presented. Exploring the history of regional community radio stations reveals the relationship between stations and how regional communities choose to represent themselves and construct their own mediatised identity. This article details the findings of a case study focussed on North Queensland station Triple T. One of the oldest regional community radio stations in Queensland, the history of Triple T offers rich insight into the mediatised identity of regional communities.

28:T424,

COVID-19's supply chain disruptions saw small-scale, artisanal food and craft producers experience surges in demand from consumers seeking locally made goods. This article analyses Australian news coverage promoting this ‘turn to the local’, with a focus on mainstream news outlets from March 2020 to February 2023. We identify two dominant narratives: the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’. Using Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s (2018) work on resilience as a regulatory ideal of neoliberalism, we argue that both narratives focus on individual responsibility in ways that make invisible structural and economic impediments to change. The consistent ways in which buying and producing local small-scale goods were presented and understood in the news coverage – across different products, places and stages of the pandemic – highlights the persistent ways in which neoliberal values perform particular kinds of work for capitalism by asserting the necessity of local ‘resilience’ and ‘positivity’ in times of crisis.

29:T48e,

Over the last decade Australia's free-to-air commercial networks Seven, Nine and Ten have undergone a protracted digital transformation with the development of their online, ad-supported broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) platforms 7Plus, 9Now, and 10Play. The present article considers some of the questions these commercial BVODs raise for television policy in Australia, with specific reference to local content regulation. Through content audits of 7Plus, 9Now and 10Play, we assess the localism of the BVODs’ catalogues in terms of the availability and discoverability of Australian titles. We find that these BVOD services – which are not presently regulated for local content – are less local in their programming than the networks’ free-to-air linear channels, but are more local than competing subscription video-on-demand services such as Netflix and Prime Video. We also reflect on how the networks position themselves in the newly expanded Australian television market, and how they reconcile their historical status as protected national broadcast institutions with their newer status as ‘just another app’ in the streaming ecosystem.

2a:T43a,

Despite its prominence in societal and scholarly discourse, a consistent definition and scope for media diversity remains elusive. This leaves ambiguous its characteristics, concerns, and impacts and complicates efforts to achieve its benefits. This study sought a new approach to identifying its role that leverages lived experiences of the public interacting with their media ecosystem. Public submissions to the Media diversity in Australia inquiry presented a unique opportunity to pursue this goal. The 5068 texts were dominated by citizens perspectives that went beyond reframing and redefining media diversity to explain how they saw it affecting their daily lives, families, and communities. Using multi-stage thematic analysis, this study worked to consolidate these diverse and grounded views into the shared themes that confronted citizens, finding concerns about the diminishing reliability of media functions, with losses in media diversity leading to unsatisfactory media performance, media avoidance, and harms for communities and individuals.

2b:T41a,

Public figures are subject to higher rates of online abuse than other users in part because many digital platforms have significantly higher thresholds for intervening in cases of public figure abuse. Internationally, this higher rate of abuse has led to substantial impa