Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024. This is an imperfect bill and purports to fulfil a Labor election promise that is now three years old on the shelf. It seems quite odd that we should be considering this bill on the eve of the 2025 election and that, yet again, this parliament should be subjected to legislation with which no-one is particularly happy, with so many stakeholder groups expressing concern about the framework contained in the bill. But, as we have heard from so many contributors in this debate before me, Australia is known as a scammers' honey pot, easy for the taking and light on regulation at a time when, as we have vastly digitised our economy through the COVID period, digitally enabled scams have been exploding both in number and impact. This bill, at least, would institute a scams prevention framework, which would require regulated entities to take certain actions in relation to scams, including taking responsible steps to prevent, detect, report, disrupt and respond to scams relating to services which that entity provides.

Almost weekly, I hear from constituents in my electorate who have been scammed or near scammed. It's agony when they raise this issue with me. They tend to come feeling quite embarrassed—ashamed in some instances—and frustrated that there is no emergency button to press when it happens and that no-one seems to be accountable, least of all the scammers themselves, for this fraud and the crime affecting so many in our community. In 2023, the last available figures, almost $3 billion of Australian savings were lost as a result of over 600,000 scams made that year, which was an almost 20 per cent increase on the previous year's figures. That is an astonishing figure, and I can't help but wonder whether, if $3 billion worth of assets had been stolen from people's homes through breaking and entering, we would have doubled the police force. But, because so much of this scamming occurs in the digisphere, and in particular via unregulated internet platforms owned and based offshore, Australia has been slow to react.

For those who have been scammed, let me be clear that it is not your fault. The skills of scammers, their extraordinary customer service, leave our government institutions, our banks and our airlines in the dust. Their customer service is second to none, highly tailored to reassure and guide the elderly or the infirm in particular through a labyrinth of digital manipulation. Their interlocutors on the phone and their systems are much easier to navigate than the ones that the banks or the telco companies or the TV channels or the news websites give us. I know because this happened to my poor old mum 12 months ago. Poor old Mum is getting a bit of a shout-out this week; it's just as well she can't reprimand me for that anymore. She serves as a useful yardstick here because my mum was no dummy. She was a Fulbright scholar; the recipient of endless medical scholarships and fellowships; a trained cardiothoracic surgeon; and a lawyer, barrister and tribunal member—a genius.

A year ago, I flew overseas to South America for a short break, and when I landed I rang Mum to check in. I asked how she slept. 'Not well,' came the answer, 'because I got to bed so late after talking to Telstra.' 'Talking to Telstra?' I said. 'Yes. Apparently the Russians were trying to hack my devices, but it's okay because Telstra rang, and they talked me through the steps I needed to do to protect the system. It did take forever, though, and I only got to bed after 9 o'clock.' 'What time did they ring you, Mum?' 'About 7 pm.' 'Mum, Telstra doesn't ring after five. Did they put anything on your computer?' 'Yes, yes, they put all the things I need to be safe on it and on the iPad and the phone too, and I'm sure it was Telstra because it was an Australian voice'—Mum's from a different generation—'but it's all safe now.' Silence. 'Mum, it wasn't Telstra. I need you to ring the banks right now. You need to ask them to stop all transactions on all accounts, and you need to block your credit cards right now.'

Within minutes of hanging up on Mum, the scammers had set up a Gmail account which mirrored her longstanding Bigpond account so they could intercept all of her emails and fraudulently represent that they were her. Friends who ran to her side that day at dawn could see an overnight web history of people trying to break into bank accounts, iTunes accounts and online retail shopping platforms. By gift of my mother's age, she had never cached a password. The scammers got nothing, but it was a horrendous shock for her, and I had to sit up through many, many nights of that week—from the other side of the planet—talking her through the safety I had put in place around her and what to look out for in coming days in case there was something we had missed. I had friends confiscate and clean all her devices. I had to get her a backup phone. I put holds on all of her bank accounts and had friends walk around to her house with brown paper bags of cash while I digitally reimbursed them from the other side of the planet. At exactly the time she wanted to follow all my travels online, I left Mum in the digital dark. It was both cruel and heartbreaking.

When I expressed my dismay to a digitally clever friend about the timing—Mum had just come out of hospital—I was told, 'That's intentional.' The scammers take a read of which devices are drawing down overnight from the tower above the hospital so they know who's staying there for treatment rather than being there as a doctor or nurse. And then, when that device—that IP address—leaves the remit of the hospital tower, they get in contact with the number. There's nothing like new drugs, poor sleep and perhaps pain management to make you vulnerable to a scammer. I rang the hospital and suggested they advise their patients or their families to be particularly wary of scams when they leave the hospital's care. Even though Mum lost nothing in that scam, what endured for her was a morbid fear of technology—her questioning of herself every single time she was online. She lost all dexterity in internet banking. All trust in emails was gone. At the start, lest some form of spyware had been left on the devices, I banned all internet banking, and we would go into the branches together to manage her affairs. Thank God she still had branches to go into.

