Canberra part-pays 2,000 journalists and forces tech to pay 2.5% levy.

By Margaret Hale · Opinion · 2026-08-04

Two announcements, nine months apart

Neither decision was presented as half of anything. The first arrived in November 2025 in the least glamorous form available to a government, a grant opportunity opening on a departmental portal. The second arrived on 3 August 2026 with ministers at microphones and a legislative timetable attached. Taken separately, each has a respectable case behind it. Taken together, they describe an arrangement Australia has not had before: a government that sets the price digital platforms must pay news publishers, and that separately pays part of those publishers' wage bills.

That is not an allegation. It is an arrangement, documented in the government's own papers, and it is worth reading as one.

What the record shows

Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino finalised the News Bargaining Incentive on 3 August 2026.^[1] Platforms with more than $250 million in Australian revenue face a charge of 2.5% of their Australian digital advertising revenue, lifted from the 2.25% floated in the consultation draft. The carve-out for professional networking services went, bringing LinkedIn into scope. Deals with large publishers offset 150% of the liability and deals with small publishers offset 200%, up from 170%, with six deals now required for a full offset rather than four. Five per cent of whatever the charge raises will fund grants for publishers turning over less than $150,000 a year.^[2]

The second lever is older and much quieter. The Journalism Assistance Fund opened in November 2025 with $67.6 million over three years.^[3] It pays $13,000 for each full-time-equivalent journalist a year, $39,000 across the three years to June 2028, with a floor of $39,000 per grant and a ceiling of $7.5 million.^[4] More than 180 publishers took it. Nine received $16.1 million and Seven's side of the Southern Cross group $11.3 million, and three ownership groups between them accounted for over 40% of the money.^[5]

First come, first served

The guidelines are the document worth reading, because they describe the machinery rather than the intention. The fund is a demand driven grant opportunity, and applications were to be "reviewed in order of receipt until available funding is exhausted".^[4] Applications opened on 21 November 2025 and shut inside a month with the pool emptied. There is no merit panel and no arm's-length board. A Program Delegate, defined in the guidelines as a manager within the department, decides which grants to approve, and that decision is "final in all matters".^[4]

Eligibility does quiet work too. Foreign-controlled Australian entities are excluded, which kept News Corp and Guardian Australia outside the scheme, and the ABC and SBS were never inside it. The recipients are therefore, by design, Australian-owned commercial and independent outlets: the part of the industry with the least capacity to replace the money if it ever stops.

The exclusions repay attention. An applicant is ineligible if it is "affiliated with a foreign government, political party, union, financial institution, non-government organisation, or policy lobby group where that affiliation would influence or might be seen to influence, the content produced by the applicant".^[4] The department, in other words, screens applicants for relationships that might merely appear to bend their coverage, and applies that test on behalf of the government about to become their funder. The standard the guidelines set for everyone else is not one the arrangement sets for itself.

An acknowledgement is not a disclosure

Section 11.8 of the guidelines supplies a form of words. "This publication received support from the Australian Government under the Journalism Assistance Fund Program. Support from the program covers part of the cost of employing journalists, but does not influence the production of specific content."^[4]

The trigger is the interesting part. That wording is required if a publisher "makes a reference to the support" it has received. The obligation is to phrase it correctly should you choose to raise it, not to raise it. Nothing in the guidelines requires a subsidised masthead to tell readers it is subsidised, and nothing requires it to say so in a story about the department writing the cheques.

What is true, and what is not

A stronger version of this has been circulating than the evidence carries: that the government is quietly paying journalists in exchange for favourable coverage. That claim is not established, and repeating it weakens the case rather than making it. Communications Minister Anika Wells said the support "is not conditional on what stories are written".^[6] Matthew Ricketson, a journalism academic, said that "if government is funding the media, there are certainly things to look out for and be wary of", while also saying that publicly funded broadcasters have maintained their independence.^[6]

The fund was not secret either. A minister announced it, the guidelines were published, and every recipient sits on the Commonwealth's GrantConnect register.^[7] What did not happen was reporting. The register sat in the open for roughly eight months before anyone assembled it into an account of who took what.^[5] A press that took eight months to notice a $67.6 million transfer to itself has a problem of its own, quite separate from anything the government did.

Dependence is also a matter of timing. The money runs to June 2028 and then stops unless a future government renews it, which converts an editorial question into a budget question at a date certain. A masthead that has built three salaries on the subsidy will be reading the next expenditure statement with an interest no newsroom should have to have in a government it covers.

The Canadian ledger

Canada has been running the experiment longer and is worth watching for that reason. Since 2019 its Local Journalism Initiative has spent $128.8 million subsidising more than 400 reporting positions, and stacked with the 35% Canadian journalism labour tax credit, roughly half a reporter's salary can end up publicly funded.^[8] Reporters working under the scheme told researchers they did not believe federal money had blunted their watchdog role. Two-thirds of them were nonetheless uneasy about how their independence looked from outside.^[9] Perception is not a trivial concern in a trade whose only real asset is being believed.

Canada supplies the other warning as well. Its Online News Act prompted Meta to block news links outright rather than pay, and publishers who had budgeted for platform money were left with neither the money nor the distribution.

The questions

Australian publishers are not united on any of this. News Corp's Michael Miller said the final changes "gut the incentive for tech platforms to strike fair deals with Australian media". Nine's Matt Stanton said changes made that late "require closer scrutiny". Scott Purcell of Man of Many said the original bargaining code sent roughly 60 to 70% of its money to three companies, which cut 450 journalists in 2024 regardless. Meta, self-interestedly and not therefore wrongly, said the scheme "will leave Australian journalism dependent on a government-administered subsidy regime".^[10]

Which leaves the questions. If platforms decline to strike deals and simply pay the charge, the levy proceeds and the wage subsidy collapse into the same thing: public money distributed on terms a department sets. Who then decides which outlets qualify, and against what test, when today's answer is a manager whose decision is final? What happens to a regional title built around three subsidised salaries when the program lapses in 2028? Should a publisher declare the subsidy in a story about the minister administering it? And what does a decade of this do to the instincts of a newsroom that has learned where its floor comes from?

None of those questions requires anyone to have behaved badly, and none of them is answered in the papers the government has published.

Margaret Hale

Margaret Hale writes about politics, policy and the culture of business. She is drawn to the people behind decisions and to the moments when a political story turns out to be a human one.