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 BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (20:22): 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 Leader—got 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.