My mum's story is one of hundreds I could give you from my electorate. We are an older electorate—the fifth oldest in the country—which makes us prime targets for scammers impersonating trusted brands in particular: Telstra, Qantas, Woolworths, Medicare, Origin Energy and the ATO. In 2024, nearly 60,000 over-65s were scammed out of a total of $100 million, according to Scamwatch. There would be thousands more near misses like my mum with no financial loss but which come with a vast loss of confidence and capability in a rapidly digitising economy.

This is a really important issue for my community of Flinders. A year or so ago, I spoke to a Probus group at Main Ridge, and, while the topic of my conversation was meant to be about parenting and social media, it quickly became a conversation and a realisation for me that we really have failed to equip our senior citizens with the skills they need to do things digitally and the know-how for what they can trust online. While regulatory frameworks, like those contained in this bill, are important, human frameworks—customer-centric design thinking about the age and vulnerability of the customer demography—are just as important.

In May of last year, I hosted a seniors expo in my electorate, and one of the store holders was our community bank in Mount Martha, operated by Bendigo Bank. It is a much loved institution up and down the Mornington Peninsula and one which prides itself on face-to-face customer service for our community, especially in relation to scam recovery services. At the seniors expo, Bendigo Bank brought down its top brass in scamming class, and it shared three steps to mitigate the risk of scamming: stop—don't give money or personal information to anyone if you're in any way unsure; think—ask yourself, 'Could this message or call be a fake?'; and protect—act quickly if something feels wrong. The last step, act quickly, is vital. This is what I had to do through the night—in fact, over many nights—from Santiago in Chile to install protections around my mother's interests and, more importantly, to reassure her she was going to be okay.

Scams thrive because it is human to have inevitable lapses in judgement, and with each day our scammers get more sophisticated, such that even the most paranoid amongst us are at risk of being duped. I remember the first time I got one of those text messages from NAB. It came from NAB, the same NAB title that I got from every other communication from NAB in my iPhone. It told me I needed to ring the bank about a suspicious transaction on a mobile phone number. I thought, 'That's weird,' and I rang the bank on the normal number that I call them on, not the text, and was told: 'No. There are no odd transactions.' I screenshot the text and sent it to them.

The scammers' business model is vulnerability executed to perfection. They know when mums are busy picking up kids or dads might be trying to finish up a day's work on the tools before a long weekend. They text Nan on a public holiday, 'You forgot to pay your Origin bill.' No-one wants to pay the Origin bill late, and so you pay it, but you use the click-through because you're on the run, and it turns out you haven't paid the Origin bill at all.

As part of this debate, we must recognise that older Australians rely on an analogue interface. We used to call it going into the branch. Closing branches has a devastating effect on people's confidence that there will be help if something goes wrong. As I sat with Mum at Westpac or NAB, waiting to make a simple transaction in the few months after her scam exposure, I observed a myriad of people coming in in absolute desperation. They were up at the counter expressing their frustration, their confusion and their panic. They had no idea what happened, but they knew something bad had happened. A branch or a vigilant daughter—for those who don't have the latter, they still need the former.

Bendigo Bank—so loved in our community for their support of community sport, for their support of volunteer groups and, most recently, for their contribution of $600,000 to create a wellness centre at the Bays Hospital in Mornington, which I had the honour to open on Monday—has developed a big emphasis on face-to-face resolution as a way to make people feel more comfortable admitting they have been scammed. Not only does it more effectively help those generations who aren't digital natives, but it gives every human a sense of assurance that the problem can be solved then and there. In 2023, Bendigo Bank launched a face-to-face education approach to help its 2.5 million customers safely navigate digital banking. It's an innovation which other banks could and should follow.

When I have raised the issue of digital and scamming education with the big four banks on behalf of my consumers, they have been keen to tell me that such education is readily available online. I can only stress here as I have stressed in those meetings: you are missing the point, dear banks. Once you have been scammed or near scammed, the online world is one of fear and uncertainty. The way back is face-to-face communication. My community in the electorate of Flinders has benefited greatly from these sessions being run by local branches of the Bendigo Bank, and I really thank them for this and encourage them to keep up their great work.

The coalition has a record of advocating for sensible obligations on companies to stop scams. In his 2023 budget reply speech, our leader, Peter Dutton, committed that a coalition government would impose more onerous obligations on big digital companies to stop scams and financial fraud. The Australian Banking Association has, in the absence of concrete policy from government in this space until now, developed a Scam-Safe Accord, which seems to be the central policy glue committing all types of industries to work together in an ecosystem to mitigate against scams. We are yet to see if it will stem the scamming tide.

