Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the bill before the House today, the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024, a bill put forward by the member for Whitlam, who has worked tirelessly to inform the public by attending forums across the country about scams. He's gone from town to town and from shopping centre to shopping centre, making sure that Australians understand how intense the attacks on Australian consumers by scammers, people who want to illegally take funds from Australians, have become.

In preparing to speak on this bill, I, like many others, was flabbergasted by the amounts that we've been seeing. I heard the previous speaker say that one in 25 Australians have been scammed. That sounds like a high number. My litmus test for these things is often to revert to a visit to classrooms. When I'm in a classroom talking about civics and citizenship, it's astounding the number of primary school children who have questions about which levels of government are responsible for protecting Australians from scams, and it's astounding the number of children who know stories about their parents having been scammed.

First of all, I want to make sure that those listening understand that it is the case that absolutely no-one is exempt from being targeted by these scams. I received a text message this week supposedly from one of my sons saying that their phone had been dropped in the sink and that they could be contacted on this number, obviously wanting me to ring this number and set up that connection with the phone that I had in my hand. From my personal experience, I've also had amounts of money repeatedly taken from my personal accounts using systems. My advice to people is to keep an eye on those accounts. On the one hand, electronic transfer of funds makes us vulnerable to this. On the other hand, having your phone in your hand and the capacity to check what's going on in your bank accounts often is also a handy way to ensure that you are on top of these things if somebody has access to your account details and is therefore making withdrawals or putting costs against them. I have been victim to that as well.

I want to share with the House that just this week I received an email from a constituent who was telling a story that I've heard from many businesspeople in my community. Often, when businesses are purchasing something large or perhaps purchasing another business, in those conveyancing processes or transfer-of-funds processes, you hear from businesses that they have been hacked in that process. I received an email this week from a constituent who had lost the deposit on their house. The old story is now a well-known story where the conveyancing company is hacked. The constituent received an email to say, 'Transfer the funds to this bank account now,' and in faith they did that only to find that there'd been a hack at the other end; the conveyancing company's emails had been hacked. They've secured $90,000 from a constituent of mine, and that constituent is now in the processes, outlined by the previous speaker, of trying to recover those funds.

It is an enormous thing to think you have saved so hard for a deposit for a house and you can lose it in the blink of an eye and then find yourself with nowhere to go and, in a very circuitous way, be both the victim and the person who has to try to recover those funds from various places. So it's great to see that this piece of legislation will give consumers more access to a single front door where they can report the loss and be supported in the process of trying to recover those funds. I think that's really important. I think the framework is really important. I think it sends a really strong message to those involved: to the banks, to the telcos and to the social media businesses. Often those three things are involved in the scam processes that people are using.

We know and we've heard time and time again that this has been set up by organised crime and it requires a government response. I'm pleased to be here today to support this government's response, the Albanese Labor government's response, at this stage, which will set up a framework where those businesses that are being used in those processes will be asked to meet standards and face civil penalties of up to $50 million for breaches where they have not been up to scratch in following the Scams Prevention Framework. This incentivises these businesses, whether they be banks, telcos or social media companies, to make sure that they are up to speed and have the protections in place that Australian consumers would expect them to have and certainly that government wants them to have. Staying on top of the ever-evolving tricks and processes being used by these criminal gangs in targeting Australians is something that we want to encourage all businesses to do, and this framework is designed to do exactly that.

Furthermore, once this legislation is in place, I think we will be sending a strong message to those criminal organisations that Australia will no longer be defenceless in its fight against scams, that Australian businesses will be working together and working with government so that the scammers will leave our shores or find it more difficult to scam consumers in this country and will therefore turn their minds to perhaps making a living doing something legitimate. That would be the hope.

I don't think there's a family that I know that hasn't been touched in some way, whether it be thinking they'd had an emergency call from a child in need and then transferring $500 to support that child because their wallet had been stolen or whatever the scammer's message was. I don't think there's a family I know that hasn't been touched by scams, so I know that across the country there will be people who will appreciate the work that has been done by the minister in bringing forward this piece of legislation—and not just work by the minister but by government, the banking sector, the telcos and all of those who've given information and who have sought to help find a way forward in this space to protect Australian consumers.

I would add that I don't believe that this will be the final time that we're in the federal parliament talking about this or introducing legislation to protect consumers as this evolves further. But I do want to congratulate the minister and those who've been involved in the consultation processes and design of this piece of legislation that will establish the Scams Prevention Framework and penalties for those businesses who don't keep up in this war against criminal organisations wanting to steal from Australian consumers.

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