Yes — taxpayers should bail out journalism. It’s the least bad option we’ve got left

'If making The Great Gatsby is in the interest of the Australian taxpayer, then so is covering the news.'

Australia’s media industry is in dire straits. Amid big tech deals drying up and falling revenues in a soft advertising market, newsrooms are resorting to widespread redundancies as a stopgap. Journalists are doing more with less as outlets compete for eyeballs in a cost of living crisis. But is that your problem? Or rather, should taxpayers bail out journalism? That’s the question our debaters are throwing around in this week’s Friday Fight. Arguing the negative we have professor of economics Chris Berg. And for the affirmative corner we have Tim Burrowes, owner of the media industry newsletter Unmade.

Before I explain why a taxpayer bailout for journalism is the least bad option we’ve got left, let’s recap how we ended up in this mess.

Newspapers used to have a great business model. Advertisers would pay a lot of money to reach the readers because it was the most efficient way of selling stuff. Delivering great journalism was what brought the eyeballs to those ads. The civic benefit was merely a happy byproduct. But it was a real and important byproduct.

Then digital disruption came along. Classified advertisers — jobs, real estate, cars and the rest — could do it more cheaply and efficiently online. And so could brands.

Fair enough. That’s the free market, baby.

And then the market broke.

The platforms, headquartered overseas, have been able to legally send most of their revenue offshore, booking what would otherwise have been local profits into low-taxation countries.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) reckons Meta banks $5 billion but declares a tiny fraction of that locally. Digital advertising peak body IAB Australia estimates Google’s search monopoly is worth $6.5 billion in Australia.

That creates a hit on taxpayers as advertising that once would have gone to tax-paying local media companies goes overseas instead.

That’s what the government was trying to address when it created the Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law in 2015 (until the likes of PwC helped overseas companies restructure their local operations and beat the law).

However, the erosion of the local tax base isn’t the only market failure. 

Paying less tax allows businesses to offer cheaper advertising rates than their rivals. As a result, brands chasing the best return on their advertising investments end up choosing the platforms. Which makes it even harder for news companies to compete.

That’s where a digital levy, not on profits, but on advertising spend by local advertisers, comes in. You can’t easily hide that or redirect it offshore. A double benefit will flow the other way instead. A levy will bring in more local tax and level out the playing field. To maintain their profits after paying the levy, the platforms would need to put up the price of their advertising, which would make it more viable for their local rivals to compete on price.

And the pool of money raised — even a 1% levy on Meta and Google alone might raise $100m per year — could then be used to fund a tax offset for news companies to invest in journalism.

The precedents are already there. It could work in a similar way to the tax offset already available as an incentive for film and TV production. Eligible film and TV productions can claim back up to 40% of what they spend on productions. If making The Great Gatsby is in the interest of the Australian taxpayer, then so is covering the news.

With a clear set of rules, that would be a mechanism far closer to the rule of law than the winners-and-losers system created by forcing Facebook and Google to do deals with a range of publishers of their choosing when the threat of the News Media Bargaining Code arrived in 2021. It would also incentivise news companies to actually spend the money on journalism rather than using it to merely drive up profits, as was often the case with the last lot of no-strings-attached payouts.

And it would be less chaotic than actually designating platforms under the code and forcing them to negotiate individually with the 50+ news sources that have already registered with the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

If the government pushes on with designating Facebook, most likely its parent company Meta chokes off all traffic it currently sends to news sites so it can argue during those forced negotiations that it derives no benefit. In turn, the ACCC would argue that this is a misuse of market power, at which point Meta might well leave the market, plunging small businesses reliant on its platforms into chaos.

The platforms would probably prefer the certainty of a modest levy over the chaos of a confrontation. It will recreate a level playing field and a more orderly market. 

Bring on the bailout.

Read the opposing argument by Chris Berg.

Should taxpayers bail out journalism? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

No — taxpayers should not bail out journalism. They do so already!

'Crikey has been arguing for a long time that News Corp pays less tax that it ought to. Guess who the biggest private beneficiaries of subsidised journalism are?'

Australia’s media industry is in dire straits. Amid big tech deals drying up and falling revenues in a soft advertising market, newsrooms are resorting to widespread redundancies as a stopgap. Journalists are doing more with less as outlets compete for eyeballs in a cost of living crisis. But is that your problem? Or rather, should taxpayers bail out journalism? That’s the question our debaters are throwing around in this week’s Friday Fight. Arguing the negative we have professor of economics Chris Berg. And for the affirmative corner we have Tim Burrowes, owner of the media industry newsletter Unmade.

