Why is Australia ranked low for press freedomthen? The only controversial thing I can thing of in Australia is the mining industry. Do you all have protesters against the mining industry...thinking of Midnight Oil's "Blue Sky Mine"

"In Australia (30th), the media were subjected to investigations and criticism by the authorities, and were denied access to information" according to the article. Personally, I don't see why the authorities have any less right to criticize the media than media have to criticize authorities. I don't think the mining industry has anything to do with it.

The public has done a bizarre about-turn on the mining tax. When it was introduced, the frothing middle-Australians were saying "How dare you bring down those who have brought prosperity to our nation!?". In the intervening years it's become apparent that those mining profits are largely going to overseas owners, yet still screw up the rest of our economy ("two-speed economy" - the rest of the economy is growing, but the mining makes our dollar grow faster yet...). Now middle Australia is whining that the gummint didn't tax those greedy miners enough, they're screwing us over and we aren't getting our cut. One of those times you actually feel sorry for the politicians.

That's off-topic though - the mining tax has left public discourse in the last year, but there's lots of noise about internet content filtering, plus according to the page about Australia on the press freedom index, there's lots of obsfucation at the government level when it comes to requests for information. There's not much in the way of protesting, but there were things like reporters working on the wikileaks story having their work blocked.