Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Adelaide for the question, and I thank him for organising a tremendous community forum in his electorate on Friday last week. We had lots of people there sharing their stories and were very keen to know what the government was doing to help them in the battle against scammers. Over the last few weeks, we've held a number of town hall meetings around the country, in the electorates of Tangney, Swan, Hasluck, Macquarie, Boothby, Isaacs, Moreton and Dunkley. At each of these forums, people have been telling the same story. They're being bombarded by emails and SMSs. They're having their money stolen, or threatened to be stolen, by criminal gangs who are preying on them and their innocence, and it's impacting their ability to engage in online commerce. They're that they want the government to do something about it. They know that the problem has got worse and worse and worse.

The simple fact of the matter is that the previous government on this issue was completely indolent. They left Australian households on their own to fight the scammers. Well, there's a new government, a new change and a fresh approach, and we are on the side of consumers. We're going to fight back against the scammers. We're establishing a national anti-scam centre, a world first, as a result of the announcement made in the budget last week—over $56 million. It will have three functions. The first is real-time reporting and sharing of information. So if a scam is reported anywhere in the country, it's shared with the people who need to act fast to pull up the barriers, put the red flags in, and stop the scammers from going to work. We're also going to put in place new fusion cells, which are action squads that will go after the scammers who are preying on Australians. Something the previous mob could have done, but they didn't!

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