MICHELLE ROWLAND MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS
MEMBER FOR GREENWAY
 
 
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER ROUND OF CLOSURES ON THE COALITION’S WATCH
  

Today’s announcement that News Corp Australia will restructure its publishing portfolio, resulting in potentially over 500 job losses and the closure of a number of community titles, is a devastating blow for local news and Australian stories.
 
It follows the recent closure of online news sites 10 Daily and Buzzfeed News Australia this month, and mounts on top of more than 150 Australian newsrooms shut since January 2019.
 
Local journalists play an essential role in breaking news and telling the stories that matter to their communities – particularly in outer-metro and regional Australia.
 
The loss of print editions is particularly hard on those Australians in the digital divide, including the elderly, who will no longer be able to read the local paper.
 
Our thoughts are with media industry workers facing unemployment in a sector hit by the triple-whammy of digitisation, COVID-19 and this inept Liberal National Government.
 
These closures are another example of a media sector in deep crisis and a Government that inspires no confidence in the sector.
 
Labor warned that the Government’s Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund, announced in 2017, was ideologically-motivated and inadequate. This Government wasted precious time in failing to provide timely and effective support to a media sector in crisis.  
 
In April 2020, we called on the Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, to allow community and regional media to access his $1 billion COVID-19 relief fund.
 
Instead, the amount of funding now on the table for regional and community media is less than what the ACCC recommended the sector needed a year ago, before COVID-19 even existed.
 
The Minister’s Public Interest Newsgathering Fund (PING), announced in the midst of COVID-19, was scant on details, late and inadequate.
 
Delays on this Government’s watch means that essential funding is yet to flow to media organisations in their time of need.
 
As always, it’s a case of too little, too late from this Government.
 
The media is an essential pillar of our democracy and it was in crisis long before COVID-19.
 
But make no mistake: Liberal-National inaction over seven years has left Australia’s media exposed to external shocks and it will be local communities that miss out.
 
THURSDAY, 28 MAY 2020