The case for subsidising journalism is weak. The case for subsidising journalism more than we already do is incredibly weak.

The government already directly pays for journalism through the ABC ($1.1 billion in the 2022-23 budget) and SBS ($316 million). With my colleague Sinclair Davidson I am famously sceptical that public broadcasting is a good idea. (Maybe infamously.) But put the argument for privatising the ABC and SBS aside. Policy choices do not exist in a vacuum. Any case for journalism subsidies should first explain why our already significant expenditure has failed, and whether there are any ways to reform our public broadcasters to more directly align with our policy goals. There is a lot the ABC and SBS do that isn’t journalism — would some of it be better redirected?

It is true that democracy relies on a thriving public sphere, of which news and journalism are critical parts. But on this count, Australian democracy doesn’t seem to be doing too badly. In the digital age, our problem as citizens and voters is not an information deficit but an information surplus — there is an enormous amount of online and offline content about the actions of the Australian government and civil society that we can consume. Digging through that content is the real challenge. Usually, we say that governments should subsidise things if the market underprovides for them. What is underprovided here? How should we measure it?

The real struggle is within media firms. Having lost their monopoly over advertising to a richer, more diverse, and more complex digital ecosystem, they find themselves competing to produce an extremely low-margin product while trying to support their legacy, high labour and production costs. I understand that the media industry has gone through 20 years of industrial pessimism. But at the same time, there are now senior journalists who have experienced nothing but disruption and have thrived within it. Too often policymakers confuse protecting established companies with supporting what they produce.

Practical considerations also undermine the case for journalism subsidies.

Almost any policy framework to subsidise journalism favours the large players that already dominate the Australian institutional media. Crikey has been arguing for a long time that News Corp pays less tax than it ought to. Guess who the biggest private beneficiaries of subsidised journalism are?

Maybe we can imagine a way to only favour the journalism we want, or to only favour smaller firms. But a policy framework that tried to discriminate against (say) the conservative talking shop ADH TV to only fund a left-leaning equivalent would merely invite the same government interference that the ABC labours under. A government unhappy with coverage could threaten to take away a media outlet’s privileges.

Government-subsidised journalism — whether through public broadcasting, tax breaks or direct subsidies — is fundamentally misconceived. It makes civil society the handmaiden of the state, rather than the other way around.

But in an important sense, the sort of policy rationalism I’m presenting here is beside the point. The question before policymakers is not whether subsidising journalism is a good use of taxpayer funds. The question is what to do with the Morrison government’s News Media Bargaining Code now that Meta is refusing to play ball. 

The code is a legendarily outrageous example of rent-seeking in the history of Australian public policy. It is simply one sector using the government to directly extort money from another sector of the economy. And on the flimsiest pretence too: we have been asked to believe that allowing users to share news links with friends is somehow a violation of intellectual property. 

The only “bargaining” that is going on here is between the media giants and the government. Meta and Google are the objects of the bargaining, not the participants. 

The irony is that, if anything, the digital firms that are being targeted have been responsible for what has historically been the sharpest growth in the public sphere since the Gutenberg press. If democracy is first and foremost about citizen engagement, then they have been great for democracy.

Scratch the whole thing and start over. Media companies never had a natural right to advertising dollars and they have absolutely no right to funds forcibly extracted from companies in another sector. If we think the market is underproviding journalism then let’s see if our public broadcasters can spend their budgets better. At the very least, it is time to draw a line under this shameful, rent-seeking episode.

Read the opposing argument by Tim Burrowes.

Should taxpayers bail out journalism? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

Dictators, a ‘love child’ and succession battle: The legal brawls of Australia’s billionaire siblings

Pretty much all of Australia's richest heirs are having a legal battle at the moment, providing a great deal of evidence of how fabulously weird the fabulously wealthy really are.

If the golden era of TV really is drawing to a close, it may well be replaced by the golden era of messy courtroom dramas featuring the children of Australian billionaires (not quite as catchy an era designation, I grant you).

Please enjoy our round-up of the various legal catastrophes currently befalling the catastrophically wealthy.

The Pratts

Box billionaire Anthony Pratt has already given us so much. Who could forget his fun (and then discreetly culled) following list on Instagram? His relentless and presumably very pricey cardboard-themed karaoke, in which he treats some of the great songs of the 20th century with the same level of care as Oliver Reed showed his liver? And of course, his on-again-off-again friendship with former US president Donald Trump — who allegedly told Pratt a bananas amount of detail about various US defence matters, which Pratt then allegedly passed on to 45 of his closest friends, including six journalists and THREE former prime ministers.

