It definitely provides the media agencies more traffic. From what I understand of the government's proposed legislation, they want Facebook to pay for simply one of your friends sharing and article and that share appearing on your news feed. So as a user you don't even share that article, nor open it, you simply scroll past it because someone else shared it and the government wants Facebook to pay for this.
Not forgetting that a lot of those articles (for some media companies like DT, The Australian) are behind a paywall, so you have to be a subscriber to open the article in the first place.
Facebook have to also strongly take into consideration that if they agree to this government's laws, other nations are going to use these laws as a yardstick, effectively fucking Facebook worldwide.
The simple fact is, again this government is showing it's loyalties to murdoch and wants us to go back to 1950s. There's no ifs or buts