Thorpe rebuffs Indigenous leaders’ criticism of protest – as it happened
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More on news media bargaining code and funding of media publishers
One of the committee's key recommendations was a digital platform levy on companies like Meta and Google, which some have described as a tech tax to fund public interest journalism.
So in parts of Europe, for example, there's a 2% digital services tax. You could look at a public interest journalism levy.
The issue that we have fundamentally here is the ... offshoring of the digital platform's profits, where currently they pay very little tax because they argue that they don't operate in Australia, even though they're getting this enormous profit yield of the advertising on their platforms. So that's another thing that has to be resolved within legislation in order to impose a tax.
But simply imposing a tax and feeding [it] into media organisations ... won't fix the issue if Meta continues to deprecate news content - that is, reduce the exposure of news content to its consumers.
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