News Journalism Payments Bill 2026, News Journalism Payments (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2026, News Media Bargaining (Administration) Bill 2026, News Media Bargaining Charge Bill 2026, Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media Bargaining) (Consequential) Bill 2026

Ms CHANEY (Curtin) (20:10): 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 Echo—are 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.