It nevertheless aligns with some of the recommendations that the coalition provided in its additional comments to the recent Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society report, namely that a shared responsibility for scams is the only way that customers will be protected through the entire supply chain of a digitally executed or induced fraud. In that report's additional comments, the coalition members argued that social media companies should be held liable for failing to remove and report links, tools and users who, through link-in-bio platforms, facilitate access to class 1 or class 2 material and indeed scam ads. At present, social media companies are making money out of advertising from regulated and restricted industries. They therefore have a vested interest in using data to exploit users for their clients. For these reasons, the coalition committee members in that report recommended that government mandate detailed annual reporting to the eSafety Commissioner on revenue from regulated and restricted industries.

In their evidence to the joint select committee, the International Justice Mission also identified that dating apps and websites play a significant role in romance scams and child sexual exploitation and called for those companies and social media platforms to collaborate closely to stem romance scamming. The coalition members of the social media committee argued in recommendation 13 that we should establish a joint standing committee on online safety, artificial intelligence and technology, tasked with investigating the strengths and weaknesses in Australia's regulatory system, legislative tools, industrial base and technological capabilities. As scammers get better at their craft using different platforms and methodologies, we must be ready to regulate to keep our citizens safe. This bill we're considering today constitutes a start, albeit a slow and unambitious start. It's perhaps one indicative of this entire government's approach to leading Australia but one which hopefully will, if nothing else, rob us of the title of global scams' honey pot.

(Quorum formed)

Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Scams have been a feature in many of our lives for decades, but in today's digital age they have taken on a new, invasive form that is leading to devastating outcomes for too many people. Like nearly every member in this place, I have heard some terrible stories from constituents in recent years about the scam losses that they or a loved one have experienced.

Top of my mind is an experience of a local resident, Doris. Doris has shared her story with the media to make other people aware of the very creative ways that scammers try to reach out to people, and she is really hoping that sharing her story will stop others from falling victim to similar scams. Doris was trying to set herself up for retirement by investing her savings, $260,000. She was looking online at banks to invest with, looking for a good investment rate, and she came across what looked like a very legitimate Singapore based bank offering what looked like a very good return on that investment. Doris spoke to someone who said they were from the bank. She got sent some very legitimate-looking documents. I've seen those documents myself. I looked at them, and they looked like the kinds of documents that a bank would send you if you were looking to set up an account and invest with them.

Doris thought: 'Great! This is what I'm going to go ahead with. This is a good rate of return. This will secure my retirement.' She went along to her local Commonwealth Bank branch, where her money was, to send the money to this allegedly Singapore based bank. Doris completed an international money transfer at the bank and thought that all seemed well. Six weeks later, Doris went to try to withdraw some of her funds, and she found that there was nothing there. She in fact had been scammed. Her life savings were gone. And, again, Doris is towards the end of her working life, and this has a devastating impact for her and her future. As she said, 'They made it sound so perfect, and I lost the lot.'

Doris is a smart woman, and she has worked hard. Like many people, she's had her share of challenges, but she did what she thought was her due diligence on this investment. She was caught out by a sophisticated scam designed to lull her and others into a false sense of security. Doris took her case to the ombudsman because she was concerned about whether the Commonwealth Bank should have played a bigger role in checking where that money was going. The ombudsman found the bank was deemed to have done all it was required to do in this situation. It is absolutely fair enough that Doris wishes that the Commonwealth Bank could have and would have done more to stop this transaction and that, when she got to that point of transferring the money, there were more warnings to her about the risks before she approved that transfer.

Doris did nothing wrong. She is an intelligent woman, and she has shared her story to try to stop others from being in the same position. But it is absolutely the case that banks, telcos and social media companies must all do more. That's why I'm really pleased to be speaking on the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 today and about the work that this government is doing to focus on this insidious problem and to make sure that people like Doris are not at the same level of risk of being scammed in the future.

Of course, Doris's story is not a unique one. In 2023, Australians lost a total of $2.7 billion as a result of scams. That shows the scale of the challenge we face. As I said, banks, telcos and social media companies in particular have a responsibility to do more to stop people from being scammed. People like Doris should not be left without their life savings, particularly if there could have been just a bit more done to advise her of risks, to make sure that the transaction she was taking was legitimate before it was too late. Absolutely, social media companies have a responsibility to stop the absolute flood of ads and scammers that fill our news feeds, local community group pages where people are just trying to talk about what's happening in their neighbourhood, and the friend requests that aren't actually friends or, in most cases, real people. They are absolutely not doing enough, and this isn't a new problem. It has been like this for years. It had been getting worse until this government took the focus that we have now. Scams have been allowed to flourish for too long in this country.

Our government has been and is taking action on an issue that the Liberals and the Nationals put in the too-hard basket for far too long. We have delivered more than $180 million to combat scams and online fraud, and it is making a difference. Scam losses have dropped by 40 per cent. Losses have almost cut in half since we stood up the National Anti-Scam Centre. There is more work to be done, and that's why this bill is going to be so important. The Scams Prevention Framework is the next vital step in our work to stamp out scams. Scamwatch data tells us bank transfer was the most reported payment method used by scammers, with more than $200 million in reported losses in 2023. It was phone calls and social media contact that were the methods associated with the highest value of the losses: $116 million and $93.5 million, respectively, in 2023. With the work we're doing, we will be holding banks, telcos and social media to account to ensure that they are doing their bit to keep people's savings safe from criminals. To get the change that we need, we do need to have an all-in effort. It will obviously take government and the work we are doing here, but it will also take all of these companies and our community.