In addition to all that, Pratt and his siblings have been embroiled in a long-running battle with his half-sister Paula Hitchcock. Hitchcock is the “love child” Anthony’s late father Richard had during an extra-marital affair with horse trainer Shari-lea Hitchcock. Paula, now 27, is arguing that she is legally entitled to a chunk of the billions in the Pratt family trust, asking the NSW Supreme Court to declare her a “discretionary object” of the fortune and to void the deed of exclusion that cut her out of the inheritance as a child. The other kids are trying to get her case thrown out, arguing the pre-trial document search would be “intrusive” and “time-consuming”.

The Murdochs

In calling his attempt to redraw the terms of his succession plan “Project Harmony“, Rupert Murdoch displayed a grasp of Orwellian language that his brigade of Australian commentators seldom do. Surely there could be no better example of doublespeak than using the word “harmony” in relation to his plan to prevent any of his non-Lachlan heirs from taking the international media empire anywhere near the political centre.

The trust, as it stands, currently hands control of the family business to all four of Murdoch’s eldest children after he dies, splitting control between Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence. But according to a blockbuster report in The New York Times last month, Rupert is arguing in a Nevada court that “only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs”.

Both parties have lawyered up ahead of a case set to start in September. Little wonder one of the terms of Murdoch’s separation from Jerry Hall was reportedly that she was not allowed to pass on any ideas to the writers of Succession.

The Hancocks

But the real spice is coming from the family of Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart. Her company Hancock Prospecting is facing several challenges over royalties and ownership of the Hope Downs mine, one from the company of her father’s late business partner, Peter Wright, and one from two of her own children.

Then there was the latest instalment of poison pen letters between Rinehart and her father Lang Hancock. Christopher Withers SC, the lawyer representing Rinehart’s eldest children, John Hancock and Bianca Rinehart shared letters in which Hancock had “pleaded” with his daughter to “stop her barrage of criticisms” in the late 1980s.

“I would be pleased if you would leave me alone to live the rest of my life my peace,” he said in an April 1989 letter to her.

Rinehart had been particularly brutal about Hancock’s marriage to the family’s housekeeper Rose Lacson (later Porteous), who Rinehart allegedly referred to as an “Oriental concubine” and a “prostitute” and tried to have deported. Oh yeah, and what Rinehart referred to as Hancock’s “reckless and possibly ruinous” business deals with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Which family’s cash battle will you be most ardently tuning into? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

Got a problem gambling? Tabcorp has just the intervention for you — more money

When Tabcorp discovered one of its customers might have had a gambling problem, it rang to check on them — then offered them more money to keep gambling.

Gambling giant Tabcorp has been fined $4.6 million by the Victorian gaming regulator for a remarkable incident in which its own systems identified a problem gambler and a Tabcorp employee rang to check on them — only to then offer them more incentives to continue gambling.

The Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission detailed the breach while announcing what is a record fine by the regulator for a series of breaches between 2020 and 2023.

In October 2022, Tabcorp’s systems alerted staff to potential problem gambling by a customer:

“Significant increase in losses and turnover over last 3 months. 12M losses $160k, 1M losses 135K. Staking seems consistent although active most days recently with large volume of bets. Recommend call if none recently.”

A Tabcorp staff member then contacted the customer — who had opted out of all direct marketing by Tabcorp — on October 26:

“Called [customer] and left VM to contact back — Betting on account has increased dramatically over the past two months — RG check-in required and further information regarding account.”

When staff spoke to the customer, however, the subject turned to incentives for the customer to keep gambling, with Tabcorp offering a $2,000 deposit match to bet on horseracing:

“So that’ll be on the account for you just in a couple of minutes and away you go. It will trigger on your next deposit,” the staff member told the customer. “Have a look at the form. I’ll be doing the same… I’m at Flemington across the four days.”

Tabcorp subsequently admitted to the regulator “the value of the welfare check-in was undermined by the making of a promotional offer to the customer at the conclusion of the call. Tabcorp notes that this offer should not have been made.”

Six days later on November 2, Tabcorp noted:

“Customer has increased their betting and spending since June, with losses reaching $171k and frequent betting sessions on a weekly basis. 12M losses are $186k, so majority of activity and losses have been since June. Unable to locate any open source info. RG check required to assess comfortability with losses and increased time spent betting. Affordability and soft [source of wealth] should be addressed also.”

Despite that, Tabcorp went on to offer the customer tickets to the Australian Open, a “bonus bet in lieu of Australian Open tickets” of $1,000 and another $2,000 deposit match in February 2023. The customer shut the account in May 2023.

