Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak on the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024. I understand that there will be further scrutiny of this bill, and I think that's a good thing because some of the elements of this bill are contested and they deserve further scrutiny. Schedules 1 and 3 of the legislation are relatively uncontentious, and they revolve around doxxing. So the bill addresses the practice of doxxing. Doxxing can take several forms, but essentially it's the public release of private information or personal details without consent. The eSafety Commissioner has outlined several types of doxxing:

Deanonymizing doxing

Revealing the identity of someone who was previously anonymous (for example, someone who uses a pseudonym).

Targeting doxing

Revealing specific information about someone that allows them to be contacted or located, or their online security to be breached (for example, their phone number or home address, or their account username and password).

Delegitimizing doxing

Revealing sensitive or intimate information about someone that can damage their credibility or reputation …

The most recent example of doxxing was very high-profile and involved details of hundreds of Jewish members of a private WhatsApp group being published by pro-Palestinian advocates. Indeed, it was the impetus to bring this bill forward. The victims, amid a disgraceful and rising tide of antisemitism in Australia, reported being shunned, suffering adverse professional and personal consequences and, in some cases, suffering death threats.

The coalition rightly condemned the doxxing of Jewish creatives and offered to work constructively to improve the legal framework. We have for some time been supportive of laws to respond to doxxing. The former coalition government commissioned a review of the Privacy Act during the previous parliament. The purpose of the inquiry was to examine whether Australia's privacy laws were fit for purpose.

The bill is not without controversy, and I do just want to make a few comments about schedule 2 of the bill. That is the schedule that would establish a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy. The merits of putting that statutory tort into the bill are highly contestable, and we need to think about what the consequences of that would be. Any individual could sue any other individual, including a body corporate or a government, for misusing a person's personal information or intruding on their seclusion.

What that could lead to is more litigation, more people finding their way into courts and the driving up of insurance premiums. Plaintiff and class action law firms are, unsurprisingly, very supportive of this, but there are many business organisations that are not, including ACCI and the BCA, which have expressed concern about schedule 2. Coming from such an entrepreneurial place as my electorate of Nicholls—it is really based on private enterprise—I continue to say to the government in this place that, often, the more of this legislation you put forward, the more cost it puts on business.

Now, we can't have no legislation in relation to this, but we do need to think about what costs it puts on business and what impositions it puts on people trying to run private enterprise—insurance premiums, risk of litigation and all of those things—and I do think there are unintended consequences that I would like to see examined by further scrutiny of this bill. Ultimately, as we understand in this cost-of-living crisis, greater cost to business will be potentially passed on to consumers, and we need to consider that. So, while the new doxxing offence is a welcome element of this bill—and I congratulate the government on it—I think that schedule 2 needs more scrutiny. I worry about the unintended consequences and I would welcome further scrutiny of this bill, particularly schedule 2.

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