Certainly, as a government, that's also a message we have been trying to empower people with. I want to echo what others have said in this chamber: if you have been scammed, it is absolutely not your fault. It's not that you have missed something. I think people sometimes feel ashamed and like they are at fault. It is not your fault. It is the fault of these very sophisticated criminals who are targeting you.

It has been great to host in my electorate the Assistant Treasurer and the Minister for Financial Services, who has been leading a lot of this work. He came to Jagajaga last year and spoke to a packed audience and the Bundoora Community Hall for a scams forum. That was a really useful session talking about the types of scams people face, the avenues people can take to protect themselves from scammers and why our government's work to stop scams is so important. At this moment, I would particularly like to thank the Assistant Treasurer for his dedication and work over the past 2½ years as a minister driving this work to stop Australians being scammed, to protect Australians, and also for travelling the country to electorates like mine to make sure that Australians know what protections are out there for them when it comes to scams.

As Assistant Minister for Ageing, I am particularly aware that older Australians often feel that they are particularly vulnerable to scams as people who haven't grown up being digital natives. They feel as though (a) they're probably more likely to be targeted and (b) they're less likely to understand what's going on. Again, I do want to say to those older Australians: if you are scammed, it is absolutely not your fault and there are avenues to support you. That's the work we are doing here.

We are also doing work to make sure that older Australians can feel more confident online. In particular, the Be Connected program, which is run in conjunction with the eSafety Commissioner, is a wonderful program that provides all Australians but, in particular, older Australians with workshops and modules to learn how to get online with confidence and with safety. It's often run in community centres, in libraries or through senior citizens groups. So, if you are an older Australian and you are worried about being scammed and want to feel more confident online, I would absolutely recommend looking up the Be Connected program, finding out about where it's running near you and taking some of the modules under that.

The Minister for Small Business has reminded me that we are also assisting small business to make sure they're set up to be able to deal with the impact of scams. The IDCARE program specifically supports small businesses that have had a cyberattack or a scam. They are the people for small businesses to contact when they've been attacked or fallen victim to scams.

Again, these scams are insidious. They're happening across our economy. They're happening to people across the country. So, as the government, we are really aware that we need to take an all-in approach, putting the scammers on notice that we are onto them. We are looking at banks, telecommunication providers and digital platforms. Under this framework, we are asking them and requiring them to do more than they have done before. We will be making sure that the framework is kept up to date. We'll be looking at other sectors that may be coming under it in the future, such as superannuation, cryptocurrency, online marketplaces and other payment providers.

We will make sure that there are penalties of up to $50 million that may apply if people breach the framework. Obviously, that's intended to incentivise compliance and provide adequate penalties to deter regulated entities who may, in fact, foresee higher possible gains from breaching the framework. We want to make sure that this works. Regulators will also have other compliance tools available: infringement notices, enforceable undertakings, injunctions, public warnings and remedial actions. These are all to ensure the framework is administered as intended to protect consumers.

Consumers will have access to free and transparent dispute resolution processes. Again, this is going to make a big difference in the cases such as the one I outlined. There will be somewhere for a consumer to go to actually resolve their dispute when they feel like an entity has not met its obligations. I think that will be a really important part of this puzzle as well. People will be able to take action in court if they have suffered loss or damage because a regulated entity has not met its obligations under the framework.

I want people in my community to have increased confidence that this is something our government is bringing a huge amount of attention to. With this bill, we are saying that more must be done to combat scams, to keep Australians safe and to make sure that others do not end up in the position of Doris in my community and that others do not fall victim to scams that mean they lose their life savings. This is really important work, and it is, of course, the work that a Labor government does to make sure that our communities are safe and fair for all.

Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Scams are a huge problem and absolutely need to be addressed in legislation. This bill, the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024, is a good start, but I don't think it goes far enough in considering the experience of the victim. But, in the spirit of pragmatism, I'll be supporting it.

Some of the first constituent stories I heard after being elected were from people in my community who'd been the victims of scams, and it's such a significant issue for my constituents that I've spoken about the issue of scams a number of times in parliament. In 2023, I told Lisa's story. Lisa lost $750,000 in a scam where she set up an account with the ING Bank, or at least she thought she did, only to discover that the account was fake. I also spoke about John, who lost $2.7 million in an elaborate scam when he relied on a broker for his investments and it turned out that the broker was actually a fake company. Last year, in 2024, I told Tim's story. His mum lost $800,000 in a scam that actually resulted in a capital gains tax liability, even though she'd been scammed out of the assets. Because this issue of scams is so important to my community and to all Australians, I, along with the member for Kooyong, co-founded the Parliamentary Friends of Scams Protection so that MPs and senators from across the floor could meet and try to find some better ways of addressing this growing problem.

