Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

We appreciate the sentiment in this amendment. It is, clearly, in the public interest that public interest journalism be assessed as part of the review. However, I think the government should be able to make an undertaking, in that regard, without biasing the other issues that might also emerge in the time of the implementation of this legislation. We would expect, for example, the work of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, PIJR, and the Australian news mapping project—these are all important considerations. However, we need to address a context in which the department has failed to produce basic information about newspaper coverage in Australia, particularly given the department's role in relation to the Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund. That was announced back in 2017 as well as the Public Interest News Gathering program announced in 2020. So there are a wide range of issues that need to be researched and assessed in terms of the balance of this kind of review. We're very happy to emphasise the needs of small and independent journalists and the Public Interest Journalism Initiative et cetera, but this inquiry and review has to address the needs of a much greater diversity of stakeholders.