Huge blow for Channel 10 as 10 News+ attracts less viewers than The Project
10 News+ had received an intense marketing blitz over the last two weeks as the network made its bid to win over new viewers with their promise of putting 'the truth first'.
Sadly for Network 10, that promise wasn't enough to win over viewers, with a mere 291,000 tuning in on Monday evening.
To put those numbers into perspective, 7News attracted 1.5 million viewers, with 9News close behind with 1.45 million.
What really rubs salt in the wound is that the final episode of The Project scored almost 500,000 viewers on Friday evening.
After shedding almost half its audience, it remains to be seen whether the network's gamble of cancelling The Project was the right decision.
Viewers delivered their verdict on social media on Monday evening, with many labelling 10 News+ a 'Temu ACA'.
'You replaced the project with a Temu ACA not seeing @theprojecttv is incredibly depressing. 10news+ sucks!' remarked one viewer.
Another complained about the format of the new show, tweeting: 'Please no more long investigation reports it's 6pm! Much too heavy, much too serious, American looking set and awkward presentation.'
'This is proper @Channel7 style commercial JUNK. It's like watching a cross between Fox News and Anchorman. Why the silly news voices!? questioned another disgruntled viewer.
One however, praised the show's lead story on convicted drug smuggler Debbie Voulgaris, who gave an exclusive interview from a Taiwan prison.
'Loving 10 news +, strong launch story. Is this the new Schapelle Corby story we all need to know about. 10 news should be very proud,' they wrote.
Another added: 'That was a decent first show'.
The news show's interview with the Prime Minister also sparked some viewer backlash, with journalists Denham Hitchcock and Amelia Brace being called out for their interviewing techniques, which saw the PM interrupted multiple times.
'Some ridiculous questions and hectoring tone from both hosts in this very disappointing interview with the PM,' ranted one.
'You replaced #theprojecttv for this tabloid junk? I'm turning this off!' complained another.
'This is trash, so dry and bland. Time for the project 2.0 and a game show in a prime time slot up against Home and Away. Good luck!' tweeted a third unimpressed viewer.
While a fourth added: 'Oh dear. I thought I would give 10 News Plus a go. I feel like we have regressed 20 years!'
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Liberal Party dusts off same script on quotas to debate lack of women MPs
Is there a more ghoulish spectacle in Australian politics than the triennial round of hand-wringing and puzzlement that consumes the federal Liberal Party after yet another election bestows yet another round of shrinkflation on its ranks of female MPs? It's 10 years now since a covert report to the Liberal Party's federal executive warned that the party did not afford equal opportunity to female candidates, and strongly advised that a target of 50 per cent be set and met by 2025. At the time the report was written, there were just 17 Liberal women in the House of Representatives, a number sufficiently grim that the Turnbull government, in 2016, duly committed to the 50 per cent target. When Parliament resumes later this month, the situation will be visibly, morbidly worse. Just six Liberal women will take their places on the green leather. Assuming Liberal leader Sussan Ley takes a COMCAR to Parliament House, the rest of the Liberal women can get there in a Corolla. The truly transfixing part, however, is this: no matter how low the number goes, the script remains the same. Dismay is expressed. A review is called. A handful of party figures (mostly women) gently suggest that perhaps after 30 years of arguing about this while things get worse and worse, it might be worth looking at some kind of mechanism to improve the situation. At which point they are briskly reminded by various grandees (mostly male) that the Liberal Party is the party of merit, and quotas are to the party of merit as dancing is to the town of Bomont, Utah in the movie Footloose (a breakout hit in 1984, the last-but-one election year in which the Liberal Party's proportion of female candidates was competitive with Labor's). Quotas are illiberal, goes the party line. They are anti-democratic. They are anathema to the spirit of the Liberal Party. Which is weird, because the Liberal Party invented quotas for women. After the sickeningly dispiriting election of 1943, in which John Curtin's Labor Party trounced all comers with 58.2 per cent of the two-party preferred vote — still its highest ever — Robert Menzies built a grand coalition between the non-Labor forces the very next year, in 1944, and called it the Liberal Party. Lending funds and campaign expertise to the enterprise were women's groups like the Australian Women's National League, whose leader Elizabeth Couchman shrewdly negotiated a provision in Victoria that half the party's executive positions be reserved for women. Were those appointments made on merit? Quota purists would say no, of course. But Couchman and her colleagues must have been doing something right: the