Below the Fold: Govt. versus Goliath

Below the Fold is the monthly newsletter from Cognito, an independent PR and communications agency specialising in financial services and technology, with a team based in Sydney.

“Social media platforms are choosing to do the absolute bare minimum because they want these laws to fail”. That was Communications Minister Anika Wells in late March, fronting media to deliver a particularly pointed barb at the social media platforms.

For those who haven’t been following closely, the Australian Government’s under-16 social media ban hit its first compliance report last month. The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, named five platforms – Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube – as being investigated for “potential non-compliance” with the law.

The findings were uncomfortable: platforms are allowing users unlimited attempts at age verification, prompting users who have already declared themselves underage to try again, and doing the bare minimum to stop new underage accounts from being created.

Wells and Inman Grant have controlled the narrative on this story for the better part of a month. The social platforms, by contrast, have continued to fumble.

The pressure didn’t stop there. On 28 April, Wells unveiled the draft News Bargaining Incentive – a 2.25 per cent levy on the Australian revenue of Meta, Google and TikTok if they refuse to strike commercial deals with Australian news publishers. The timing was, frankly, brutal: Meta’s annual financial accounts had landed the same week, revealing the company sent 87 per cent of its $1.74 billion in Australian ad revenue offshore in 2025, paying (only) a cool $61.16 million in local tax.

I’ve also got some thoughts on the federal budget on 12 May, and what financial services and technology brands should be thinking about heading into it.
As always, feel free to get in touch if any of the points included caught your eye, or if there’s something you’d like to see discussed in next month’s edition.

Until next time,

Jonathan Buxeda,
Director, Cognito ANZ

Narratives Down Under

As observed by Scott Schuberg, Managing Director, Cognito ANZ

Fans of Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell’s The Rest of Politics podcast will be used to the way Campbell portrays the mainstream media’s failings in the way it characterises the likes of Trump & Farage as celebrities. It’s a valid argument, but the solution isn’t easy – if Trump posts something on Truth Social that ostensibly details a foreign policy decision, how can readers possibly be immune to a headline showcasing his early morning musings?

In one of his most recent appearances, however, he paid satirists-cum-publishing powerhouse The Betoota Advocate a visit and drew comparisons between political coverage of One Nation in Australia and that of Reform in the UK and senses the potential contagion threat of its style of politics here is quite real.

Speaking on the matter of the Farrar by-election, prompted by ex-Liberal Party leader Susan Ley’s resignation and now commanding its own dedicated Wikipedia entry, Campbell said it gives the major Australian conservative coalition, “…the permission they desperately want to start emulating One Nation,” precisely what he sees the Tories doing in the wake of Reform’s success in the UK.

Is he right? Well the weekend’s Farrer by-election results are unambiguous – enormous swing against the Australian Liberal Party of –31% at the latest count, landing just over 12% of the vote while One Nation’s David Farley (+32.85% to 39.45% of the vote) and Independent MP Michelle Milthorpe (28.39%), which prompted federal Liberal leader Angus Taylor to conclude, “Mass migration has not worked for this country…” That probably tells you everything you need to know about what will be a campaign cornerstone of the federal opposition party’s platform for the time being. Even prior to this, you didn’t have to look far to find evidence to support his changing narrative.

Liberal Party elder Alexander Downer penned an op-ed in The Australian late March, containing plenty of coded messages that married the cost of living, cost of housing and declining real wages with immigration and the recognition of indigenous inequity via welcome to country ceremonies – all cited as the words of others, not his. Although he did showcase some phenomenal market research skills, claiming, “Many are saying Australia is changing and they use the phrase ‘we are losing our country.’” The Farrer result gives some insight into whether this narrative is being driven by facts or rhetoric on the topic of immigration – Farrar’s electorate was 80.4% born in Australia, versus a 66.7% national average. Whatever residents of Farrar are upset about, there’s a good argument to say that this anger is being misdirected.

