Jason Falinski – Spokesperson
The Albanese Government has a habit of taking a problem created by government, doubling down on it, and then acting surprised when the consequences arrive right on schedule. Its proposed News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) is the latest entry in that well-worn playbook.
We are told this is about “supporting journalism”. In practice, the NBI is about forcing a private-sector transfer payment from digital platforms to incumbent legacy media firms, backed by penalties large enough to make the deals “voluntary” in the same way a mugging is a donation.
When you threaten fines for not signing a “voluntary” deal, the word voluntary is stretched beyond recognition. True to form, this isn’t consultation. It’s notification, with a branding exercise.
The NBI is not a lifeline for journalism. It is a subsidy for compliance.
Once revenue is underwritten by regulation rather than earned from audiences, media firms are incentivised to lobby government rather than innovate to preserve legacy models rather than adapt them. Government creates a pipeline of forced payments; recipients spend their energy defending the pipeline; innovation loses because rent-seeking wins.
This isn’t theory. It’s how regulated industries behave whenever incentives are misaligned.
And it’s audiences who ultimately lose. When innovation is discouraged and competition dulled, Australians get fewer choices, worse content, less diverse viewpoints, slower improvements in digital services and higher costs passed through in advertising and subscriptions. A media ecosystem that responds to audiences produces better journalism; one that responds to regulators produces better lobbyists.
The government’s starting point is deceptively simple: platforms “use” Australian news and should therefore pay. But that logic only works if you ignore how markets function and how the internet actually works.
News outlets publish online because distribution is valuable. Platforms provide demand, traffic and audience discovery. They are the world’s largest referral engines. Pretending legacy media is doing Google or Meta a favour by placing links on the internet is like arguing Westfield should pay David Jones because shoppers walk past the window.
No government can legislate its way around economic reality. Those who adapted to the digital economy have done exceptionally well. If journalism were an irresistibly profitable asset for platforms, they would be tripping over themselves to buy more of it.
Instead, the market signal has been clear: news is low-margin, high-risk, high-liability content. Meta’s decision to scale back news after 2024 wasn’t ideological. It was rational a response to a policy that distorted incentives and turned news into a regulatory victim.
Labor’s response? Don’t fix the policy. Punish the exit.
That should worry Australians far more than Silicon Valley. When governments design laws that continue to impose penalties even after a firm has stopped engaging in the activity the law claims to regulate, they’re no longer setting incentives. They’re enforcing compliance for its own sake.
And the economics deteriorate further from there.
The NBI is effectively a revenue-based levy — revenue, not profit. That distinction isn’t technical; it’s the whole story. Taxing revenue ignores cost structures. It punishes firms that invest heavily in infrastructure, safety, moderation and R&D the same as those that don’t. It shifts decision-making away from long-term investment and toward short-term monetisation.
It is the policy equivalent of telling innovators: “we’ll tax your top line, then lecture you about why you didn’t build the future here.”
You don’t need to be Adam Smith to see where this leads. You just need to understand incentives. Get them wrong and you don’t get the outcomes you want you get the outcomes your incentives produce.
Step back and the pattern is unmistakable. This is a government that talks endlessly about partnership with business, but governs through demand. It doesn’t work with markets; it instructs them. It doesn’t tolerate exit; it punishes it.
And because the target here is the digital information ecosystem, the implications go beyond economics. This is the state embedding itself deeper into the architecture of the internet deciding who gets paid, who survives, and on what terms.
Australia should be doing the opposite.
In a world of intensifying strategic competition where the race for AI, compute and data-centre capacity is real we should be lowering sovereign risk, not advertising it. We should be attracting investment, not signalling that success will be treated as a piggy bank for whichever interest group is best connected.
If the objective is public-interest journalism, then say so and fund it transparently through the budget, where voters can see it, contest it and judge it. Don’t outsource a tax to regulators, dress it up as a bargaining code, and pretend it’s voluntary because you avoided the word tax.
Australia doesn’t stay prosperous by turning markets into feudal arrangements where the productive are compelled to subsidise the politically favoured.
The NBI isn’t modern policy. It’s antiquated policy the kind that leaves a nation stuck managing decline, bargaining over ever-smaller slices of a shrinking pie.