News Journalism Payments Bill 2026, News Journalism Payments (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2026

Mr BIRRELL (Nicholls) (18:17): I, too, rise to speak on the News Journalism Payments Bill 2026 and the associated bills, which together establish the news bargaining initiative. I want to start somewhere very specific. In my electorate, there is a newspaper called the Shepparton News.

It was founded in 1877, when a printing press was hauled up from Echuca by a bullock team, and it's been in the hands of the McPherson family since 1888. For most of the last century it was on the kitchen tables of the Goulburn Valley five days a week. Since the middle of last year, it has been printed two days a week, Tuesdays and Fridays.

Forty minutes north, in Echuca, the Riverine Herald has been publishing since 1863. It has gone from three print editions a week to two. Why?

It's because close to 80 per cent of those mastheads' readers now get their news on a phone. The company has invested in an app and in newsletters and in audio and video. It is doing what a sensible business does when the audience moves.

But I would ask the House to sit with what change actually represents. A newspaper that came out five days a week and, for a short time, six days a week now has two print editions. The journalism hasn't stopped—the journalists are still there—but what has gone is the advertising revenue that used to pay for them, and it has gone to the digital platforms that are the subject of these bills.

That's the whole argument in just a couple of regional mastheads. The coalition supports the objective of this legislation, and I want to put on the record why. It was a coalition government that asked the ACCC to develop a code in 2019, and it was a coalition government that made that code mandatory in 2021 when the voluntary approach went nowhere—and it worked.

Two platforms were captured, more than 30 commercial agreements were struck and something in the order of $250 million a year began flowing into Australian media to support newsrooms. Some of that money came to my electorate. Country Press Australia collectively bargained on behalf of more than 80 rural and regional titles.

Small publishers who could never have negotiated alone with a trillion company suddenly had a seat at the table. That was the point of the code, and on that measure it succeeded. But then, in 2024, Meta walked away.

It announced it would not renew and made clear that, if it were designated, it would simply remove Australian news from its platforms altogether, which under the code as drafted meant there was no power to compel it to pay anything. The government had a choice at that moment, and the former chair of the ACCC Rod Sims argued for a straightforward fix: deem the platforms to have published Australian news so that switching news off didn't switch their obligation off.

But instead the government spent the better part of two years dismantling the code and building a new one. So we come to these bills 18 months late. I want to acknowledge what has been achieved in that time, because a lot of it was achieved by people who do not have a lobbying budget, and Country Press Australia is an example.

They asked for the regional loading in the distribution model to be lifted from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. Now it's 20 per cent. They argued that four commercial agreements was nowhere near enough to satisfy a diversity requirement and that six was still not enough.

The bills now require us to have eight. They asked for stronger offset for deals with smaller publishers. The offset for small and medium publishers is now 200 per cent against the 150 per cent for the majors.

A 25 per cent per-deal cap has been reinstated so that no single agreement can wipe out a platform's liability. These are meaningful wins, and they were won by regional publishers turning up with evidence again and again over two years. I had many discussions with them, and I want to thank them for it.

But I still have some concerns, and I'll raise them now because I'd rather this scheme work than just pass. My first concern is what we mean by the word 'regional'. When the Public Interest Journalism Initiative built the national data set on the Australian news, it drew exactly this distinction.

It classified professional local news outlets separately from community scale outlets, which is described as tending to be non-commercial, produced by volunteers, sometimes without journalistic training and covering hyperlocal matters. It applied professional ethical standards to the first category and did not apply them to the second, because they are different things doing different work.

If this scheme is going to distribute money on a formula tied to the number of journalists employed, then the loading has to attach to organisations that employ journalists. That's not gatekeeping; it goes to the entire logic of this bill. Another issue is the lack of data.

We are not quite legislating in the dark when it comes to regional journalism, but the light has dimmed. For five years this parliament has had access to something genuinely valuable: a monthly, publicly available record of what is happening to news production in this country. The Australian News Data Project tracked openings, closures, mergers, service reductions and the end of print editions town by town from January 2019.

It told us there had been 519 market changes and 161 outlet closures between 2019 and 2024. It told us that roughly two-thirds of the contractions were in regional Australia. It told us that, as at the end of 2024, there were 1,222 news outlets in this country and that 1,061 of them were local.

That project ceased on 31 December 2024, when its funding ended. The task passed to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. To be fair to ACMA, it hasn't dropped it.

It published its first report on news media in Australia in 2025. It refreshed its interactive data reports in May this year. Its outlet register is current to March 2026.

But the first report is also the only report, and the next one's not due until 2027. The monthly market-change tracking—that granular, closure-by-closure record of which towns are losing what—is not being maintained in the same form that it was. We are about to establish a scheme that redistributes money on the basis of where journalists are employed and we have no continuous national record of where newsrooms are opening and closing.

The data is not there. I would ask the government to direct ACMA to maintain and publish a continuing regional news register, updated at least twice a year, with the market-change data restored. I want to close on why this matters.

It's easy to present this as a subsidiary to an industry, but it is not that. Local journalism is not just a service that a community consumes; it is a piece of infrastructure that a community runs on. No-one knows that better than the member for Riverina, who was an editor of a regional newspaper before he came into parliament.

It is the reason a council knows its planning decisions will be read out. It is the reason why a water authority can explain itself. It's the reason a hospital board's decisions are contested in a public space, rather than settled in private.

It sits in the same category as roads, bridges and telecommunications—democratic infrastructure largely invisible until it fails and, when it fails, it costs money. Research published by the Journal of Financial Economics examined what happened to local government finances in the United States after a local newspaper closed. The finding was that municipal borrowing costs rose by between five and 11 basis points in the years following a closure.

The authors were careful to establish that the effect was causal, not a reflection on the town's underlying economic decline. They also found higher government wages and larger deficits—sound familiar?—and a greater likelihood of costly refinancing arrangements. The effect was strongest in places that had the fewest newspapers to begin with.

The conclusion was simple: local newspapers and other local media organisations hold local institutions accountable and, in doing so, they keep the cost of government down. And don't we need that? I support these bills.

The coalition built the original code, and we want a scheme that works. But passing this legislation is not the achievement. Country Press Australia have put this well.

The real test is whether it translates into genuine commercial agreements across a broad and diverse Australian news industry. If in two years time the platforms have done eight deals with the eight largest media companies in the country and the Shepparton News, the Riverine Herald, the Country News, the Seymour Telegraph, the Numurkah Leader and the Cobram Courier are in exactly the position they are in today then this parliament will have passed a law and changed nothing.

So we owe it to them to make sure this legislation works in a way that saves local journalism and local news organisations and allows them to continue doing what they have done—holding governments to account, holding local institutions to account, telling the stories of the people who live in regional and rural Australia and facilitating the discussion that is going to move our beautiful parts of regional and rural Australia forward.