Federation Chamber (part 2 of 3)
13 October 2026
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Federation Chamber Australian Parliament
10:00 - 10:02
Speaker 1
Are there any constituency statements and I give the call to the member for Clark.
10:02 - 10:46
Speaker 3
Deputy Speaker, thank you. Deputy Speaker, I have received a whistleblower disclosure from veteran Tasmanian investigative journalist Mr. Jeffrey Swan, a 10-year contributor to the Tasmanian Times who was until January acting chief editor of the publication. My office has had several dealings with Mr. Swan this year via emails, phone calls and in person. Deputy Speaker, Tasmanian Times was founded in 2003, holds about 64,000 articles and has been a reputable and trusted local publication for years. The documents provided to me by Mr. Swan allege serious misconduct by the publication and its former owner and publisher, Mr. Alan Wykes.
10:46 - 12:21
Speaker 2
Mr. Swan claims that Tasmanian Times has been leveraging its reputation to quietly profit from the promotion of illegal offshore gambling. According to Mr. Swan's disclosure, when conducting an audit of the Tasmanian Times database he found 1,894 posts which contained hidden black hat search engine tactics. Deputy Speaker, black hat SEOs are features like hidden links and invisible text that are used to rank a website by violating search engine guidelines. They do this by manipulating search engine algorithms to increase a site's rankings. In the case of Tasmanian Times, Mr. Swan alleges black hat SEOs have been used to funnel readers towards unlicensed offshore casinos.
The posts are invisible to ordinary readers, but highly visible to Google, which trusts the masthead because of its decades of credible reporting. It is relevant here, Deputy Speaker, that the Interactive Gambling Act of 2001 prohibits hosting links to unlicensed offshore gambling services. Therefore, if Mr. Swann's allegations are correct, both Tasmanian Times and Mr. Wyck stand accused of breaching the Interactive Gambling Act as well as misleading readers. To date, Mr. Swann has referred his allegations to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Federal Police, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. But as is often the case with whistleblower matters I raise in this place, each organisation has so far failed to act.
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