The regulator found that “it is highly egregious for the account manager to set out to make a responsible gambling call on 26 October, 2022 and then to use that call as an opportunity to offer the customer an inducement to gamble. That undermines the purpose of the call and evidences a mindset that does not show respect for what responsible gambling principles and policies are meant to achieve. Further, even leaving aside this highly egregious conduct, the phone call did not adequately inquire into the customer’s sources of wealth. Nor did it adequately explore responsible gambling strategies with the customer.”

Nonetheless, the regulator determined the offence was “mid-range” and fined Tabcorp only half of the total amount if could have fined the company.

What restructure are people prattling about in a posh Paddington dog park? Please tell me!

An overheard conversation in a dog park about a big restructure brings new meaning to the phrase 'digging up dirt'.

When you go to a dog park, you expect to see plenty of leads. And sometimes, you might hear one, too.

The Royal Hospital for Women Park in Sydney’s snooty, inner-east suburb of Paddington is a popular destination for the suburb’s high-flying residents to take their precious pets to blow off some steam after work. 

This week, a Crikey spy couldn’t help but overhear a conversation that will set both tongues and tails wagging.

They passed on a tip that two dog owners could be heard loudly talking about a big “restructure” that is supposedly set to be announced on Monday. While one talked about taking calls from ASIC, the other looked around furtively. 

Don’t worry, said the first one, everyone knows about this story. It’s in the financial press. She’d seen a partner from lobbying and communication firm SEC Newgate over the weekend who knew about it. “Everyone in this dog park knows about it,” she exclaimed. 

Everyone, it seems, except our Crikey informant. 

Could it be the overdue Reserve Bank of Australia restructure, which hangs on Treasurer Jim Chalmers being able to wrangle a deal out of the Coalition? We’re told there was a mention of a “Cecile” (Australian Financial Review’s Cecile Lefort?) speaking to “Ian” (former Reserve Bank governor and vocal reform advocate Ian Macfarlane?). Maybe there’s another restructure we aren’t privy to. 

Do you know what they’re talking about? Write in to boss@crikey.com.au or leave a comment to let us know if you think we’re barking up the right tree.

We once called TV journos the ‘Filth’. Nine’s management has earned the label

Nine's exodus of 85 staff — dozens with irreplaceable experience and contacts — reflects a management team that either doesn't understand or doesn't care about journalism.

The “Filth”: that was what we called television journalists when I was a police reporter at The Sun News-Pictorial in the 1980s. It was not a term of endearment.

Back then, police rounds were a journalist biodome. Newspaper and radio reporters shared a rabbit warren of rooms a few doors down from the St Kilda Road police complex, and were largely left alone by their motherships as long as they stayed out of trouble and broke yarns.

Breaking yarns was relatively easy for the Sun journos. After all, we vastly outnumbered our competitors, were treated as the police gazette, and had our own network of citizen informants who called in news tips for cash. It was a cutthroat business, but we stayed on friendly terms with the other print and radio journos at St Kilda Road.

The TV journos were different; we saw them as parasites. Let me explain why. Unlike the radio journos, the TV reporters were not a part of the sealed environment at St Kilda Road. Yet they turned up at the big crime stories and, sometimes, begged us for help — trying to bleed us for our hard-won contacts.

Consequently, we called them the Filth. Before any TV journos spell-check outraged emails, let me say this in my defence: there were and are many fine TV journos. And back in the 1980s, given the fact many TV reporters could run rings around my best efforts as a 19-year-old tabloid hack, yes, calling them filth was unfair.

Then again, the term came to mind this week as Nine confirmed 85 staff had been issued redundancies, with the majority being journalists and production staff working across The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and titles WAtoday and the Brisbane Times. These are dozens of reporters and staff with irreplaceable experience and contacts.

These redundancies came after Nine’s newspaper journalists went on strike over poor wages during the Paris Olympics. The company’s response was outrageous — filthy, even — and speaks of a TV-centric corporation that doesn’t understand the value of journalism in general and print journalism in particular.

Some context is necessary here. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked in a multimedia newsroom in San Francisco and saw firsthand what could be achieved when TV and print journalists worked together.

The best TV reporters and producers knew how to find, report and tell a story better than most print journalists; the best print reporters had the depth of knowledge necessary to break hard news and recognise trends. All of which is why I was hopeful when Fairfax and Nine merged in 2018.

Since then, the blending of TV and print journalism has, deservedly, elevated the public profiles of newspaper reporters such as Nick McKenzie. And as The Age’s Chip Le Grand pointed out to me this week on X, “terrific broadcast journos working for Nine … helped McKenzie and [investigative reporter Ben] Schneiders break the CFMEU story”.

