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

Senator WALKER (South Australia) (10:27): I think most Australians can agree that having good journalists around is very useful. They sit through council meetings most of us would struggle to get through. They spend days digging through documents.

They turn up to court. They talk to people, check claims and work out what's happening. They come into this building and ask politicians questions that we may or may not be thrilled to answer.

That is their job, and our democracy is much better for it. The problem is that doing all of that costs money, and the way journalism has traditionally paid for itself has changed a lot over the last 15 years. Advertising used to provide a huge amount of the revenue that kept newspapers and newsrooms going.

Over the past couple of decades, more and more of that advertising has moved online, and a very large share of it now goes to a small number of global tech companies. At the same time, Australian news organisations have been trying to work out how to keep paying reporters, especially in smaller and regional newsrooms, where the margins can already be pretty tight.

This legislation is about dealing with this reality. If large digital platforms are operating in Australia, making substantial advertising revenue here and benefiting from an online environment where Australian journalism is shared, searched for and consumed, we think it's fair that they contribute to keeping that journalism going. Australia has actually been working on this for a while.

The news media bargaining code was introduced in 2021 and was genuinely world leading at the time. It encouraged digital platforms to reach commercial agreements with Australian news publishers and brought a significant amount of money back into Australian journalism. But we've also had five years to see where that system could be improved.

One of the biggest problems became pretty obvious when Meta announced that it would not renew its commercial agreements with Australian news companies, which were estimated to be worth around $70 million a year. Under the existing arrangements, platforms also have the option of responding to regulation by removing news from their services altogether. We saw Meta do that briefly in Australia in 2021, and we have since seen it happen in Canada.

That gives a company with enormous market power a pretty handy bargaining tool. If the rules become inconvenient, it can threaten to stop carrying news. The news bargaining incentive has been designed so that strategy no longer gets them out of paying their fair share.

The new incentive will apply to major social media and search platforms with significant Australian audiences and more than $250 million in relevant Australian digital advertising revenue. For platforms that meet these thresholds, there will be an equal charge to 2.5 per cent of that relevant advertising revenue. But we would much rather see that money going directly into commercial agreements with Australian news businesses.

That is how the scheme has been designed. If a platform enters eligible commercial agreements with Australians news organisations, that spending can be used to offset the charge. The standard offset is 150 per cent, rising to 200 per cent for agreements with small and medium news businesses.

So there is a pretty strong incentive to sit down with Australian publishers and reach a deal. There are also rules to make sure those deals are spread across the media sector. A platform needs agreements with at least eight eligible news organisations to get the offset, and no single agreement can account for more than 25 per cent of its total liability.

This is important because Aussie journalism is much bigger than just the handful of big mastheads everyone knows. Some of the most important journalism in this country happens in small newsrooms. It's the journalist covering their local council every week and knowing when something does not quite add up, or a journo covering a bushfire, a local hospital, a school closure or a development proposal.

It is a reporter who knows the community they're writing about and knows who to call when something happens. When those jobs disappear, we feel the difference. There are communities around Australia that have already seen local newspapers close or shrink to a fraction of what they once were.

Sometimes there is nobody left whose job is to turn up to the council meeting, follow a local issue for six months or ask why a decision was made. Those stories are probably never going to trend nationally, but they still matter a lot to the people who live there. That is why this scheme gives platforms an extra incentive to make agreements with small and medium publishers rather than concentrate all of their spending on the biggest media companies.

The same thinking carries through to what happens if a platform decides to pay the charge. Every dollar connected to the news bargaining incentive will go back into the Australian news industry through the News Journalism Payment Scheme and grants. I really like that the payment scheme has been built around the people actually producing journalism.

Payments will be linked to the number of journalists an organisation employs, including freelancers. The definition also reflects what a modern newsroom looks like. It covers journalists, photojournalists, data and visual journalists, editors and producers directly involved in producing core news content, because journalism has changed.

A reporter today might be writing an article, recording an interview, filming something for social media, working with data or producing a podcast. Plenty of excellent journalists freelance across organisations. This legislation recognises that.

There will also be a 20 per cent uplift for journalists employed by small and medium news organisations, journalists working in regional and remote Australia, and organisations serving diverse communities, including First Nations and culturally diverse communities. Those organisations often face higher costs and smaller potential audiences, but the work they do is incredibly important.

