The ban on news in your Facebook feed is not the end of the world. There are countless other news websites that have news and information about what is going on in your neighborhood. So losing news on a Social Media site is a small thing. I am sure you could create your own social media site with news aggregated into the feed and allowing users to choose which news they wish to see. That would not be too difficult, even though the Information Technology scene in Australia is not the best, judging by some websites that do not even have a working SSL cert in 2021. But I am sure that they can get something working. I am sure that there are open-source solutions for creating a social media site. Diaspora is one good option, this is open-source and secure with good privacy options. That would work well on a fast and powerful server machine. Then Australia could have a nice Facebook alternative for them to use. But considering the many bungles of the Australian government, this may not even happen. The Australian government ran a Census online and this server was overloaded and this resulted in many people not being able to log in.
This should have been distributed over many servers and used some kind of protection like Cloudflare to prevent a DDOS attack or whatever it was, it might have just been too many people accessing it at once. And the DDOS attack is just a cover story. But this just shows how incompetent they are when IT is taken into account, they are shipping IT offshore to China and India and this does not bode well for national security. But this is the order of things in 2021. Not everyone knows too much about IT anymore and therefore, they outsource everything overseas and the quality drops. But Facebook bots are not the best either, pages such are Surf Lifesaving, Suicide Prevention Australia, 1800Respect & Break the Silence Against Domestic Violence have been blocked, this puts people who are already at risk, in further danger. This is too broad a brush to wield when deleting news content on Facebook. Hopefully, sense will prevail in the long run and something can be worked out to solve this issue.
Facebook alternative? https://diasporafoundation.org/.