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As the world turns its attention to the slow-motion car crash that is this year’s U.S. presidential election, September in Australia was a comparatively ordinary, intermediate month for
news. A number of continuing scandals and controversies – including the donations affair engulfing Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, the Country Fire Authority pay dispute in Victoria, and the
growing opposition to a costly nationwide referendum on same-sex marriage – played out through the month, but none of these managed to fully capture the nation’s attention; distractions
including the NRL and AFL finals series and the spring school holidays saw to this. The Australian Twitter News Index for September 2016 therefore points to a gradual decline in the sharing
of links to Australian news sites on Twitter, especially as the school holidays commenced in the majority of states and territories on 17 or 24 September; far from the caricatures sometimes
drawn by self-interested political operatives, Australian Twitter users have families, too. The stories from the leading Australian news sites that were most widely shared on Twitter during
the past month document the diversity of topics currently exercising the Australian social media community. A _Sydney Morning Herald_ piece accusing Liberal Party members of orchestrating a
dishonest campaign opposing same-sex marriage appeared in some 1,400 tweets; the referendum was also addressed in an _SMH_ article that covered the handwritten message to Malcolm Turnbull
delivered by a same-sex couple’s 13-year-old son, which received 1,100 tweets. Elsewhere, the Chinese donations scandal centring on Labor Senator Sam Dastyari generated a number of claims
and counter-claims about Chinese influence on Australian politics, and led a May 2016 exposé on political donations to Australian politicians from Chinese interests from the _Sydney Morning
Herald_ to re-emerge as the second most widely shared article in September (1,200 tweets). It was accompanied by widely shared _SMH_ stories on the Chinese links of Liberal MP Stuart Roberts
(1,200 tweets) and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop (1,200 tweets), which in combination seemed to deflect the issue away from Dastyari alone and to raise broader questions about the integrity
of the Australian political process. Such broader issues were also addressed in other leading stories during September: the _SMH_ also questioned Attorney-General George Brandis’s
appointment of a major Liberal Party donor to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal just before the commencement of the pre-election caretaker period (1,100 tweets), while _ABC News_’
interactive data journalism piece on the expenses claimed by federal politicians of all stripes was circulated on Twitter in more than 1,000 tweets during September. Rounding out the top ten
_SMH_ and _ABC News_ articles for the month are articles on the government’s embarrassing procedural mistakes in the Senate (_SMH_, 1,200 tweets), as well as the only two pieces not dealing
with party politics: the plan to register a roadworthy solar car in Queensland (_ABC News_, 1,100 shares), and the commencement of construction of twelve new solar power plants across
Australia (_ABC News_, 1,000 shares). The comparatively modest numbers of tweets achieved by each of these leading articles also paints the picture of a month in which user attention was
broadly distributed, however: none of these issues, and the many other topics also being addressed in news articles from these and other Australian sources, managed to rise to particular
prominence. The patterns in domestic user visits to Australian news sites captured in our Hitwise data also bear this out. Across the Australian news and opinion sites we track here,
activity from week to week remains almost uniform, with very few aberrations; indeed, repeating a pattern we have found in previous years, even the commencement of the school holidays does
not appear to affect the number of visits to these sites – it seems that Australian users still follow the news online during the holidays, but are less interested in sharing on news
articles during this time. The one major spike in activity – especially for _Nine News_ and _ABC News_, and to a much lesser extent also for _Adelaide Now_ – occurs towards the end of the
month, on 28 September. As the Adelaide connection indicates, this is almost certainly tied to the major power outages occurring in South Australia on this date, as the result of a number of
major storms bringing down crucial powerlines. Occurring so late in the month, the subsequent political debate over the role of South Australia’s dependence on renewable energy in this
outage is unlikely to have substantially affected the statistics on article sharing on Twitter that we track in ATNIX – we will see in the October instalment whether this emerging debate
generated enough news sharing activity to appear in that month’s list of leading articles. STANDARD BACKGROUND INFORMATION: ATNIX is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing
to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites (even if those links have been shortened at some point). Datasets for those sites which cover more than just
news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude the non-news sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). Data on Australian
Internet users’ news browsing patterns are provided courtesy of Hitwise, a division of Connexity. This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia
Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”.