Fair point. But let’s get back to filth. What’s dirty about the state of Nine is neither the TV nor print journalists. I know they bust a gut for a yarn and are undermanned and outnumbered by flacks. It’s the management. Judging by their actions, journalism is no longer a core business at Nine.

It’s easy to see why. In Nine’s half-year results, from July to December 2023, the company’s revenue was $1.4 billion. The publishing arm accounted for $288 million of that $1.4 billion in revenue, but print’s share was only $112.3 million — far less that TV, Stan and Domain.

The good and bad news is that the newspapers’ electronic arms are growing — digital subscriptions were up 9% — but not fast enough to make up for a $16.4 million loss in print and digital advertising.

A bullish reading of the numbers is that Nine’s newspapers have a healthy profit margin of 26.9% (better than TV, Stan and radio) and can make the jump from an advertising-based business to a subscription-based business. For that to happen, though, Nine’s board needed to maintain — if not strengthen — their TV and print newsrooms so they could produce content that attracts new subscribers.

Instead, they gutted the newsrooms. That false economy isn’t surprising when you look at Nine’s management. Its board directors have little to no reporting background — they’re all about e-commerce and streaming and TV. Neither does CEO Mike Sneesby, who was recruited from Stan.

I’m not saying Sneesby and co are dumb. But as any police reporter worth their salt knows, you need good journalists to break good stories. Journalism is all about the yarn. Doing the hard yards to find and tell the stories that matter — like the CFMEU scoop — takes time and costs money. Doing that and making a healthy profit is, from the perspective of the newspaper business, the equivalent of splitting the atom. But since the merger, that’s exactly what Nine’s news hounds have achieved: breaking hard news while remaining profitable.

All of which is why it’s stunning but not surprising that Nine’s masters let go of many of the primary producers of those profits this week. Stunning because it is an act of self-sabotage. Not surprising because the Nine board are tech, showbiz and business types who either don’t care about or don’t understand journalism.

Either way, I’m filthy.

Are the Nine redundancies a practical response to economic headwinds, or reflective of out-of-touch management? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

NDIS and aged care: It’s not just about fiscal sustainability

Reducing the rate of growth of the NDIS isn't just about the cost to the budget — the workforce for disability care can't keep up.

One of the defining characteristics of Tony Abbott’s brief time as prime minister was Labor’s absolute refusal to cut him a break — it opposed pretty much everything he proposed, leaving vast swathes of the 2014 budget mired in the Senate. It was payback for Abbott’s relentless negativity when he was in opposition — especially in cases where he put forward measures in government he’d opposed in opposition, like cuts to Family Tax Benefit payments. It eventually led Barnaby Joyce to publicly wonder whether, just maybe, the Coalition hadn’t been a little too negative in opposition.

It seems that Peter Dutton has learnt at least part of that lesson.

On the NDIS, the Coalition could be forgiven for fighting Bill Shorten’s efforts to rein in spending every step of the way. Pretty much anything the Coalition did in government on the NDIS was savaged by Shorten as an assault on the disabled community — “steamrolling though unpopular individual assessments“, an “undeclared campaign to slash the NDIS funds of people with disabilities across Australia“, “the Morrison government’s obsession with slashing the NDIS is killing jobs and stranding Australians with disability.” The irony, of course, was that NDIS spending was hitting new heights year after year under the Coalition.

But any Coalition desire for payback is tempered by the realisation that if it returns to government anytime in the next decade it will face the same fiscal pressure to curb relentlessly rising NDIS costs — including that driven by state governments cost-shifting. It’s willing to back Shorten’s reforms, to be implemented by a much larger National Disability Insurance Agency.

On aged care, the Morrison government provided a target-rich environment, especially around its mishandling of the sector in the pandemic. But there’s been a greater history of bipartisanship on funding of aged care. It was one of the few areas where Abbott declined to pick a fight with the Gillard government when it introduced a greater level of user pays as it dramatically expanded home care. This time around, the Coalition has only demanded marginal changes to Labor’s proposed expansion of user pays in both residential and home care.

Curbing spending on aged care and particularly on the NDIS isn’t merely a matter of fiscal discipline. They are two key areas of funding of “social care” — which comprises, along with the health sector, by far the biggest, and fastest growing, employer of Australians. Social care — disability care, residential aged care, home aged care, child care — makes up one million of the nearly 2.3 million jobs in health and social care. All of those are, or will be, the recipients of rapidly increasing government funding, via the NDIS, via the government’s funding of long-overdue pay rises for aged care workers (and its mandating of nurses in residential care), and via its funding of a pay rise for childcare workers in December this year and next year.

