The Digital Publisher Alliance, a lobby group of news outlets, is pressing the Albanese government to widen its Treasury 'News Bargaining Incentive' scheme to cover AI training data, freeze public ad spending on foreign tech platforms, and add a journalist salary tax offset,…
Australia's news publishers are trying to force AI companies to pay for the journalism that trains their models, and they believe they have already built the policy machinery to make it happen. At the National Press Club on Wednesday, Digital Publisher Alliance chair Tim Duggan outlined a three-front pressure plan aimed squarely at Canberra, betting that the government's own spending and access decisions can be turned into leverage against AI scrapers.
The lever is a Treasury scheme called the News Bargaining Incentive, announced roughly two months ago as a way to compensate Australian news publishers for content used by digital platforms. It is the operational hook the DPA wants to use to drag AI training data into copyright payment frameworks, rather than let AI companies negotiate around local newsrooms. Duggan is pressing the Albanese government to extend that scheme's reach, include small and independent publishers, freeze public advertising spending with foreign tech giants, and add a journalist salary tax offset modeled on the production offsets already used for the local film and video game industries the Press Club address, as relayed by the Inverell Times.
The bluntest tool in the DPA's kit is access. Duggan called for barring AI chief executives from Parliament House until they compensate Australian creators whose work trained their models. "We should not be welcoming any (AI) CEOs into parliament house without first demanding that they compensate the Australians whose work they have stolen," he said, framing the gatekeeping as a precondition rather than a posture Inverell Times report of the speech.
The alliance is also leaning on a single striking number to make the asymmetry vivid. It claims Anthropic's Claude scrapes roughly 24,000 pages of content for every referral it sends back to publishers, a ratio the DPA describes as a broken exchange in which publishers subsidize AI traffic and see almost nothing back. That figure is load-bearing for the advocacy case, and it remains unverified outside the DPA's own framing. Treat it as the alliance's case, not as an audited industry measurement, until Anthropic or an independent benchmark confirms it.
The counter-voice comes from inside the industry. Squiz Media managing director Claire Kimball told the same Press Club audience that news media conversations tend toward the negative, but there are reasons for optimism, a reminder that the publisher-versus-AI framing is not unanimous among local operators Inverell Times.
The timing is not incidental. Southern Cross Media and Punkee have both shed staff in recent weeks, and the Treasury's News Bargaining Incentive consultation is the live policy hook. AI training data is the frontier the original scheme did not name, and Duggan's pitch is to fold AI firms into the bargaining framework while steering the government's ad spend and tax preferences away from big tech.
What to watch next: whether the Treasury consultation writes AI platforms directly into the News Bargaining Incentive or leaves them in a separate file; whether any major AI lab agrees voluntarily to a copyright payment deal before the consultation closes; and whether the journalist salary offset survives the cost controls federal budgets usually face. Until then, the DPA's argument is a pressure campaign dressed as policy advice. The next test is whether Canberra treats the parliamentary access card and the ad freeze as a credible threat or a negotiating posture, and whether any AI lab blinks first by signing a copyright payment deal before the Treasury consultation closes.