If you live in a regional town, you should be able to find out what your local council is doing. If you're part of a community that rarely sees itself reflected in mainstream coverage, there should be room in our media landscape for journalism made by and for that community. If we want those services to exist, there have to be journalists there to produce them.

That is also why organisations receiving payments will have to maintain their editorial capacity over the payment period. The scheme is designed to keep journalists working. There is separate support for really small publishers and startups as well.

Five per cent of revenue raised through the incentive will go towards grants for small publishers and new organisations trying to build local news services. That is a great part of the package because we should be thinking about how new journalism grows as well as how existing organisations survive. There are parts of Australia now being described as news deserts, where local coverage has become extremely limited or disappeared altogether.

And, when you think about what that means in practice, it is pretty concerning. If there are no local journalists, who is regularly sitting in the council chamber? Who is following up when a government project is delayed?

Who is covering the local court? Who knows enough about a story to realise that the explanation they are being given does not quite stack up. Social media can tell you that people in town are angry about something.

A local journalist can actually find out why. The legislation also provides a dedicated support for the Australian Associated Press, with five per cent of revenue raised going towards the AAP. AAP is one of those organisations that most Australians probably do not think about very often, even though they come across its work constantly.

Its newswire provides content to more than 400 Australian publishers, including more than 300 in regional areas. It does a huge amount of the basic reporting that keeps the wider Australian media system functioning, and recognising that role makes sense. The government has also made sure that good-faith commercial agreements entered into since 1 January 2025 can count towards offsets under the new system.

The policy was announced in December 2024, so companies that responded to the announcement and reached agreement should not be disadvantaged for getting on with it. Meta has called the policy a digital services tax. Industry groups representing major US tech companies have made similar arguments.

I'm pretty sure there has never been a company in history, when told they have a new financial obligation, that has said: 'Perfect! That is just what we were asking for!' They can make their case, but we also have to look at what has happened to the Australian media market. The advertising market has changed dramatically.

Global platforms now capture a huge amount of the digital advertising revenue generated in Australia while news organisations are trying to fund the expensive work involved in producing original journalism. The government has come up with a system that encourages those platforms to negotiate commercial agreements and gives extra incentives for deals with smaller publishers.

This is very reasonable and, for people my age and younger, the whole debate is happening alongside another massive change in the way we consume the news. A lot of young Australians are not buying a newspaper every morning or sitting down to watch the six o'clock news. We see a headline on Instagram; someone sends us a story in a group chat; we hear something on a podcast and we google it; we see a TikTok clip and then maybe search for the full interview.

Sometimes the first hint that a major world event has happened is a meme about it or the Betoota Advocate making a joke. There are some genuinely great things about that. We have access to more information and more voices than previous generations could have imagined.

But we also have access to a crazy amount of false information. Someone can make a very confident 60-second video about an issue they learnt about that morning and by lunch it has a million views. False information moves incredibly quickly.

AI-generated material is becoming easier to produce. People are seeing real reporting mixed into the same feeds as advertising, opinion, conspiracy theories and whatever their algorithm has decided will keep them scrolling for another 20 minutes. In that environment, having people whose actual job is to check things becomes really important.

Journalists make phone calls. They speak to the other person involved. They check documents.

They ask for evidence. They have editors who ask whether the story stacks up. They can be held accountable when they get something wrong.

All of that takes time and money. We cannot spend years worrying about misinformation and declining trust in institutions while ignoring whether the people producing reliable information can afford to keep doing it. There is also a pretty direct democratic consequence when newsrooms shrink.

A journalist who loses their job does not just disappear from a payroll spreadsheet. There are stories that would have been covered that now will never be written. There are questions that will not be asked.

There are meetings nobody will attend. There are discussions that will receive less scrutiny. And there are communities that will know less about what is happening around them.

Governments should care about that, even when journalism is inconvenient for us—especially when it's inconvenient for us. I'm sure every politician in this building has had the experience of seeing a journalist walking over, and suddenly remembering we have a very important meeting somewhere in the opposite direction. But that is part of the job.

We are supposed to be questioned. Governments are supposed to have their decisions scrutinised. Businesses should be scrutinised too, along with courts, councils, institutions and everyone else who exercises power in this country.

For that to happen, Australia needs journalists who have the time and resources to do the work properly. Australia will be better for it. I commend the bill to the Senate.