Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this really important matter of public importance brought by the member for Warringah. It's something that is pressing for all Australians, and I'm proud of the action that our government, led by Assistant Treasurer, have taken to address scams and to stop this very destructive trend in our society. I was recently proud to host an antiscams forum with the Assistant Treasurer here in my electorate of Canberra. It was good to hear him talk about all the scam forums he's held all around the country. I do believe he said mine was the biggest—it doesn't really matter, but over 300 people attended this forum, which shows the level of concern in the community about scams. We've all got them; we've all had the text messages, the calls and the emails. It was a great opportunity to have the minister come and speak with my community about the prevalence of scams, give them advice around how they can protect themselves and tell them about what the government is doing to ensure that fewer Australians are being impacted by scams every day.

The work this government has done to date has been transformative in this issue. In 2022 scammers stole $3.1 billion from Australians. In 2023 the government reduced that figure to $2.7 billion. Obviously, this number is still far too high, and there is more work to be done, but this trend is going in the right direction. Last year the government established the National Anti-Scam Centre to provide cross-sector engagement. The centre brings together industry participants from finance, telecommunications and digital platforms, and these participants are working together with government to expand policies and initiatives which drive down scam activity. Since coming to office the government has invested over $154 million in the fight against scammers. I was really concerned to hear the Assistant Treasurer say just now in his speech that the coalition are including some of this in their wasteful spending, so it will be interesting to see if they will commit to continuing this critically important work to protect Australians. Soon we'll be legislating mandatory industry codes to ensure that the banks, the telcos and the social media platforms are doing everything they can to address this issue. These codes will ensure that, if they are breached, the company responsible for the breach will be responsible for compensating the victim.

In 2023 an ASIC report into scam prevention, detection and response by the four major banks found that the overall approach to scam strategy and governance was highly variable and, overall, less mature than expected. The report found they had inconsistent and narrow approaches to determining liability across their banks. It also found that victims are often not well supported and that their ability to detect and stop scam payments had significant gaps.

A couple of weeks ago, as a member of the House economics committee, I had the opportunity to question the CEOs of the big 4 banks, and I focused my questions on scams and the responses of the banks to the significant losses of their customers, often as a result of their own institution's failings. Particularly, I wanted to raise the issue of two of my constituents who lost enormous sums of money to very sophisticated scams. One of these constituents lost around $1.6 million and the other lost over $5 million. In both cases, my constituents told me about the response of their bank, which was clearly completely inadequate, lacking the urgency and the empathy that one would expect for such a life-changing loss of money and devastating crime that has happened against these people. In one of the cases, Westpac informed the individual that they had been scammed and provided them with ways to protect themselves in the future. That is clearly a terrible response to someone who lost over $5 million. I believe that they deserve more from their bank, and I raised this and am pleased to say that Westpac have offered to contact both of those constituents individually.

There is more we can do in this space. While the banks have a really important role to play, as the Assistant Treasurer has said, social media platforms also have a really important responsibility in this. The fact that they can take advertising money from scammers who are taking advantage of Australians is not the banks' fault. That is a responsibility that those social media platforms should take seriously. They really should take their role in these terrible crimes seriously and address that.

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