Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

If the hardest thing in your day is to support this bill then you have no problems whatsoever. There is no reason you would not support this bill; it is a great bill. In fact, there are two good reasons to support this bill. One is that my friend and colleague the shadow Attorney-General has put his heart and soul into breathing life into what is the Marrakesh treaty in the Australian context, and he deserves more than ample praise for the work he has done advocating for this. The coalition have done a great job with this bill and what it will do. I dare say they have probably gone a little bit further than we would have, but they have done a great thing for Australians who want to be able to access content, who are visually impaired or who have hurdles in their way in accessing content.

But that is it—that is the limit of my compliments for this bill. It is not what is in this bill that you should be focused on when you are looking at this debate. What you should be focused on is what is not in this bill. What is represented by the absence of key parts in this bill is policy cowardice by the Turnbull government. A few years ago when they presented the exposure draft of this bill, they said that they would include provisions for safe harbours in copyright. This is not some academic concept; this is not something that is too difficult, too arcane, too much in the policy long weeds to ignore. An inability to have an effective safe-harbour regime in this country—which was supposed to be in this bill—means that jobs are on the line. Businesses are on the line. We are looking at a government that championed itself as being the innovation government, the one that would see all these new firms sprout up, particularly in the tech space. These firms are now actively looking to go overseas because this bill—and the policy cowardice that is wrapped up in this bill—was unable to work out a way to allow those firms to continue in this country. That is the problem with this bill.

I will give you a classic example. There is a firm in Melbourne that started small and has grown big. It has provided, just in Melbourne, over 100 jobs. It has provided artists with income and it has provided manufacturers with income. For the artists, they will do better than just relying on Australia Council grants; they will actually make a quid and do very well out of it. The firm is called Redbubble, and right now their commercial prospects have been put under pressure because of the policy cowardice of this government. Just to let you know what we are turning our backs on, this is what Redbubble are: by many accounts, Redbubble are probably one of the largest global internet companies to come out of this country. They have some 15 million visitors per month and 450,000 artists have uploaded work, with over 11 million images available, and 63,000 of these artists are from this country. Ninety-three per cent of their sales are offshore from Australia. Artists have earned some $72 million from the Redbubble site, with over 10 per cent of this going to Australian artists. This is nothing to sneeze at; this is good money earned by great Australian artists through a company that emerged out of Australia from Australian smarts. That happened right here. We do not celebrate these companies enough. This is a great, great company. We should be supporting these companies. We should have legislation in this parliament that says: 'You know what? We want to make sure you survive.' But, because of the cowardice on that side—

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