There is a business model behind Australia’s culture wars, and it’s worth understanding before we argue about anything else.
For most of the 20th century, Australian media organisations made their money through a relatively straightforward exchange: readers, viewers, and listeners paid for content (or put up with advertising) and media companies provided information and analysis. Bias existed, of course — it always has — but there was at least a shared interest in keeping audiences broadly informed. An uninformed audience, after all, wasn’t a paying audience for very long.
The internet changed everything. Suddenly, media organisations were competing not just with each other, but with an infinite supply of free content from every corner of the globe. Advertising revenue collapsed. Newsrooms shrank. And media executives, scrambling to survive, discovered something both powerful and corrosive: outrage drives engagement far more effectively than information.
The Anatomy of the Outrage Cycle
It works like this. A fringe figure on the far left says something provocative — perhaps a minor academic argues for a policy that 95% of Australians would find extreme. A right-leaning outlet amplifies the story, framing it as evidence of what “the left” really believes. Audiences on the right feel threatened and share the story widely. Left-leaning outlets then respond, defending the fringe view or attacking the coverage. Audiences on the left feel their tribe is under attack and share that story widely. Both sides have generated enormous traffic. Both sides have sold advertising. No one has learned anything useful about the actual state of political opinion in Australia.
This cycle has a mirror image on the other side. Replace “far left academic” with “far right commentator” and the same machine operates in reverse, just as profitably.
Who Benefits — and Who Pays
Media companies benefit. So do the most extreme political voices, who find that outrage is a far more effective fundraising tool than nuanced policy discussion. Algorithms on social media platforms benefit, because engagement — even angry engagement — keeps users on the platform longer.
Ordinary Australians pay. We pay in the form of a degraded public debate that makes it harder to discuss and resolve real problems. We pay in the form of declining trust in institutions, media, and each other. We pay in the form of political paralysis, as politicians who attempt nuanced positions are drowned out by those who play to the extremes.
What Can Be Done
Awareness is the first step. When you see a story that seems designed to make you furious about what “the other side” believes, it’s worth pausing to ask: is this person or view actually representative? Or am I being shown a carefully selected outlier to maximise my emotional response?
The second step is diversifying your media diet. Reading across sources with different perspectives doesn’t mean accepting all views as equally valid — it means being better equipped to identify where the actual mainstream of debate lies, and where media companies are fishing for outrage at the margins.
The third step is demanding better. Media organisations respond to commercial pressure. When readers, viewers, and subscribers start to actively reward nuanced coverage and punish outrage-farming — by cancelling subscriptions, writing to editors, and calling out manipulative framing publicly — the incentives begin to shift.
Australia’s political and cultural divisions are real, but they are far narrower than our media landscape suggests. Understanding that gap — between the polarisation we’re shown and the moderate, pragmatic country most of us actually live in — is the starting point for fixing it.