As a result of the (on-and-off-and-on-again) Liberal National Coalition’s factionalism and infighting, any lessons learned from the socially-progressive/fiscally-conservative teals’ success in 2022 have gone out the window – it’s now a full swing to the right to combat the gap left, which prompted the rise of One Nation. Crikey did a good job of characterising this, following the Coalition’s 2026 South Australian state election defeat that left Pauline’s party with 22.9% of its vote, up from 2.6% in 2022.

All this has created plenty of fertile ground for criticism of Labor Treasurer Jim Charmers’s Budget, which he’ll deliver tomorrow at 7:30pm. While the incumbent Labor government isn’t required to call a federal election in Australia until May 2028, state elections and by-elections will crystalise the mood the electorate ahead of that, and the two abovementioned events leave the Australian Labor Party with two strategic options – bring the nation’s mood to its way of thinking in the next 12 months, or concede that its principles may need to flex in order to retain a majority government.

Client Spotlight

Retail investors in Australia have made a clear statement with their portfolios: investment performance is increasingly taking priority over ethical considerations. That was the finding at the centre of our first major campaign for Sharesight, the portfolio tracking platform helping self-directed investors and advisers better understand what their money is actually doing.

April marked the onboarding of Sharesight as a new client, with an immediate focus on building the brand’s profile and AI-search visibility through proprietary platform data and timely commentary on retail investor behaviour.

Working with Sharesight, we used real investor data to uncover timely insights around investor behaviour, market sentiment and the trends shaping how Australians are managing their money.

The story, Australian investors prioritising returns over ethics, combined proprietary investment data with broader market insight around shifting investor sentiment and performance expectations, securing strong visibility throughout Australian media, including this great piece in FS Sustainability.

The campaign highlights the value of pairing strong, exclusive data with a credible spokesperson and clear market insight to build momentum for a new client relationship. Momentum is already continuing into May, with an AAP interview secured and new storylines in development around CGT changes and what they mean for self-directed investors.

Kudos and Catastrophes

This month, the Kudos goes to Communications Minister Anika Wells, who has run two parallel campaigns against the social media platforms in April and won both narratives convincingly.

The first is pushing for better enforcement of the under-16 social media ban. Wells’s “absolute bare minimum” line is the kind of quote that may very well end up in various media training decks (mine included). It was specifically engineered to be lifted into a headline without editing. It was, and got run almost verbatim across the Guardian, the AP, the BBC and SBS.

The second front opened on 28 April with the News Bargaining Incentive. The framing was just as disciplined, with a clear message to push for a 2.25 per cent figure was front and centre. The mechanism was ‘tax if you don’t engage with us, offsets if you do’ – plain language, and easy for the punters and media alike to wrap their heads around.

And critically, the press framed the policy as a response to bad behaviour rather than a fresh tax grab.

Two things stood out from a comms standpoint.

First, the simultaneity (new word of the day) is putting pressure on from all sides. Running both stories at once gives Wells two compounding narratives that reinforce each other. Each platform misstep on the under-16 ban makes the case for the news bargaining tax look more reasonable. The Meta tax disclosures – which would have been a one-day story in a quiet news cycle – become front-page evidence in support of the government’s broader argument that the platforms are extracting Australian value without contributing fairly. It’s a smart way to keep the pressure on without appearing to overstep.

Second, the messaging discipline across multiple government voices – Wells, Inman Grant, Albanese – has been almost suspiciously tight, with no off-piste comments, and no temptation to overreach on what enforcement might look like.

The Catastrophe, by contrast, sits with the platforms. And while their PR teams are clearly under fire on multiple fronts, the responses have been remarkably lacklustre.

Meta’s response to being named in the eSafety compliance report was, and I’m quoting directly: “We’ve also been clear that accurately determining age online is a challenge for the whole industry”.

This is far and away a departure from the CEO of TikTok’s ‘zooming out’ moment in response to questions from Congress on ties with China, which we use in our media training decks (check it out here). Instead, this reads as if it were assembled by a committee whose primary brief was to avoid acknowledging the existence of children.