The workforce for residential care — which is primarily aged care, but includes some disability care — has gone from around 240,000 during the pandemic to 300,000 in May. The workforce for social care — split between home aged care, disability care and childcare — has gone from fewer than 600,000 people in 2022 to well above 700,000 now (according to last year’s NDIS review, the disability care workforce component of that was around 325,000 in 2022).

The pay rises for childcare and the remaining aged care pay rises, still being implemented, will further accelerate that growth. And since 2019, the health workforce, separately, has gone from under 1 million to around 1.25 million.

That presents massive workforce challenges. The NDIS review noted “about 128,000 more workers are likely to be needed by June 2025 to fully meet demand. But service providers, participants, families and carers told us that finding and keeping disability workers with the right skills, values and attitudes is already hard today”. And while specialist disability care skills and qualifications are by no means interchangeable with those required in aged care and child care, retention in one caring sub-sector will be made harder by other sub-sectors becoming comparatively more attractive.

Recent work by peak body National Disability Services — using language familiar from other caring sectors — warns of a “broken system” amid huge turnover in the sector — “turnover continued the upward trend growing to 24% this year, while permanent staff turnover jumped to 16%, the highest it has been…” There’s a particular shortage of behaviour support practitioners, which disproportionately impacts clients with complex needs. That’s the sign of a sector that has expanded too quickly for its workforce supply. A substantial wage rise for disability workers is likely the only immediately available remedy — even if Shorten is successful in reining in the rate of growth of the NDIS.

More taxpayer money for companies linked to Israel’s war in Gaza

Australia continues to reward companies with links to the Israel Defense Forces, this time with Norwegian firm Kongsberg winning a major contract for missile production.

Australian taxpayers will once again be funding companies with ties to the Israel Defense Forces, with the government’s announcement that Norwegian arms manufacturer Kongsberg will receive $850 million to build missiles at a manufacturing facility near Newcastle.

Kongsberg, which has maritime, defence, aerospace and digital arms, is majority-owned by the Norwegian government.

Norway bans arms exports to countries in states of war, including Israel, and in February, Norway’s foreign minister Espen Barth Eide said: “states exporting weapons to Israel should reassess whether they are effective partners in the genocide in Gaza Strip or not.”

However, Norway does not prevent Norwegian arms firms from manufacturing weapons for export via other countries. One such company is Nammo — the Nordic Ammunition Company — headquartered in Norway, which manufactures the M141 Bunker Defeat munition at its Meso, Arizona and Salt Lake City facilities.

Nammo’s ownership is split between Norway and Finland, with Kongsberg owning half of the Finnish share. The munitions have been sold to Israel and used in Gaza, though Nammo defends itself by saying it is not responsible for the onselling of its munitions once it has sold them. Pro-Palestinian activists have demanded that Norwegian universities end collaboration with Kongsberg and the company has also been criticised for manufacturing parts in the global network of F-35 production and production of munitions used by the fighter.

The company is a regular beneficiary of Australian defence spending: according to Austender records, since late October 2023 the company has earned around $42 million in contracts with the Department of Defence.

Companies with more direct links to the IDF have also enjoyed taxpayer largesse under Labor: Elbit, the company that manufactures the missile used by the IDF to murder Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and her colleagues, has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars recently, while Australian company NIOA, another firm that supplies the Israeli military, is a big winner from defence contracts.

A new Australian media company has just launched. But who on earth is funding it?

Exclusive: Crikey has spoken to the people heading up a new media brand — but we have some questions about where the money's coming from...

Gazette News is a mysterious new Australian media startup led by Anna Saulwick, a former Change.org and Unicef executive and GetUp campaign manager. 

Saulwick, who lists her title on LinkedIn as CEO of Gazette News as of June 2024, has brought on board former Vice head of editorial Brad Esposito as the company’s editorial director. Saulwick told Crikey that the startup is “aiming to provide high-quality free local news”, focusing on both regional and metropolitan areas “where disinformation is being targeted”. 

Saulwick also said that the company, which will look to have a number of sub-mastheads in regional areas, will be “recruiting local reporting talent”, funded by a “group of philanthropists and impact investors who care about the future of news”. 

However, Saulwick declined to answer Crikey’s questions about who these mysterious do-gooding investors were, or how much they had invested. 

“This is in the very earliest stages, and arrangements aren’t complete, so I’m not in a position to share anything on this yet,” she said. 