The magnitude of scam losses is hard to believe. CHOICE tells us that nine out of 10 people have come across what they suspected to be a scam in the last 12 months. In 2023, Australians lost an astonishing $2.74 billion to scammers. It has dropped a bit recently, but that's nearly three times what it was in 2020. In 2023, Australians lost more than $5,000 per minute, and that's just the scams that were reported. The vast majority of scams are not actually reported.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says investment scams were the highest loss category, followed by remote-access scams and payment redirection scams. Traditional electronic bank transfers remain one of the most commonly reported means of payments to scammers, but social media scams are apparently the most profitable. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has found that banks only reimburse between two and five per cent of customers affected by scams—so, really, a tiny proportion of the losses that are occurring. Right now, there's no clear obligation on banks, telcos or social media platforms in relation to scams management. That's all to say that the introduction of a scams protection framework in parliament is essential.

I acknowledge the work done to date. The National Anti-Scam Centre was set up in July 2023. It has a mandate to disrupt scams before they reach consumers, and that's starting to make some impact. But, as fast as we work to stop scams, the scammers keep innovating, and the scams evolve even faster, so it can feel impossible to keep up.

That brings me to the bill, which is a welcome addition to the network of scam prevention measures, but it could be better. What does it actually do? It introduces mandatory sector-specific codes to protect Australians against scams. The framework will first apply to banks, telecommunication companies and digital platforms, but the minister could consider adding additional sectors as the framework develops and as scams continue to evolve. This bill attempts to protect the vulnerable by creating obligations on those providers. The bill sets out obligations for businesses that are providing services in one of those three regulated sectors to do a few things: proactively take reasonable steps to detect, prevent and disrupt scams; report to the ACCC about actionable scam intelligence and scam responses; and establish internal dispute resolution processes and join an external dispute resolution scheme to resolve customer complaints for scams. If they don't comply, they may face significant civil penalties. It also sets out the ACCC as the framework regulator, and individual sector regulators can be designated by the minister. The minister can also make codes for each regulated sector.

There are some good things about this approach that I first want to talk about. We absolutely need the regulation. We absolutely need a simple, clear regulatory framework that can be understood by both businesses and consumers. It needs to be as clear as possible for business to implement measures and as simple as possible for consumers to access help. Some of these principles are addressed here and some have some work to be done.

I agree with the government's approach to base the framework on principles. It's such a big problem, and it's evolving over time, so we need a broad set of principles on how entities will work to protect consumers. Under the framework, regulated entities are required to publish policies about how they'll respond to scams in relation to the principles of governance—prevent, detect, report, disrupt and respond. I think it's important to regulate this issue as a progressive problem. It will keep changing. Each entity must take reasonable steps to prevent and protect, and to disrupt scams.

I also appreciate the single-door approach to scams regulation. We need to make scams prevention as accessible as possible for consumers. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority has jurisdiction to deal with all scam disputes involving banks, telcos and digital platforms, which will hopefully reduce red tape and complexity.

I support the safe harbour provisions. The legislation allows for a 28-day safe harbour protection for regulated entities to take proportionate disruptive steps to respond to concerns. This may feel like a long time for consumers, but I support the advice of stakeholders that the objectives of the framework can only be achieved if regulated entities feel empowered to take strong and timely action to block activity that they suspect may be a scam but where they don't have sufficient information to be certain the activity is a scam. The safe harbour provision will help with that.

There are a number of things in the bill that concern me. Prevention is really important, and we absolutely need to do that work, but this legislation should create a really clear path for victims if they're scammed. Scams will never be stamped out completely. It needs to be obvious and clear for victims who have already experienced a loss what they can do to get compensation. I have concerns in three areas: the compliance approach, the onerous dispute resolution mechanism, and the onus being on the victim. As drafted, this legislation is designed for businesses to take a minimum standard compliance approach rather than incentivising innovation to keep up with scammers who are always steps ahead. I think that's a problem. The dispute resolution mechanism is complicated, expensive and onerous for the consumer. It requires the consumer to go through an internal dispute resolution process first with the regulated entity before escalating their complaint to an external dispute resolution mechanism.

The Australian Law Society said in its submission that directing scams to internal dispute resolution processes before they go external would result in a poor and frustrating experience for victims. Perhaps the most concerning part of the legislation in front of us is that the onus of proof is very much on the consumer or the victim of the scam rather than the organisation that allowed the scam to happen. So the person who had the money stolen from them, despite the requirements of the banks or telcos to stop it, is required to show that the bank, telecommunication company or digital platform didn't do enough. The vulnerable victim has to take on the business to prove that the institution didn't meet the requirements.

This seems very challenging for a consumer who has just suffered a loss—which could be considerable—to then have to navigate the legal system to prove the scam is the fault of the bank telco or digital platform. Reversing the onus of proof so that the bank, telco or digital platform must show its reasonable steps would be a more consumer focused approach where there's significant asymmetry of information. The banks and telcos will know a whole lot more about what steps they've taken and what they could take than the consumer, who's looking at it all from the outside.

