ABOUT & EDITORIAL STANDARDS

What this newsroom is, and what it can't do for you.

We are journalists at Pahibalo News, publishing in Australia for Filipinos here and in Aotearoa New Zealand. We are not the Department of Home Affairs, not a migration agent, not the consulate, and not your lawyer. This page says plainly what that means.

LAST UPDATED 19 SEPTEMBER 2026

What Pahibalo News is

Pahibalo News is a small independent newsroom, live video channel and podcast network built in Australia and published from Adelaide by Kangaroofern Media Lab Pty Ltd, founded by Miko Santos.

We publish four ways: a rolling wire of the day's news, live and looping video channels, podcasts across the network, and written guides on work, visas, scams and settling in. New Zealand is a beat here, not an afterthought — the rules are different and we say which country we are talking about.

What we can do

• Explain what a rule change actually means for your visa, your job or your money — in language that does not need a lawyer to decode it.
• Name the scam pattern your situation matches, and how it usually runs.
• Point you at the official Australian or New Zealand channel for your situation, free of charge, and tell you which order to do things in.
• Tell you where a story came from. Every item on our wire names its source and links straight to it, so you can read the original yourself.

What we cannot do

• Give migration advice. Only a registered migration agent or a lawyer can advise you on your own case, and we are neither.
• Give legal or financial advice. We describe how things work; a professional advises you on your situation.
• Recover money you have lost. Nobody can promise that, and anyone who offers to do it for a fee is running a second scam on you.
• Intervene with an employer, a landlord, an agency or a government department on your behalf, or contact anyone for you.
• Speak for the Philippine government, the Embassy or any consulate. We are an independent newsroom and have no official standing.

How we use AI, and where it stops

We use AI in this newsroom, and we would rather tell you exactly where than let you guess.

The wire is assembled with machine help: software gathers and drafts, and every item carries the outlet it came from and a link to the original. It is a signpost to other people's reporting, not a replacement for it — if the item matters to you, follow the link and read the source.

Some shows on the network are made with synthetic voices. Where that is true, the show says so on its own card rather than in the small print, and a show hosted by a person says that too. You should never have to work out whether you are listening to a human.

Editorial standards

We link out to other people's reporting rather than rehosting it, and our own interpretation is kept visibly separate from their summary.

We take no money from migration agents, education agents, remittance companies or recruiters in exchange for coverage. Where a listing or an event slot is paid for, it is labelled on the page as paid.

Corrections are permanent and dated. We do not quietly edit a page that was wrong and carry on as though it always said the new thing.

We do not publish the visa status, immigration case or family details of a private person who has not chosen to be public, even when they are on the record about something else. For people in the community, that detail can carry a cost that never lands on us.

If we get something wrong

Tell us first — editor@financialregister.com.au reaches the desk, and a correction on this site is dated and permanent.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you are not stuck with it. The publisher is bound by the Australian Press Council's Standards of Practice, and the Council takes complaints about us directly, free of charge, on 1800 025 712. That is a body we do not control, which is the entire point of naming it here.

Why Miko built this

Miko Santos is a Filipino-born journalist with a degree in journalism and more than two decades in newsrooms. He was a feature writer in Manila through the EDSA II and EDSA III uprisings, and later reported from New Zealand for GMA 7 — including the Christchurch earthquake in 2011.

He migrated to New Zealand in 2005 on a Work-to-Residence visa, and arrived into service-crew work before moving up to assistant manager across several five-star hotels, building a life there with his wife and their two children. Journalism and hospitality ran in parallel for years, which is its own answer to anyone who thinks a migrant's first job is their ceiling.

In 2012 he moved the family to Australia — two years in Darwin, in a high-end hotel, before settling in Adelaide. Alongside that he built a string of media businesses: Podwires, a marketplace for podcast producers; The Financial Register, a newsroom covering money, politics and scams for young Australians; Guerrilla Podcast Syndicate; and Mencari Travel Wire. All of them sit under Kangaroofern Media Lab Pty Ltd, which began as a podcast management company and grew into a media one.

Across that whole journey he kept noticing the same thing. The week a Filipino migrant lands, they go looking for Filipino businesses, Filipino food, a Filipino service provider who will understand the question — and for news that explains the country they have just walked into.

“When you arrive in a new country, the first thing you look for is something that feels like home — a Filipino business, a Filipino restaurant, a Filipino service provider. That sense of belonging is the start of everything else.”

Miko Santos, founder

Pahibalo News is the news half of that answer: the reporting a household needs in the first year, and in the tenth.

Who publishes this

Kangaroofern Media Lab is an independent digital media company based in Adelaide, South Australia. The publisher of this website, its channels and its newsletters is Kangaroofern Media Lab Pty Ltd, which also publishes The Financial Register — a newsroom covering Australian money, politics and scams for Gen Z and millennial readers — alongside Podwires and Kababayan Connect. The titles are editorially independent of each other; what they share is one publisher and one set of standards.

Memberships and accreditation

The publisher holds membership of, or accreditation with, these bodies. They are listed because each one is a standard we can be held to by somebody other than ourselves — which is worth more to you than anything we could say about our own reporting.