Matt Burnell (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Scams destroy lives. You hear the figure $2.7 billion, which is what Australians lost in 2023 due to scam activity. Despite that amount of money being nearly impossible to imagine on a table in front of you and despite the astronomical physical cost of scams, which merits attention in itself, that figure of $2.7 billion still doesn't do justice to the human cost of scams and the livelihoods that are affected as a result.

I had a constituent from Elizabeth North come to my office about six months ago. She initially had a conversation with my staff about the government's National Rent Affordability Scheme, the NRAS. She wanted to know more about it, so she had this conversation and pointed out that she had found a representative of NRAS on Facebook via an advertisement hosted on the site and had had a chat with that representative over Messenger. My staff looked up this supposed NRAS Facebook page and found the one she had been speaking to, along with a series of others. In fact, you can look up the phrase 'national rent affordability scheme' on Facebook right now and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. There are about half a dozen pages, all claiming to be the NRAS, all with the same teal-coloured background and coat of arms on the profile picture, each as dodgy as the other.

The constituent who attended my office had provided her drivers licence number, her bank details, her myGov login and her tax file number to this entity pretending to be NRAS, and she did so because she trusted the NRAS name. She couldn't fathom that a criminal would abuse the trust that people have in it and rob vulnerable Australians looking for help. Upon relaying that to my staff, this constituent burst into tears. She had already known what had happened before she'd walked in; she just needed a way to get the words out. It hit this constituent that the income support that she, as a pensioner, relies on, her control over her finances and much of her livelihood had been compromised by a person or a group of people who wanted to take it away from her. Fortunately, my staff gave this constituent advice to secure her information and protect herself.

In the end, no financial or identity based harm came of this, but there was certainly an emotional toll, especially in the rush with which this 80-year-old woman had to protect her livelihood. She was forced to travel back and forth to her bank to lock her account, to Service SA at Elizabeth to change her driver's licence and to the police station to report the crime, as well as to sign statutory declarations to prove that it happened.

While she was under all that stress, her car ran out of fuel and was stuck on the side of the road, and she couldn't access funds that had just been compromised to fill it up again. She was fortunate that a man in the community who was passing by pushed her car to a service station up the road and put $20 of fuel in her tank so she could do what was needed to protect herself. I don't know who this man is, but I cannot commend his gesture enough. This is a genuinely inspiring act. It's how we do things in the north, and it's the kind of thing that will always triumph over the scum that put this woman in the situation she was in.

Regardless, this constituent found herself crying in the car, worried about her rent, her dinner that night and her very identity. She says the ordeal took such a toll on her that she lost kilos of weight under the trauma of it all. I'll remind everyone that this is a scenario that worked out in the end! There are scores of people around this country who haven't been so lucky, from whom billions have been collectively stolen and from whom livelihoods have been taken. It could have been worse for this constituent, but, even without that happening, this woman had an ordeal that profoundly affected her mental health as well as her self-esteem. She still calls herself stupid and gullible for falling for a scam in the first place.

We in this place know through our engagement with our communities and our exposure to the severe impact of scams in this country that Australians should never feel that way in this situation. They are the victims of heinous crimes which were reported to Scamwatch nearly 250,000 times last year. There is no shame to be had. But Australians do feel this way. They do feel humiliated by what's occurred. That adds up to the human toll which the scams ecosystem has in this country. While the economic figure I began with is significant, the cost to the individual, psychologically, socially and, of course, physically is absolutely devastating. This constituent's experience is just one of the many that I have so far heard since beginning this term. I'm confident that every member in this place has had someone in their own community come to them for assistance to deal with a scam.

In my role, I've seen websites trying to impersonate the federal government's GrantConnect, trying to make people pay hundreds for advice that is freely available. I've seen emails attempting to convince pensioners that they are from Centrelink or Australia Post—and these are pensioners who rely on information from these services to live. The member for Mallee was quite right in her remarks on this bill that these scammers are the scum of the earth for committing acts like that. Worse still, they are widespread in our country. That's why government needs to take action, and I am proud to be part of a Labor government which is doing just that through the bill now before the House to establish the Scams Prevention Framework.

One of the reasons I opened my contribution with an individual's story is that this legislation is people-centric. It protects Australians by making entities relevant to scam prevention, such as banks, telecommunications providers and digital platforms, accountable to customers. It does that because consumers are reliant on those parties to take the steps needed to protect Australians from scams. It enforces that protection by legislating that the regulated entities take responsible steps in all circumstances across the economy to develop and maintain ways of shielding Australians from scammers. While there have been voluntary efforts by private entities that have been implemented, such as two-factor authentication for logins, or systems to notify users when their information is at risk, more action is needed.

The government's engagement with regulators, law enforcement and industry has shown that businesses aren't always prioritising scam prevention or systems to mitigate it, which leaves people at risk. That engagement also found that the mechanisms for reporting these scams and getting the urgent assistance needed if an Australian feels they are at risk are inadequate and often toothless. This is especially true on digital platforms, like social media and search engines, which are largely unregulated at this point. This has become more of an issue as scams have rapidly become more sophisticated and more dangerous.