Where a scam could be avoided by multiple parties—that is, a bank, a telco and a digital platform—the risk of the scam harm should be allocated to the party that can avoid the scam harm at least cost. In almost all circumstances, the parties best placed to eliminate or mitigate scam risk would be banking, telecommunications and digital platform companies. This is because, first and foremost, they have control over the architecture and design of their systems and processes.

Another way of dealing with it would be a mandatory reimbursement model. Under the UK model, UK banks will be required to reimburse up to a maximum of about $166,000 unless the consumer acted with gross negligence. If you've brought it on yourself and it's entirely because of your action, then there's no mandatory reimbursement. Otherwise, you will get reimbursed. Instead, Australian consumers can obtain compensation via the AFCA or by exercising their private right of action for damages against regulated firms if and when they can establish a breach of those legal requirements.

Australia has the opportunity within this framework to aim far higher and become a world leader in preventing and disrupting scams and responding to innocent people and families whose lives are markedly changed by scams. Having heard so many stories from consumers in my community and considering how hard it can be to navigate the dispute resolution process, I don't think this proposed legislation puts the interests of the victims first and foremost.

In conclusion, I appreciate the minister's engagement with me personally on this issue and with the crossbench on the government's broad response to scamming. I recognise the importance of introducing an overarching framework and proposed industry codes for banks, telcos and digital platforms. It's absolutely a great start, but it doesn't focus on the experience of the victim enough. In the context of a complicated and evolving space, while scammers continue to innovate, the framework still ensures the onus is on consumers to navigate that system and prove that the bank, telco or digital platform failed them. Shifting this onus onto the companies with the information and the scale would create better incentives for companies to continue to innovate on how they prevent scams. But, in the spirit of pragmatism, this framework is better than nothing, and it's definitely an improvement on the existing approach. I won't let the perfect be an enemy of the good, and on that basis I will be supporting this legislation. But there is a clear opportunity there, perhaps in the future, to make this go further to protect Australians better.

Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 addresses an issue that's really important to people in my electorate in Darwin and Palmerston, to Territorians generally and, of course, to people around Australia. All members in this place, whether they're in the government with us, in the opposition or on the crossbench, know that Australians are being ripped off by scams every day. I've helped a number of my constituents when they've been scammed. Often, of course, it's too late and they've already suffered great losses, but at least we've been able to show them the new resources, and through legislation like this we are strengthening the ability to protect Australians.

Last year, we launched the Fighting Scams awareness campaign to equip Australians with tools to protect themselves against scammers. There are three simple and memorable steps to empower Australians to identify sophisticated scam tactics. They are to stop and think before you share personal information; to check that you know who you're dealing with, whether it be online or on the phone; and to protect against scams by reporting them to scamwatch.gov.au. In some cases, some of the constituents I've assisted have been able to get some funds back, and that's been appreciated and satisfying. But, as previous speakers have mentioned, that is happening a small percentage of the time. We need to do everything we can to make sure that this education campaign is as widely understood in the Australian population as possible—stop, check and protect—because overwhelmingly it is prevention, rather than work after the fact, that is going to lead to less criminal behaviour that results in Australians being deprived of their hard-earned cash.

After all, our government is about exactly that. We are making sure that Australians both earn more and keep more of what they earn. What scammers try to do is illegally and criminally take money from Australians by deceptive means. So remember to stop and think before sharing your personal information; check that you absolutely know who you are dealing with; and then protect against scams by reporting them to Scamwatch. In doing so, you're preventing other Australians from being scammed as well.

In addition to this awareness campaign, we've got a world-leading Scams Prevention Framework that will help keep Australians' money safe from scammers. This framework is going to ensure that banks, telcos and social media companies are doing their bit to protect Australians from scammers. We are making Australia the toughest target for scammers to operate in. It's all part of our Albanese Labor government ensuring that Australians keep more of what they earn.

As I said, I've spoken to many constituents, and it is absolutely heartbreaking to see Territorians in my electorate lose their hard-earned money because of these scammers. And often these scams take everything. I've seen them take houses—there have been houses mortgaged in order to keep feeding illegal and criminal scamming. It's very sad that it's often our senior citizens that are targeted. They are from a different generation that is more trusting, and unfortunately that goodness of theirs is preyed upon by scammers who are, frankly, evil in their actions to deprive any Australian, but particularly senior Australians, of their hard-earned money.

Often, when people come to my office with their story, they're even still a little bit unsure about whether they've been scammed. I think they know in their heart of hearts that there's something wrong, but they come, unsure of what to do. We have the Little Black Book of Scams that we actually pre-emptively send out to Territorians, but please know that you can get that support through the Little Black Book of Scams from my office and get assistance at any time if you believe that you're being scammed or that someone in your family or a friend is being scammed.

