Who owns the news you think you’re reading

Kerry Stokes controls a A$10.74 billion industrial empire selling Caterpillar equipment to mines and holding the largest stake in an oil and gas company. He also owns Western Australia’s only major newspaper and a television network reaching 98% of Australians. The conflict writes itself. The coverage doesn’t.

Sky News and the regional capture

In Australian cities, you pay to watch Sky News Australia. In much of regional and rural Australia, it is your only available news channel, broadcasting free, all day, every day. This is not an accident. And what it broadcasts is not news.

501,876 signatures and nothing happened

In October 2020, more Australians signed a petition calling for a royal commission into News Corp than have ever signed any petition in Australian parliamentary history. A Senate inquiry agreed with them. The government did nothing. This is the story of how media power defeats democratic accountability, every time.

Australia’s Gas Heist · 11 Articles

Investigation

We gave away the gas

Australia is one of the largest LNG exporters on earth. Australians pay more for their own gas than buyers in Tokyo. The companies that take it pay almost no royalties on more than half of it. And Japanese buyers of Australian gas are reselling it to other countries for a billion-dollar profit. This is not a market failure. It is a policy choice.

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83% of all gas Australia extracts is exported as LNG

INPEX exported A$21 billion of gas and paid zero resource tax

Japanese buyers resell Australian LNG for over A$1 billion profit

East coast gas prices tripled while WA kept theirs at half price

A$22 million ad campaign killed the mining tax in six weeks

Who profits

Australia’s gas is mostly extracted by foreign multinationals. Their profits flow offshore. The executives running those companies earn millions annually — in one case heading straight from the top of Australia’s largest gas company to run one of the world’s largest oil companies for more than double the pay. This article names who takes the money and documents what they leave behind.

What Norway built

Norway and Australia both discovered oil and gas. Both had booms. Both watched multinationals extract billions of dollars from their continental shelves. Norway taxed the industry at 78 per cent, put every dollar into a sovereign wealth fund, and in 2025 that fund made A$350 billion in profit — in a single year. Australia built nothing equivalent. This is not geology. It is political will.

How they killed the mining tax

In 2010, a Prime Minister tried to make the mining industry pay a fair price for public resources. The industry spent A$22 million in six weeks. The Prime Minister was removed from office in 53 days. His tax was gutted, then repealed. In January 2026, newly-released files showed this campaign was being coordinated at the highest levels — and that the strategists themselves privately admitted there was no principled argument against the tax.

The political connections

The gas industry donated at least A$3.98 million to Australia’s major political parties in the year before the 2025 election. The minister who approved Queensland’s LNG export industry became chair of the national gas lobby within six months of leaving parliament. His successor did the same. Both were in breach of the Ministerial Code’s cooling-off period. Nothing happened. This is how the gas rort is maintained.

The east coast gas cartel

Australia exports gas to Japan, where it is resold for profit. It exports gas to South Korea. It exports gas everywhere — and in doing so, it has created a domestic energy crisis in which Australians pay world prices for gas extracted from their own territory. The ACCC has been investigating the east coast gas market since 2017. Its own reports describe the structural features of a cartel. It has not broken it up. Manufacturers have closed. Households pay high electricity bills driven by gas prices. The industry that caused it paid almost no resource tax while it was happening.

Gas and climate: the final rort

Australia dropped its bid to host the world’s most important climate conference weeks before it was finalised. It did so while providing A$14.9 billion per year in fossil fuel subsidies, approving a 40-year extension to one of the world’s largest gas processing facilities, and resisting every serious proposal to reduce its gas exports. The gas rort and the climate crisis are the same failure, from two different angles.

World Worriers · 10 Profiles + Breaking News

World Worriers

Breaking · 31 March 2026 · Antarctic waters

Operation Krill Wars

On 31 March 2026, the M/V Bandero, operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, rammed the Norwegian krill trawler Antarctic Sea in Antarctic waters. Aker BioMarine, the world’s largest krill harvester, called it a terrorist attack. Watson, from his houseboat in Paris, called it aggressive nonviolence.

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The Airline Rort · 8 Articles

Investigation

Data visualisation showing Australian domestic airfare pricing by number of competing carriers

The fare

Australia's domestic aviation market is one of the most concentrated in the developed world. Two airline groups control 94–99 per cent of all domestic flights. Load factors are at near-record highs. Profit margins on domestic routes are more than double those on competitive international routes. Fares remain well above pre-COVID levels. The competition watchdog monitors it every quarter. Nothing has structurally changed.

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In This Series

The duopoly

Australia's aviation market has been a duopoly for most of the past 35 years. The same structure that existed before deregulation returned within a decade of deregulation and has persisted ever since. Eight challengers have tried to break it. Every single one has failed or been absorbed. The mechanism that protects the duopoly is not just market power; it is also control over a physical resource that determines whether competitors can fly at all.

The Qatar block

On 10 July 2023, Transport Minister Catherine King rejected Qatar Airways' application to almost double its flights to Australia. Qatar found out via media. The letter giving no reasons arrived ten days later. Qantas had lobbied against the application, while simultaneously admitting it could not meet demand for at least five years. The Acting Prime Minister was not consulted. The Senate inquiry called it a protection racket. The man at the centre of it left the country. Qatar arrived anyway, through a different door. The delay cost Australians up to A$788 million a year.

Alan Joyce and the politicians

The Chairman's Lounge has approximately 5,000 members. Around 90 per cent of federal parliamentarians are among them. Membership is free, by invitation of the Qantas CEO, and provides access to priority upgrades, private airport facilities, and a personal relationship with the airline that regulates no other industry creates. It is not a bribe. It is something more effective than a bribe: an arrangement in which politicians feel comfortable asking for things, and an airline that benefits from government decisions feels comfortable providing them.

The frequent flyer financial machine

Qantas Frequent Flyer has 15 million members, about half the Australian adult population. In the financial year to June 2024, the Loyalty division generated A$2.6 billion in revenue and A$511 million in profit. During the COVID pandemic, when flying almost completely stopped, Loyalty's profits fell only 9 per cent. The reason: Qantas's real business is not flying planes. It is selling a private currency to banks and retailers, and Australians are enrolled in it at a rate that makes the currency nearly unavoidable.

Who owns the airports

Australia's major airports are private monopolies. They face no competition. They are monitored by the ACCC but not price-regulated. They earn EBITDA margins that reach 82 per cent, almost double the industry global average. The companies that own them are, in many cases, the superannuation funds of the workers who pay to use them. The same deregulation era that was supposed to open aviation to competition also sold the infrastructure that competition depends on. The bill is now coming due.

What the media covered

Media

Qantas has content partnerships with three of Australia's four major media groups: Nine (AFR, SMH, Age), News Corp (The Australian, Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun), and ABC. Its Chairman's Lounge membership includes 'high-profile members of the media.' It is among Australia's largest advertisers. None of this is secret. What it creates is a structural environment in which the outlets best positioned to cover the airline rort have financial relationships with the airline they are covering, and the outlets that covered it most directly tended to be those without those relationships.

What would fix it