News Journalism Payments Bill 2026, News Journalism Payments (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2026
Ms THWAITES (Jagajaga) (18:59): A strong democracy depends on a strong and independent media. It depends on journalists who investigate, scrutinise and ask difficult questions. It depends on Australians having access to reliable information about their communities, their governments and the world around them.
It depends on our ability to sustain professional journalism in an information environment that is increasingly fractured and under pressure. This is something that is very close to my heart. I began my working life as a journalist at community radio as well as at our national broadcasters, SBS and the ABC.
So I know that a mountain of work goes into producing journalism that people can trust—the phone calls you make, checking sources, reading documents, challenging claims and making sure that what you put to air or to print can be backed up. That work matters. In our current information environment, misinformation and disinformation can spread around the world in seconds.
Social media algorithms amplify the most provocative content, with no regard for accuracy, and at the moment artificial intelligence is making it increasingly easy to produce convincing false information, images, audio and video. In this environment we need to support journalism that helps Australians to distinguish fact from fiction. We need to fund journalism that helps Australians to distinguish fact from ideology.
Over the past two decades in Australia, the business model that has traditionally funded our journalism has been fundamentally disrupted, as digital platforms—the majority of them run by giant companies from overseas who have scant regard for Australian communities or Australian democracy—have increasingly sucked our attention. So, too, have they sucked advertising revenue away from local news organisations.
As these platforms have been growing and increasingly capturing advertising revenue, they have also used traditional Australian media outlets for content. They've taken, they've made our information environment poorer, and they've contributed to misinformation and disinformation in our communities. So it is entirely appropriate that these platforms make a genuine contribution to addressing those problems.
Together these bills reinforce the News Media Bargaining Code and support the sustainability and diversity of Australian journalism. They establish a clear principle that, where significant digital platforms derive enormous value from the Australian digital advertising market, they should have a strong incentive to reach commercial agreements with the Australian news organisations that produce journalism.
From 1 January 2025 the News Bargaining Incentive will apply a charge equivalent to 2.75 per cent of Australian digital advertising revenue earned by significant search and social media services. The purpose of the scheme is not just to collect that charge. This legislation is deliberately structured to encourage commercial agreements.
Platforms can reduce their liability through eligible agreements with Australian news organisations, receiving offsets worth 150 per cent of these agreements. For agreements with small or medium news businesses, that offset increases to 200 per cent. To reduce their liability to nil, platforms must have eligible agreements with at least six different news organisations.
That is important, because a healthy Australian media landscape cannot just mean a handful of large metropolitan organisations. We also need regional and local journalism. We need smaller and independent publishers.
We need organisations that serve First Nations Australians. We need culturally and linguistically diverse media outlets. And we need journalists to be telling stories that might never make a national bulletin but are enormously important to the communities they serve.
If, in this environment, a platform chooses to pay the charge rather than enter into commercial agreements, that money will still support Australian journalism. The News Journalism Payments Bill establishes the News Journalism Payments scheme to distribute any revenue raised through the news bargaining incentive to eligible Australian news organisations. It's also important that it puts journalists themselves at the centre of how these payments are calculated.
Eligible organisations will receive payments based on the number of journalists they employ, including freelancers. That includes journalists, photojournalists, videographers, data and visual journalists, editors and producers—all those directly involved in producing core news content. The more journalists an organisation employs, the greater its payment.
There is also a 20 per cent uplift for journalists working in regional and remote Australia and for organisations that serve diverse communities, including First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse Australians. And I want to reiterate that this is a really important feature of this scheme, because our government understands that local journalism matters and that diverse voices matter.
Again, going back to my own firsthand experience—and a shout-out to community radio and Arts Alive, which is still going strong, and to all the folks at 2CUZ FM in Bourke, where I spent a number of months, and to the people in regional Victoria and Warrnambool, where I worked with the ABC—I understand how important local journalism and local voices are in all those communities.