There was a pretty commonly held perception, which started over 20 years ago, that a scam online consisted of a person from a long-forgotten royal family, located halfway across the world, sending you an email to tell you he owes you millions of dollars and you should give him your bank card details because he really wants to give you that money. There were more sophisticated scams than that at the time, but this was widespread and became what people thought of in public discourse on the subject. It meant that scams online weren't taken as seriously then as they are now. At that point, when a scam came in, say, via email, we would deal with it using a spam folder or a delete button. While these mechanisms worked for that kind of thing then and continue to do so now, scams have progressed long beyond those emails. Criminals are deceiving people in a convincing matter that they are large organisations and government agencies and through technologies that are much more advanced than they were previously, in a heavily digitised and vulnerable world. As a result, these regulated entities, as the bill describes, need to directly engage with Aussies and work with them to mitigate the damage of a scam. This needs to occur firstly to ensure scams are reported quickly to those private entities so they can work with individual cases more effectively and warn the wider community and, secondly, to ensure swift action can be taken to protect the user and their information or data that has been compromised should a scam succeed.

This brings me to another facet of the people-centric approach in this bill, which is a requirement for regulated entities to have a dispute resolution process in place to deal with consumer complaints. This will address the present shortfall in ensuring that regulated entities communicate quickly and effectively with Australians who need help with a scam related issue. It will also further ensure that these parties can be held accountable for the steps they're taking to make sure their customers and users are protected adequately.

The accountability from the complaints process that the Scams Prevention Framework will enforce is beneficial in two particularly notable ways. The first is in its reinforcement of community expectations—that is, Australians can give feedback on the measures these regulated entities are taking, which will, in turn, better inform the government on whether that entity is meeting its obligation to protect Australians from scams and serve to enhance the enforcement of scam protection to a greater effect across the economy. This public scrutiny will also work in tandem with the penalty of up to $50 million for egregious breaches of the Scams Prevention Framework, which is another significant strength of the bill.

The second highly beneficial aspect of the complaints process implemented as part of this bill, which cannot be understated in its importance, is that it helps keep the legislation robust as it combats an ever-evolving and changing threat. As I pointed out earlier, scams change. As sophisticated as they are now, with phone calls that sound and act like your bank, from phone numbers that look like your bank, in reality, they are criminals who definitely aren't your bank. These elaborate scams will continue to evolve at a rapid pace as technology continues to progress at the same rapid speed. You only have to look at AI's current capabilities, whether in deepfake, in producing lifelike text to speech or in generating highly accurate imagery from next to nothing, to see how a criminal will deceive people into sharing sensitive information online or over the phone. Their efforts will become more and more dangerous as those technologies become more and more advanced.

Relevant legislation needs to allow room for approaches to combat scams to advance at the same level of sophistication of scammers and to set in stone the right of Australians to report scams to regulated entities as part of the whole-of-economy approach this bill takes and have those reports taken seriously, underpinned by the obligations that those banks, telcos and digital platforms will have through this bill. This will mean that the moment a scam goes a different direction, the moment a new tactic is deployed that could potentially ruin the lives of thousands, those regulated entities will know about it and, bound by the steps they will have to take through this bill, be able to mitigate these threats more efficiently. Communities will also be better informed about new threats, not just by reporting them but also by the provision that regulated entities take action to inform their collective users about scams and warn the community of threats present around their respective services and platforms.

Through the bill, we are mandating that Australians have direct access to these regulated entities to report scams so that their efforts to minimise the impact of a scam are updated constantly through community feedback that must be taken on board and actioned in a transparent manner. That is a large part of the Scams Prevention Framework: to be able to scale to the threat of the scams present at a given time and stay one step ahead of the criminals looking to exploit Australians. Even then, should those measures I've mentioned fail and an Australian fall victim to a scam, that complaint mechanism also provides for free and open dispute resolution processes should Australians feel a regulated entity could have done more to protect them, which can potentially lead to compensation or other action.

Again, our approach to fighting the scourge of scams is people-centric. It's to ensure people like the everyday Aussie I referred to earlier and the other thousands upon thousands of Australians who fall victim to these criminals each year are at the heart of the legislation before us today. That's not to say industry bodies are pushed aside either. I'll finish on that aspect of the bill.

The Scams Prevention Framework has been forged in consultation with industry, with the regulated entities that I have referred to. It's not the intention of this bill to scapegoat or target regulated entities through obligations provided to them. This can't happen, because, as a government, we know that these entities are essential to winning the fight against scammers. That's why the obligations that will be applied to banks, telcos, digital platforms and other regulated entities to combat scams will be tailored to the sector they're in to both match the operations of a regulated entity and better suit the scams these obligations are trying to mitigate. I commend this bill to the House.

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