With this legislation and other actions, we're saying enough is enough. We just simply cannot let scammers get away with their criminal activities, which are, as I mentioned, depriving Australians of their hard-earned cash. Losing retirement savings is particularly crushing. We're creating a framework that ensures that companies do their bit to protect Australians, and this world-leading Scams Prevention Framework legislation will put obligations on sectors to prevent, detect, disrupt and respond to scammers.

The obligations will initially apply to banks, telcos and social media companies, where much of the scam activity currently occurs. If businesses fail to meet the tough obligations, they will be subject to penalties of up to $50 million, a significant amount, and will also be required to compensate victims. Under the coalition, those opposite, scam losses were doubling over that decade of inaction. Under our government, scam losses have fallen for the first time since 2016. This legislation will put Australia at the top of the pack when it comes to preventing scammers. It will ensure that the government delivers on its pre-election promise to protect the community from scammers.

Since being elected, our government has committed over $180 million to combat scams and online fraud. There have been positive signs from this government action and industry's effort to combat scams, yet losses remain unacceptably high. A few years ago, in 2023, scammers stole a staggering $2.7 billion—that's with a 'b'—from Australians, and scammers continue to cause significant psychological and emotional harm for victims and their families. Indeed, the whole community suffers. As I mentioned, I see this day in and day out in Darwin and Palmerston, and I know that Territorians, even in remote communities, are also scammed.

That harm is real. It affects those families and it means there's less money to put food on the table and to meet daily costs. Current scam protections have been piecemeal and inconsistent across the economy for too long. Consumers face inconsistent protections and responses across different industries and different providers. This bill will certainly help to address that. The framework being introduced in this bill is a central part of our government's broader consumer protection agenda. The Scams Prevention Framework is an economy-wide reform to protect consumers from scams by requiring the private sector to adhere to consistent, principles based obligations and strong, tailored industry codes which are enforceable.

It will ensure companies do their part to protect Territorians and all Australians. The framework will ensure that all parts of the ecosystem used by scammers are held to account for implementing strong and effective protections that are tailored to that sector's role in the conduct of a scam. This is absolutely essential for the protection of consumers, as it is common for scammers to use multiple platforms and services to deceive and steal from consumers. I sat with a constituent in my electorate office as they interacted with a scammer, and we reported the scammer. They were using her social media and carriage services to try and scam her there and then. When we tried to put a stop to it, they hit her from another carriage service. So all this was happening at the one time, and it was incessant and stressful for the individual. They were being ripped off, literally losing tens of thousands of dollars week by week. It's crushing for the individual and, as I said, has that huge effect on the families as well. It rips families apart in many cases.

We have a responsibility to the consumers that are using these platforms and services, who really are the ones that are ripped off here. That's why we're stepping up as a government to protect those who are being deceived. Often they are some of the most vulnerable people in their community. As I said, often it's retirement savings that have been stolen. Regulated entities will be required to take reasonable steps to help these Australians by preventing, detecting, reporting, disrupting and responding to scams and going on the front foot, doing more to help and stop the criminal behaviour. They also need to have governance arrangements in place relating to how they protect consumers from scams. Mandatory sector-specific codes will provide tailored, prescriptive obligations for each sector which are consistent with those principles. The sector-specific codes do not relieve a business from their obligations to take reasonable steps in all circumstances, recognising that scams are constantly evolving so businesses must evolve their response continually as well.

Banks, telecommunications providers and certain digital platforms offering social media, paid search advertising and direct messaging services will initially be designated under the framework, as they represent key vectors of harm for consumers. Bank transfer was the most reported payment method used by scammers, with $212.9 million in reported losses in 2023. Australians should be able to use a bank transfer to spend their hard-earned money without worrying about scammers or, indeed, to send their hard-earned money to their loved ones or to a service provider—anyone who they intend to send money to in good faith—without these scammers preying on them. Phone calls and social media were the contact methods associated with the highest value of losses, with $116 million and $93.5 million lost, respectively, in 2023.

Australians should be able to go about their day and use their phones in a number of ways on a number of platforms and engage with their friends and family on social media without having to worry about scammers, but, because we know that they are insistent, we're continuing to try and educate people about the dangers at the same time as putting the onus on the carriage providers. This bill will make sure that Australians can have greater confidence while always maintaining vigilance.

The bill will employ resources across our government regulators. We have a multiregulator model involving the ACCC as the regulator for the principles based obligations and ACCC, ASIC and ACMA as regulators for the sector-specific codes, which will capitalise on existing industry knowledge and expertise. This will ensure that no single regulator will be spread too thin as the framework expands to additional sectors, as scam activity will inevitably shift.

Regulators have access to significant civil penalties of up to $50 million for the most egregious breaches of the framework. This is intended to incentivise compliance with the framework and to provide adequate penalties to deter entities who may foresee higher possible gains from breaching the framework. Regulators will also have other compliance tools available, such as infringement notices, enforceable undertakings, injunctions, public warnings and remedial directions to ensure that the framework is administered as intended to protect consumers, to protect Australians. This will allow the regulator to implement this framework to protect Australians from scammers.

