Once again, Anthony Albanese is taking notes from Jacinda Ardern’s long list of lessons in failure. And learning not a damn thing. Instead, he’s clownishly aping everything she already bollixed up, across the ditch.
KiwiBuild will (not) build 100,000 houses? AlboBuild will (not) build one million! Everybody hates the PM? Albo’s already got that one nailed down.
Now, he’s trying Ardern’s clever strategy of throwing money at his most loyal bootlickers, the legacy media.
The Albanese Government is part paying the wages of more than 2,000 journalists across 184 private newsrooms, and more than half of the money went to just four ownership groups. Communications Minister Anika Wells launched the $67.6 million Journalism Assistance Fund in November, and the full list of who took the cheques sits in public on GrantConnect. It reads like a who’s who of the outlets that cover federal politics: Nine, Seven, the Conversation, Crikey, the Saturday Paper, the Daily Aus and Mamamia.
Does that cover federal politics? Or just reliably wedge their tongues between the government’s arse-cheeks?
The payments run until March 2028. They’re drip fed against progress reports the government must be satisfied with, and not one of the 184 newsrooms is required to tell you it’s on the books. Every time a funded outlet reports on the government, the government is helping pay the person who wrote the story.
The eligibility rules were carefully drawn. Any “foreign controlled Australian entity” was barred. That locked out News Corp’s Australian mastheads, Sky News Australia and Daily Mail Australia. The Guardian is just the collateral damage the government is willing to wear, in order to lock out even the most mildly ‘conservative’ legacy media. Newer, right-leaning digital outlets are nowhere on the list.
For the left-leaning camp-followers, though, the taxpayer-spigot is open wide. The Conversation ($1 million), Crikey’s Private Media ($737,000), the Daily Aus ($549,000), Morry Schwartz’s Saturday Paper ($300,000) and Mamamia ($268,000). Despite being explicitly excluded by the grant guidelines, a raft of lifestyle and trade titles somehow got showered with taxpayer money: Man of Many, SEN sports radio, a caravanning magazine and even a real-estate agents’ trade rag. All under a definition of “core news content” that explicitly excludes opinion and editorial writing.
There was no merit assessment and no ranking. Applications were simply “reviewed in order of receipt until available funding is exhausted”. The fastest squawking seagulls got the chips. And, boy, were some of them fast: Wire Media Group registered its ABN two days before applications opened and walked away with $85,800.
Another recipient entered creditors’ voluntary liquidation five weeks after its grant was published. One Korean title had its ABN cancelled months later.
Some recipients doubled up through related companies. The Intermedia Group and its majority owned Mumbrella Media collected $471,900 between them. The two Vision China Times entities took $251,394. Several other recipients are family trusts that can’t be matched to any masthead from public records at all. All of it went through the process the guidelines describe, and that’s exactly the problem: the net was this loose by design.
Wells, who wrote the book on scarfing up taxpayer’s money, appropriately launched the fund at the Sunnybank office of the Chinese Herald, which had already taken earlier relief money. Where she had the cheek to say:
“Quality, relevant news is essential for keeping Australians informed and connected,” Wells said at the launch. “We need Australians telling Australian stories and that can’t happen without backing Australian journalists in diverse communities.”
So… not Australian journalists, then, but foreigners peddling the propaganda of often hostile foreign governments. As for “quality” news, she needs to make up her mind: does she want quality news, or Nine and Seven?
Nothing in the guidelines requires a funded outlet to disclose the subsidy. If they choose to mention it, they must use the government’s pre-written denial that the money “does not influence the production of specific content”, which is the funniest political one-liner since Albanese’s “I am a man of my word”.
In case anyone is still deluding themselves that this isn’t about buying favourable courage, the payments are staged against “satisfactory progress reports”. The department can conduct compliance visits. Funded newsrooms must keep their journalist numbers up until 2028 or risk clawbacks. For the next two years, 184 newsrooms have a standing financial reason to stay on good terms with the government that pays them.
And this is only the start. There’s tens of millions more of our money coming down the pipeline to buy off the bootlicking legacy media. Not to mention a re-education campaign dressed up as a “National Media Literacy Strategy”.
As if to prove that they’ve got something to hide, the legacy media have now launched concerted attacks on One News Australia. The cheap hookers doth protest too much, methinks.