Victorian branch of the Liberal Party, in its first 25 years, did better than any other party branch in Australia at electing women to the federal Parliament, producing Ivy Wedgwood, Marie Breen and the magnificent Margaret Guilfoyle, Australia's first female finance minister. Quotas brought women to the table, sent women to the Parliament and played a strong role in ensuring that the Coalition enjoyed a consistent advantage among female voters all the way until the year 2001. The Liberal Party is perfectly entitled to reject quotas for women. It's a free party, practising free association in a free country. But to pretend that it runs a quota-free operation — even today — is risible at best. The Coalition agreement with the Nationals — renegotiated after every election — is principally concerned with how many Nats are proportionally entitled to demand frontbench positions. Is it a miracle of merit that there always turn out to be exactly as many matchlessly qualified National Party MPs available to serve as ministers as would decently reflect their share of the joint party room? No, it is not. Is the deputy prime minister in a Coalition government always a Nat because the regional junior partner has a freakish knack of always just happening to have the most meritorious chap for that particular office? Pull the other one. There's a formal quota in place for Nationals on the front bench, just like there's an informal one for wets and dries, and people from Queensland, and all the rest of it. Are preselections in the Liberal Party a matter of merit? Let's be realistic. Even if there were standard KPIs available for what makes a good MP — which there absolutely are not — it would be an uphill climb to convince any disinterested observer that they alone determine who gets to be a candidate, especially in safe seats. Much depends on the factional makeup of the preselection college. The appetite of the candidate for arm-twisting and white-anting. The presence or absence of powerful sponsors. "Merit" — a wobbly concept at best, and endlessly susceptible to human subjectivity — is a particularly gelatinous affair when it comes to politics. The candidate preselection system in the Liberal Party yields — just as it does in the Labor Party — a wildly inconsistent crop of candidates, by and large. Both parties — threaded as they are with factional operatives, seats that "belong" to one gang or other, and grassroots memberships that skew left or right or old or crackers — are capable of sending profoundly ungifted representatives to the nation's capital. Sometimes, they send brilliant people. Sometimes, average ones. There are unofficial quotas for unions, for people with influential mates, for good blokes judged to have missed out unfairly last time round. Let's not even talk about the Senate, which is the largest and most obvious quota system our Parliament operates. Does Tasmania get a grossly disproportionate number of senators to its tiny population because Tasmanians are more meritorious? Nope, they get the same number of senators as NSW because when our Federation was being designed, the drafters knew it was important to hear from everybody. And more to the point, they would never have got Federation over the line without cutting a deal for the smaller colonies. Politics is always about getting the numbers. If merit's involved, which it absolutely is, at least some of the time: brilliant. But let's never pretend that the long march of gaining preselection in a major party, making it to parliament, getting picked for the front bench or even becoming the leader of a party is reliably fuelled by merit alone. The Liberal Party's new leader, Sussan Ley, provoked all sorts of huffing and puffing last week by declaring at the National Press Club that urgent action was required to increase the number of Liberal women in parliament. She did not specifically endorse quotas. This makes her not even as venturesome on the subject as Scott Morrison, who declared in 2021 — to absolutely no perceptible effect — that he was prepared to give gender quotas a go. The hard truth is that preselections are a matter for state branches in the Liberal Party, and any federal leader wanting to revolutionise the system will require nerves of steel and a determined party room with an appetite for trouble. One compromise model — proposed in 2021 by the now-former Liberal MPs Nicolle Flint and Jason Falinski – is the "priority list" approach adopted in 2005 by British Conservative leader David Cameron. Determined to modernise the party, Cameron had the party's national leadership compose a list of diverse candidates from which branches were obliged to consider at least two in each preselection round. Rather than enforcing quotas, the reform forcibly expanded the field of candidates under consideration. Still, it was a long-tail, feather-ruffling business. For years, the women on the Tories' priority list were known derisively as "Cameron's Cuties". One of them was Kemi Badenoch, who 20 years later now serves as the party's leader. Power never gives itself away. And if you want to grab it, you have to be prepared to hold on, because it's never pretty.
