Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, it's true. Interestingly, the research also indicates that the higher your income, the more likely you are to illegally download TV shows, music and movies. According to the APRA research, a household earning less than $40,000 a year is less likely to engage in illegal downloading than a household earning more than $100,000 a year.

In his second reading speech, the Minister for Communications also mentioned an education notice scheme that is being developed by ISPs and copyright holders that will warn people who have allegedly pirated copyright material and give them information about legitimate alternatives. This is now being developed into a code of practice and is currently being considered by ACMA. The good news is that it does not look as bad as some people feared it would.

The government discussion paper that was released in July last year canvassed the US copyright alert system, which involved ISPs slowing down the internet speed of their customers or cutting off their access to the internet altogether. A similar system operates in South Korea. There have been people in this government and in industry who have been keen for Australia to adopt this approach. I am glad that we are not.

The bad news is that it is still unclear who will pay for the cost of operating this scheme, how much rights' holders will pay to operate it, how much ISPs will pay and how much this will add to the internet bills of Australians who do not illegally download.

I also want to draw the House's attention to the failure of this government to do anything to address the recommendations of this report, Copyright and the digital economy: final report by the Australian Law Reform Commission, dated November 2013 and released by the Attorney-General, I think, in February 2014—almost a year and half ago. It is a very important report. It includes, all up, 30 recommendations. The bill that we are debating here tonight is an amendment to the Copyright Act, and it does not respond to any of the recommendations in this report. The key recommendation in the ALRC report is not this—it is not about site blocking; it is the creation of a fair use exemption. The Law Reform Commission argues that this would:

… make Australia a more attractive market for technology investment and innovation.

When I was in Silicon Valley last year, I heard much the same thing from my conversations with people at Google, Amazon and Yahoo. All of them told me that laws like this, fair use exemptions to copyright legislation, helped to facilitate the development of things like search engines and cloud computing.

What are we doing to implement these reforms here? Nothing. The report has been gathering dust now for almost 18 months. And the only change that this government has proposed to copyright law is this legislation that we are debating tonight.

It is the same with this report, At what cost? IT pricing and the Australia tax, a report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications, dated July 2013. This report made another problem clear—that is, that we pay more for IT products than people do in many other countries around the world. Often, we pay 50 to 100 per cent more that people pay overseas. That includes everything from music to games, software and hardware. Incredibly, it is cheaper to buy a song from an Australian artist on the US iTunes store than the Australian equivalent.

The report makes a lot of recommendations and, once again, the government has done nothing about them. That is why the opposition are moving a second reading amendment, calling on the government to respond to both of these reports by 17 September. I encourage the government to support this proposal. If the government does not support this then it will show very clearly to the Australian people that the government is not serious about reform in this area.

We do need to reduce piracy. We do need to protect copyright. If this legislation helps to reduce piracy then that is a good thing. But we need to be careful not to overestimate how effective this legislation might be. When I was a kid, you learnt about piracy at the start of every video that you got from the video store. It was the bit that you could not fast-forward through. It is a very different world today.

The internet allows us to get almost anything we want at the click of a button. When you have to wait longer than people in other countries or pay more to watch what you want to watch or listen to your favourite music or play your favourite game, people understandably get angry and frustrated, and they look for another way to get what they want. Legislation like this will not stop that; it will not stop that in its entirety. Content also has to be cheap, quick and easy to get. And that is a job for business not for this parliament.

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