpy, faulty testing that proved fatal for 1,230 people. Only a royal commission can deal with the critical point here: if the omicron fatality rate was as low as 0.03 per cent of infected persons, and most people had been infected and, at the time, had natural immunity anyway, why was excess mortality running at a staggering 13 per cent?

It's impossible for that mortality rate to have come from the COVID virus. What could it have been? Only one thing, it seems: COVID injections.

Even now, five years later, Australia's excess mortality rate is running at five per cent. This represents 10,000 additional people dying each year with no explanation. I asked about this in Senate estimates and was told it was the lockdowns delaying medical treatment.

It was psychological trauma, despair and loneliness: 'It'll pass.' It has not passed. Why is the media falsely labelling me a conspiracy theorist, and why is it lying about me for asking these questions based on hard data? The answer is that the media took their 30 pieces of gold in the first three years of Australia's COVID response.

The media banked over $600 million from COVID— (Time expired)