Their response to the news bargaining draft legislation wasn’t much better: “The idea that we take their news content is simply wrong. This proposed legislation, which would apply to platforms regardless of whether news content even appears on our services, is nothing more than a digital services tax.” It’s marginally better in that it actually picks a fight – calling the policy a digital services tax is designed to position the levy as part of a cash grab, which Australians have historically resisted – for corporates or otherwise.

Their response to the tax disclosures was, if anything, the worst of the three: “Meta pays taxes as required in every country where we operate, including Australia. We have consistently paid income tax in accordance with Australia’s taxation laws… at effective tax rates well above the statutory company income tax rate of 30 per cent.”

A statement that is technically accurate while being substantively misleading – the high effective rate is a function of the small portion of revenue Meta books in Australia in the first place, which is the actual point critics are making. Statements like this work fine in a quiet year. They land terribly when you’re fighting a war on three fronts.

TikTok declined to comment on the eSafety report. YouTube’s parent Alphabet didn’t immediately respond to most April requests. By the time those statements ran, the narratives had been set without them.

The closest thing to a competent platform response in April came from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who at least had the courage of his convictions. He published a personal note arguing that he didn’t believe Snapchat should be subject to the under-16 ban in the first place, and that cutting teens off from these relationships didn’t make them safer. You can disagree with the position – plenty of Australian parents will – but it’s recognisably written by a human being who holds an opinion. That’s a low bar, and it’s depressing how few of his peers cleared it.

Reddit, for what it’s worth, is running a different play – complying with the under-16 ban while simultaneously challenging it in the High Court on constitutional grounds. The first hearing is this month.

A broader point that I think is being underappreciated by the social platforms is that Australia is, increasingly, the regulatory testing ground for the rest of the world on this topic.

Looking Ahead: Budget Night

A quick note on something that should already be on the radar of every financial services and technology comms team in Australia: Treasurer Jim Chalmers will hand down the 2026-27 Federal Budget on Tuesday, 12 May.

This is the first full budget of the Albanese Government’s second term, and Chalmers has already told the press he wants it to be ambitious – flagging a productivity package, a savings package, and possible action on tax reform, including the long-running argument over the capital gains tax discount.

A couple of things we’re thinking about for our clients ahead of budget night.
The first is the productivity agenda. For our clients with a credible story to tell about how their business or technology contributes to productivity – whether that’s payments infrastructure, AI tooling, advisory services or workforce platforms – budget week offers a strong opportunity to land meaningfully, as journalists will be hungry for case studies that make the Treasurer’s narrative concrete.

The second point on our radar is the CGT discount. Australian media have been reporting that the government is considering cutting the discount from 50 per cent to 25 per cent. This change would reshape the conversation in property, wealth management, and financial advice overnight, and is something we’re actively thinking about for our clients.

Budget night is one of the rare moments when the entire Australian press corps is paying attention to the same story for 12 hours straight (and then a week or so re-hashing and examining), which means we’ll also be paying extremely close attention.

Coffee With a Journalist

This month, we caught up with Matt Bell from the Australian Financial Review as part of our regular catch-ups with local journalists, continuing a strong relationship built over time across markets and business news.

We previously featured Matt in a Q&A when he first started at AFR, where he shared how the Markets Live blog operates and what makes stories cut through in a real-time environment.

Given the pace of the Markets Live blog, Matt reinforced that strong, quotable insights are key. While contrarian views are not essential, perspectives that offer a fresh or unexpected angle can help stories stand out and drive engagement with readers following markets throughout the day.

He also noted the importance of local relevance, with overseas trends and US commentary only really landing when there is a clear link back to the ASX or Australian investors.

It was a useful reminder that in fast-moving markets reporting, the stories that cut through are those that are clear, timely and directly relevant to what is happening on the ground in Australia.

And that’s it! Until next month.