ABC News
an hour ago
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Victorian government to change state's Working with Children Check system
The Victorian government will strengthen its Working with Children Check laws, but the first change will not come into effect until August, the ABC can reveal. Warning: This story contains details of alleged child sex abuse that may distress some audience members. On Tuesday, Victoria Police announced a childcare worker in Melbourne's south-west had been charged with more than 70 offences, including sexual assault and producing child abuse material, related to eight alleged victims at the Creative Garden childcare centre in Point Cook. Police said the accused, who had worked for about 20 childcare centres over about eight years, held a valid Working with Children Check (WWCC). The ABC understands the Department of Government Services (DGS) recently completed an "initial review" of Victoria's Working with Children scheme. The review was ordered after the ABC revealed people under investigation for serious offences could still hold one of the permits. A WWCC is a background check conducted by the government that screens people for criminal history and professional conduct findings. Currently in Victoria only criminal charges or a regulatory finding can trigger a check being revoked. For example, someone banned by the education department from working at a preschool for posing a risk of harm to children could still hold a valid WWCC. The government said that from August, screening regulations would change so DGS could "take into account prohibition notices issued from the Department of Education when determining or revoking a person's clearance to work with children". "It's clear to us that this system needs to be strengthened," Government Services Minister Natalie Hutchins told the ABC last month, after the ABC's extensive coverage of the issue. "This is just the first step to strengthen the Working With Children Check system to ensure that awful incidents that have occurred never happen again. "I will have more to say on outcomes of the review soon." It has been four years since ABC reporting sparked investigations that would lead to flaws in the WWCC being exposed. In 2022, the Victorian Ombudsman recommended the state urgently change its laws after a youth worker was cleared to work with children despite facing sexual offence allegations, including rape, in New South Wales. The state-based changes flagged for August will still not allow the Victorian system to consider a broad range of information such as child protection reports or police intelligence. Other states and territories can. Do you know more about this story? Contact Josie Taylor at josiegtaylor@ If you're sharing sensitive information, read our tips on how to contact us confidentially. It has been 10 years since the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended Australia's eight separate state and territory working-with-children systems be both standardised and nationalised. In a rare case of a former royal commissioner speaking publicly, Robert Fitzgerald told the ABC it was "shameful" this work had still not been done. "There doesn't need to be any more reviews or any more inquiries, or any more royal commissions," he said. "The evidence was overwhelming 10 years ago and it's even more so today," he said. "Working with children checks are in fact the very first thing you need to do to create child-safe institutions. "The longer we delay in fixing the system … we continue to leave children at risk." Mr Fitzgerald, who is now the age discrimination commissioner, called for the federal, state and territory governments to urgently establish a national WWCC system and a real-time national police database. The Australian Childhood Foundation (ACF) said the alleged abuse case announced by Victoria Police on Tuesday was "one of the most significant and far-reaching cases of [alleged] child sexual abuse ever seen in a childcare setting in Australia". The Victorian government has established a webpage with information for affected families. Information, including details of the government's dedicated hotline, can be found here. It called on governments across Australia to swiftly embed mandatory child abuse prevention education into the scheme, an issue it has lobbied on for years. "We can't always stop people who want to harm children from slipping through the cracks, but governments must act to ensure that the adults around children are trained to recognise risk, respond appropriately and act to protect them," chief executive Janise Mitchell said. Emma Hakansson, a lead advocate with the ACF, said WWCC holders continued to abuse children. "At the moment [the scheme] is essentially a screening tool to make sure people convicted of harming children and other dangerous crimes can't work with children," she said. "But we know that most perpetrators of child sexual abuse don't have any past convictions and they go under the radar. "Until the WWCC has mandatory child abuse prevention training as part of it, which we are calling for, it will not work." Ms Hakansson said embedding training into the scheme would make the community safer. "At the moment, to receive a Working with Children Check you have to do zero training," she said. "You just need to go through a police screening." She said people were often trained about how to respond to a direct disclosure of child abuse, but at that point, it was already too late. "A child has already been abused," she said. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was asked on Tuesday if she supported the proposal to make child abuse prevention education training mandatory as part of the WWCC scheme. She said the recommendation would be considered. "This is one of a number of pieces of advice that is already being provided to federal and state ministers as they work through the national framework that sits across the early childhood sector," she said. "Recommendations around additional training is one of those recommendation that we will examine. "We understand that there is a need here, to look at what happened, to understand what happened, and to strengthen the regulations."
