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

The focus of our legislation, and the focus of the question, is around how we prevent scams occurring in the first place and, when they do occur, how we ensure the victims are compensated. That's the whole focus of the legislation: it introduces tough new obligations. These obligations will fall upon banks and also upon telecommunications companies and social media platforms, and I'll return to this point in a moment. These tough obligations are to ensure that they are keeping their customers safe. They are obligations to prevent scams, obligations to detect scams, obligations to disrupt scams, obligations to report scams and obligations to ensure that they are responding, including responding to their customers to ensure that their money and their information is safe.

I agree with the member for Wentworth that not nearly enough is being done by banks to ensure that their customers are being kept safe and that their customers are getting compensated for losses. That is a core feature of our scheme. There are clear paths for remediation and clear paths for compensation. But we do not accept the approach that has been pushed by some others—that we should let social media platforms off the hook. Two out of every three scams originate from an ad published on a social media platform. Meta, in and of itself, is the single biggest advertiser of criminal scams in the world. They're not a start-up. In Australia they made between $5 billion and $6 billion last year alone. So, yes, we need to keep the banks on the hook and keep the banks responsible for their part in the harms, but we should also be ensuring that big social media companies like Meta are kept to account as well.

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