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

I thank the member for his question, and I addressed some of the issues related to this in my address-in-reply. Can I simply say this: we believe in attaching liability to fault. It's a fairly rudimentary process, known well to any lawyer in this place. If you're at fault, then you should be liable for the damages or other harm associated with that fault. The problem we have at the moment is there is no standard to which people are held accountable. There's no standard for banks, no standard for telcos and no standard for social media platforms. That changes when this bill is enacted.

I'm asked why we haven't gone down the UK approach. The answer, quite simply, is we do not think it will work, because it is not focused on preventing scams and it has nothing to say about the major vector of scams, which is social media platforms. It beggars belief—I gave some examples here in my address-in-reply—that we should hold the Broken Hill building society, a mutual bank, accountable for a Facebook puppy scam that the members of that bank and the owners of that bank could have no knowledge of or no control over. We would hold the members of that bank accountable for the losses of that Facebook puppy scam, yet the biggest company in the world—or one of the biggest companies in the world—which actually made money out of advertising that scam, is not held liable. That just beggars belief in my mind. I understand why there is a simple attraction to it, but when you dig down into what we are trying to do here—that is, to prevent the scam in the first place—we believe that our approach is the better approach. I think the proof in the pudding of this is that our scam losses are dropping quicker than those in the UK, and there is intense interest from the United Kingdom and other countries around the world in the approach that the Australian government is taking because they think it is a stronger framework.

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