The CMT view of the News Bargaining Incentive

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, CMT has been busy writing submissions to government on its proposed News Bargaining Intensive scheme. In this newsletter we share our submissions with you.

CMT has long advocated for mechanisms that can put public interest journalism on a surer financial footing. With the diminishing scale and scope of legacy media newsrooms, and the alarming contractions in regional journalism across Australia, the fourth estate has looked, at times, like it is facing an existential crisis.

In November 2025, the government released a consultation paper on the successor to the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) which managed to inject an estimated $200-250 million into newsrooms for three years, until Meta announced it would no longer pursue commercial deals with news companies. In response, government announced it was pursuing what it called the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI), a scheme which imposes a levy on applicable search and social media services but allows them to offset these charges through ATO deductions. In March this year, draft legislation for the NBI was released along with a consultation paper on how the money collected by the levy would be distributed.

CMT’s view on the draft legislation is that there is a more effective approach than that being considered by government. We believe the NMBC should be repealed, and the new scheme ought not be based on commercial deals between platforms and media companies. Rather, CMT believes a fairer approach would be to impose the mandatory levy on the digital platforms and distribute levy funds to eligible news media businesses via an arm’s length body. But CMT also recognises government is likely to proceed with the core parts of its scheme, for a range of reasons, and we have therefore suggested ways to improve the legislation.  Among those measures we suggest that each digital platform enter into a baseline number of deals or for a sliding scale of the minimum number of deals which increases with the size of the charge payable. This would avoid the proposal’s risk that it might worsen media concentration – by facilitating a very small number of deals with the largest players – rather than increase sustainability and diversity.  You can read our submission here.

CMT also reviewed the Department of Communications distribution proposal, and  suggested a number of changes including the removal of the revenue threshold that applies to smaller news businesses, as it did under the NMBC. We also suggest the removal of the capacity for larger media businesses to ‘double dip’ by doing commercial deals with digital platforms and then claiming via the levy fund, if the platforms have not offset their entire liability via the deals and indeed funds are available to disburse. We would also like to see requirements and transparency on how funds are used and periodic legislative review on how the scheme is operating which would provide room to move as the media environment continues to change. You can read our submission on the distribution mechanism here.

And now to Derek Wilding – and his analysis of a new quandary for journalism – when a victim of sexual abuse opts to be named by just one journalist at one media outlet.

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