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Australia is far from its own Zohran Mamdani moment. Here's why
There's not much about American life you'd want to import here. Their cheese tastes gross, there's no national paid parental leave and their healthcare system is — to put it mildly — awful. Oh, and that's before you get to the guns. Then there's their political system, complete with an electoral college that makes a mockery of the notion of "one person, one vote". It's not ideal. But on one front, they do have an edge over our system here in Australia: breakthrough, often young, candidates have more of a chance of getting into powerful positions within the major parties. At the May federal election, Australia elected one of our most diverse parliaments ever with a higher number of women, better multicultural representation and more MPs with disabilities. It is a parliament that is more like the community it represents, but when it comes to who gets to be a minister vs who's on the back bench things are much more homogenous. In Australia, for better or worse, it is very difficult for an unexpected 'upset' candidate to win a position of much influence in our politics. In the United States, it's a different story. Take New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who recently won the race to be the Democratic candidate for NYC against the wishes of the party establishment. Yes, mayor is a local government position, but if you're running a city with more people in it than the whole of Victoria it's a pretty big deal. As illustrated by how much some members of the media in the US are straight up freaking out about Mamdani's candidacy which has also seen him subjected to vitriolic racism from the wider political establishment. We'd need another whole column with an extended word count to get into the ins and outs of the policies he's running on and whether evidence indicates they will or will not work. But in short, his pitch was that he's a fresh voice, who wants to make New York a cheaper place to live and that his opponent Andrew Cuomo was backed by billionaires who didn't care about regular people — who had also had to step down from being Governor of the state after subjecting 13 women to sexual harassment. Though as anyone who follows US politics with any passing interest knows, this is not enough to stop someone making it to the highest echelons of US politics. Just ask the most successful breakthrough candidate they've ever had. Disruptive candidates like Mamdani, Donald Trump and Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the exception, not the rule. But senior lecturer in politics at the Australian National University Jill Sheppard says there's a reason we see them less in Australia. "What we know of both major parties is that their membership base is getting old and it's predominantly very white and in the case of the Liberals in particular, it's very male," she says. Unlike Australian pre-selections, the mayoral primaries were open to voters who weren't party members. "A lot of traditionalist Democrats at the moment are arguing that their wishes were overridden," says Sheppard. "That could absolutely happen here, but the difference is that a renegade faction would have to actually join the party and go to meetings and be part of the party and abide by its constitution and do all these things." Sheppard says while Trump and Mamdani are far apart on policy, their experience breaking into politics has some similarities. "In 2015 when [Trump] was going through his first presidential primary race, a lot of Republicans thought he's annoying, he's getting a lot of attention, but it's fine because our party elders are backing other people." Similarly in 2025 Mamdani "was able to organise this support outside of the big trade unions, outside of the party elders inside Congress and basically build a workaround to get into politics," she says. "We just don't have anything like that here right if you want to become elected." Of all the 21st century's greatest thinkers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the neatest summation of how things work in politics: "It's not about right, it's not about wrong. It's about power." And in Australia, if you want to have access to the power held by the major parties you need to play by some very particular rules. "There's a real assembly line for incoming politicians that has changed the nature of the kinds of people that get elected," says Sheppard. "There is a sense that you have to do the hard yards in a party branch." While the parliament is slowly growing more reflective of the community it represents, factions — formal or otherwise — dominate who gets a shot, when and at what. There is significant evidence that people often choose to hire those who look and behave like them, this is no different in politics. In politics this can lead to a stale, feedback loop exacerbated by factions. And the thing about a blocked up system? It causes problems. Just look at issues the Liberal Party is having because its membership doesn't have much of an inclination to preselect women in winnable seats. Now you might be thinking, but Claudia! What about the independents?! And yes, the substantial number of independents in politics compared to years prior shows it is possible for unexpected candidates to break into parliament. What they have not broken into is the ministry or the balance of power. There is a flip side to all of this: stability. "Even though we don't like the people that we vote for, we still like the system," says Sheppard of Australian politics. "On the other hand, that can get stagnant, right? You become so stable that you don't move, you're just this sort of turtle that forgets how to walk." Stability is currently in short supply in the United States at least at a federal level. We don't know what a Mamdani mayorship would look like because he hasn't actually won it yet. Here in Australia, it is easy to dismiss these upsets as matters far away especially when Labor has such a thumping majority. But eventually, there will be a need for renewal and when that time comes if the new generation of political leaders are just carbon copies of their predecessors voters may cry out for something new. The major parties need to ask whether that new thing can include them.