Likewise, where exactly the company’s new regional mastheads might be based, and how the company is choosing its locations, is also in question. Asked what exactly she meant by “where disinformation is being targeted” and whether there were areas that Gazette News saw as regional priorities of particular importance, Saulwick said there are “a few factors that make a place ripe for misinformation … we are particularly interested in communities where local news has shut down and where there are fiery local debates underway”. 

Esposito told Crikey he was excited for the new publication to “meet people where they are — in the formats and on the channels they are most familiar with”. When pressed as to whether this meant an attempt at a print product, Saulwick confirmed that “in some areas the audience will prefer print, so that’s where we’ll be”.

An ASIC search revealed Gazette News is registered to an address in North Sydney.

There is no shortage of regional areas in want of local news, and even more in need of print — Australian Community Media, publisher of The Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald and Illawarra Mercury, recently shut down the Blayney Chronicle and Oberon Review in central west New South Wales, in addition to reducing circulation for mastheads in Orange, Dubbo, Bathurst and Mudgee. 

In 2020, News Corp announced more than 100 of its local and regional titles would either lose their print editions or disappear entirely, with redundancies affecting several hundred staff. Many of News Corp’s formerly thriving regional titles have been reduced to outlets staffed by sole digital journalists that focus primarily on court, crime and local council, supplanted by staff in capital cities working completely remotely. 

‘Betrayal’: Disability advocates slam NDIS deal

The government has passed a suite of reforms to the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and Kamala Harris is set to cap the Democratic National Convention with a historic speech.

NDIS CHANGES A ‘BETRAYAL’

A new law outlining what supports those on the NDIS can access has passed the House of Representatives, with disability advocates saying it will “rip the heart out” of the NDIS, according to Guardian Australia. The changes are designed to curb a massive increase in NDIS costs and are expected to save the government $14.4 billion over the next four years.

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten attempted to quell fears, saying “the sun will come up tomorrow”, but this did little to reassure disability advocates. Marayke Jonkers, president of People with Disability Australia, told the AAP her organisation was “concerned people will lose access to support before these new foundational supports are trialled, tested or even designed”. Meanwhile, Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John called the changes a “betrayal”, saying there will be “no certainty over what will and won’t be provided through the NDIS”.

The ABC is reporting that people with disabilities are wary of the “extra powers the legislation affords the agency that runs the scheme, and what will come of the proposed ‘foundational supports’ for those outside the scheme”. El Gibbs, deputy CEO of Disability Advocacy Network Australia, noted it’s not just about supporting people within the NDIS but broadening support to those outside it, who she says are currently getting little or no support. The ABC says only 660,000 of the estimated 5.5 million Australians with a disability are currently aided by the scheme.

Meanwhile, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has told Australians to expect the government to be “responsible and restrained in the MYEFO  [mid-year economic and fiscal outlook]” as it tries to rein in inflation, Nine newspapers are reporting. Inflation has almost halved since Labor came to power, but Chalmers says it’s too early to declare “mission accomplished” as he continues to jostle with the RBA, aiming to get inflation back in the central bank’s 2-3% target band.

The Australian reports Chalmers is reaching across the House in an attempt to get support for his RBA reforms, with the treasurer trying to “break up its board into one that sets interest rates and ­another that oversees the governance of the central bank”. The Coalition was reportedly wary that Labor intended to stack any new rate-setting board with sympathetic appointees, resulting in Chalmers ceding to demands to retain the current board should his proposed split take place.

HARRIS’ HISTORIC MOMENT

The time has come for Kamala Harris as she prepares to deliver her speech to the Democratic National Convention tonight (Chicago time), accepting the party’s nomination for president. If she were to win, she would be the first woman as well as the first person of South Asian heritage to be elected president, Reuters reports.

CNN is calling the speech “the highest-profile moment of her political life”, noting that “Harris has never been regarded as one of the party’s master speechmakers”. The presidential candidate has been criticised for not revealing a detailed policy platform and there are suggestions she may use the speech to lay out the aims of her prospective government, including cracking down on price-gouging, helping lower rents and assisting first-time home buyers, NBC reports.

Those close to Harris have suggested her speechwriting team will be “cautious about how they will incorporate talking about race and gender while understanding that it will be important to acknowledge the history-making position Harris is in”, the NBC continues.

Axios writes that the mothers of some of the most high-profile Black victims of police violence have been explicitly invited by the Democrats, suggesting the party may be looking to restart the conversation about police reform. Nearly 13,400 people have been killed by law enforcement in America since 2013, with Black and Native American victims 2.9 and 3.2 times (respectively) more likely to be killed than the general population.