A local journalist is often the person who's sitting through the local council meeting, covering the community campaign, talking to the local sporting club or small business and asking questions about decisions that otherwise might receive no scrutiny at all. These journalists perform that role across vast parts of our country, and it is important for all of us that they get to stay.
When those outlets and those journalists disappear, we lose more than just another job in the media industry. We lose knowledge, we lose scrutiny and we lose someone whose job it is to ask questions on behalf of their community. This scheme makes sure that the funding that's intended to support journalism actually supports journalism.
Recipients will have obligations to maintain their journalist workforce in respect of the payments they receive across the relevant period. We've also allocated five per cent of any revenue raised through the News Bargaining Incentive to a separate grants program supporting small publishers and startups to build their businesses and produce news for their local communities.
I'm sure this will continue to be a focus for government as we continue to support a diverse media environment. These reforms come at an incredibly important time for journalism and for our communities. We now have access to more information than we have had at any point in human history, but, too often, more information does not mean better information.
A false claim can reach hundreds of thousands of people before a journalist has made a phone call, checked the facts, spoken to an expert or verified a source. The systems through which we currently receive our information too often reward what is provocative or divisive, not necessarily what is accurate. Many of the large platforms where we now receive our information drive based on reach and eyeballs, not on quality of information, and they have little regard for the consequences for our communities and our country of their spreading misinformation and disinformation.
The algorithm is driven by maximising profit, and there is no thought to the consequences for our democracy. But democracy relies on people having access to reliable information. It relies on Australians being able to understand the decisions being made by governments and others, to scrutinise those decisions and to ultimately make an informed choice at the ballot box.
It relies on us being able to have conversations as a community based on a shared understanding of what's going on, and professional journalism is one of the institutions that helps make that possible. Reputable news organisations are accountable for what they publish. That does not mean journalists always get everything right or that Australians should accept everything they read in a newspaper, hear on the radio or see on the television without question.
A healthy democracy should have sceptical citizens and robust debate. But there is an enormous difference between disagreeing over ideas and being unable to find out the facts. We should be able to fiercely disagree about what's happening and what governments should do while still having confidence in the basic information that underpins that debate.
That is why strong independent journalism is such an important part of our democratic infrastructure. I know it is something that people in my community understand and value, and I know they support quality journalism. They support a strong and independent ABC and a diverse media landscape.
I have now experienced this environment from different sides—as a journalist asking questions and now as a member of parliament, being asked them and answering them. I firmly believe our democracy is stronger because of media scrutiny and media independence. That's why these bills matter.
They're not about telling journalists how to do their job or how to write, they're not about protecting media companies from competition or technological change, and they're not about protecting governments from scrutiny. They're about making sure that we are providing a framework to support Australian journalism to continue as we enter this fractured information age, making sure we give Australians access to journalism that they can trust.
I realise that protecting the right of Australians to know what's going on and to have access to basic facts isn't a value that is universally shared across this parliament. We have members who actively thrive on feeding misinformation and disinformation. Senator Hanson, the Leader of One Nation, puts herself out there for interviews with a far-right influencer who's mixed with Neo-Nazis and a far-right podcaster who was, in fact, jailed for stalking journalists.
At the same time, One Nation bar the ABC and other media outlets from their press conferences. It's just another way that Senator Hanson treats Australian people with disdain. She doesn't even respect them enough to be subject to scrutiny and to stand up to mis- and disinformation, running on the politics of fear and division with no consideration of how we build our communities, how we share our stories and how we make sure that we all understand what's happening around us.
This government recognises the value that journalism creates. We support local, regional, independent and diverse news organisations. We do want to make sure that we continue to have journalists in our communities, in our courts and in our parliaments, asking questions and establishing facts.
Our democracy is precious. We protect it through strong institutions, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary and an engaged community. We also protect it through a strong, diverse and independent media.
At a time when misinformation and disinformation are becoming easier to produce, faster to spread and harder to identify, that work is vital. These bills support the people who do that work and help ensure Australian journalism remains strong and sustainable into the future.