On the same day Harris gives her nomination acceptance speech, Donald Trump will speak in Arizona in front of a stretch of the US-Mexico border wall, US ABC reports. It’s an interesting choice, given the wall that Trump previously promised to build was never actualised, with only 450 miles of barriers completed under his administration, much of which were upgrades to “existing barriers”.

Trump has spent much of the week taking pot-shots at the DNC and its speakers, most recently calling the speeches by Michelle and “Barack Hussein” Obama “nasty”. “I try and be nice to people, you know, but it’s a little tough when they get personal,” Trump said. The former president and famously kind fellow claims to have been a victim of FAKE NEWS accusations about his character for his entire career, which for posterity I’ll just leave over here…

ON A LIGHTER NOTE…

Death is perhaps a strange subject for a lighter note, but the celebration of a life well lived can be an inspiriting affair that reminds us all to cherish the time we have, and those we love within it.

On that note, I’m sad to inform Crikey readers that Sphen, one-half of Australia’s favourite gay penguin power couple, has died at Sydney Aquarium aged 11. Sphen and his partner Magic rose to global stardom when they took each other as partners in 2018, later adopting and successfully raising two chicks — much to the chagrin of “it’s unnatural” nuclear-family-only homophobes that threaten to blow up a library whenever a fictional character in a new picture book has two dads.

Magic and Sphen inspired a Mardi Gras float, were featured on Netflix’s Atypical, and were perhaps the most famous queer bird icons to ever have not flown this Earth. Magic has been taken to see Sphen’s body and apparently grieved his lover with a song, the zoo said in a statement.

I’m not crying, you’re crying…

Say What?

Okay, a buffalo will suffice, too.

Arshad Nadeem

The 27-year-old Pakistani athlete became the first of his country to secure an individual gold medal when he broke the Olympic javelin record in Paris this year. Nadeem, who received no assistance from his government before his medal, has been overwhelmed with gifts since his victory, including an apartment, a car and a buffalo. NPR notes, “In rural communities, a buffalo is considered one of the most honourable and valuable gifts”, as it produces huge amounts of milk products and requires little care. He received the gift from his wealthy father-in-law, joking about it on a Pakistan morning TV show.

CRIKEY RECAP

Zali Steggall stands by telling Dutton to ‘stop being racist’, yet is no Green on Gaza

RACHEL WITHERS

Steggall may or may not be the original “teal” (that title could also go to Kerryn Phelps), but she knocked off Tony Abbott in 2019 and was the first of this new wave to run on the blue-green colour that has since come to define them, meaning she is likely the reason we now use the term “teals”. She is also the first among them to be reelected, growing her already impressive margin in 2022, making her formerly safe Liberal seat a safe independent seat.

Perhaps this is what gives Steggall the confidence she displayed last Thursday when she demanded Dutton “stop being racist”. The two-term teal has since doubled down, telling outlets she stands by the label with regards to the proposed Palestine visa ban, prompting threats of legal action from the opposition leader and fierce condemnation from conservative media, which is, as per the playbook, more concerned about accusations of racism than racism itself.

Here’s how much gambling money is worth to Crikey, and why we won’t take it

SOPHIE BLACK

We’re not exactly rolling in it, but Crikey has never taken gambling money. It’s not loose change we’re rejecting, either. Gambling brands spend a lot. And mostly pay full price.

We asked our ad sales team to do a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation. Stay with us here: based on the available ad impressions, and imagining we sold 10% of them, (and factor in hiring a seller devoted to the job), it could conceivably shake out at a net margin contribution of around $300,000 — enough to really sink our teeth into some stories.

But we don’t go after that kind of money, we don’t take it when it’s offered and we’re not about to start. Why?

A Labor factional war is dictating Australia’s foreign policy

GUY RUNDLE

With the recent news that Anthony Albanese has requested a fresh takeover of the Victorian branch of the ALP, it should be obvious to everyone that neither of the two biggest stories around — the destruction of the CFMEU and the ramping up of AUKUS — have anything to do with building, corruption or national security. They are external expressions of internal Labor factional battles, as the party prepares for preselections in vacant seats in Victoria and for the federal election in general. Not only does it run deep in Labor. It is determining the direction of our foreign policy for decades to come.

The simplest way to put it is that the forces who believe Billy Bob Shorten should be elevated to the highest office have been on the move for some time. They’ve been revving the tanks. Mr Shorten himself is a modest man, a minister currently charged with ensuring the welfare of sea lions, the smooth running of Ascensiontide and matters pertaining to Yass. Others dream of higher office for him.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Israeli attacks kill at least 40 in Gaza (Al Jazeera)

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