Our government has done a lot more than any other previous government and will continue to monitor what needs to be done into the future to provide the highest level of protection to Australians, all the while reminding them that the best way to prevent scammers is to be aware and to be preventive and to stop scammers in their tracks.

Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Scams can have a devastating impact on people's lives and destroy people's lives in some instances. The Greens will be supporting the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 in the House because we have listened to key stakeholders, including many organisations that represent the interests of consumers, who are calling for the bill to be passed in this term of parliament. Australia is lagging behind other countries in our response to scams and, as a result, too many people and their families are harmed by scams each year. In 2023, tens of thousands of people across the country lost over $2.7 billion to scammers.

Scams wreak havoc on so many people's lives. Australia is lucrative for scammers because Labor and the coalition have, up until this point, failed to implement a comprehensive regulatory framework, leaving it largely to industry to undertake voluntary preventive measures. As a result, protections against scams are piecemeal and inadequate, often leaving people with no avenue to recover scam losses. This is reflected in the data as currently people, not businesses, pay for 96 per cent of scam losses. Whilst we are supporting this bill in the House, we strongly urge Labor to improve the bill by including a presumption—

We hear interjections from a Liberal member. Sorry, I can't remember your name. Frankly, it's astounding. You had nine years to fix this, and you have the gall to get up and lecture other people about not doing any work.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order, the member for Bradfield!

Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's his name, sorry. Whilst we are supporting the bill in this House, we strongly urge Labor to improve the bill by including a presumption of reimbursement and ensuring offshore tech companies are held to account. Laws to prevent and respond to scams must support the interests of people, not corporations. Labor's Scams Prevention Framework Bill could have been a much-needed opportunity to crack down on the harm caused by scams. Disappointingly, Labor has chosen to prioritise the interests of major banks and multimillion-dollar profits of those banks over the interests of everyday people. As a result, without significant amendments, the bill will fail to adequately prevent scams from occurring in the first place or support people impacted by scams to quickly seek redress.

In a joint submission on the exposure draft, a broad coalition of consumer groups, including the Consumer Action Law Centre, calculated that, to seek redress for a scam, a typical person would have to go through an almost 30-step process that would take up to two years. Even worse, at the end of this process, there is no guarantee they will get any of their money back. This is because the bill places an onus on the individual to take on their bank, telco and/or social media platforms to prove that each company did not meet the requirements for the overarching principles or sector-specific code. According to the consumer groups, this is a complex, legalistic, time-draining and resource-draining task for an individual. It sets a near-impossible David-and-Goliath battle between people who have been scammed and the potentially massive corporations they have to take on. If a person manages to make it through this convoluted process, a business is only liable to reimburse them if the person can prove the business did not comply with their obligations under the framework. The Law Council of Australia indicated in their submission to the bill inquiry that the proposed laws would primarily result in compensation being denied.

Labor's proposed framework is far from best practice. For years, consumer organisations have consistently called for a model that includes a presumption of reimbursement adapted from the UK's effective approach. Under this model, banks would refund people impacted by scams within 10 days and recover costs from other companies involved in proportion to their liability, including telcos and digital platforms. The Greens support this model because it is evidence based and places the interests of people, not corporations, at the centre. It ensures people who are scammed are quickly reimbursed at the point where they lost their money, and banks, telcos and digital platforms are incentivised to innovate to prevent scams from occurring. The Consumer Action Law Centre indicated in a joint media release that, without reimbursement at its core, Labor's Scams Prevention Framework is simply not going to work.

Instead of listening to consumers, Labor has blatantly caved to the big banks. The big banks don't want a presumption of reimbursement, because it would put them on the hook to take responsibility for scams. Given that the largest four banks raked in almost $30 billion in profits in the last financial year, the Greens believe they can afford to be held to account to protect their customers from scams.

Treasury documents released under freedom of information state, 'Treasury has met regularly with the Australian Banking Association and member banks to align government and industry efforts in relation to the bill.' Even other industry groups were concerned that Labor prioritised the interests of the major banks above all else. DIGI, which represents the tech industry, noted in their submission to the draft bill:

While it appears that there has been intense and ongoing consultation … with the Australian Banking Association … the same level of consultation has not occurred with other regulated industries …

It is clear Labor will do anything to support the profits of their major donors. The latest donations data shows that, in the 2023-24 financial year, NAB, CommBank and Westpac each donated over $60,000 to Labor and over $70,000 to the coalition. It's astounding how much influence just $60,000 will buy from the major parties.

The Greens also want to bring into the Australian jurisdiction the multibillion-dollar tech companies regulated under the bill. Unless steps are taken to bring offshore digital platforms under Australian domestic corporate, criminal and consumer laws, any reform will be difficult if not impossible to enforce. The inquiry of the Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society heard from many witnesses about the barriers to legal accountability and the ability of platforms to avoid legal redress or accountability for harms done on their platforms. Even the basic service of legal documents on Meta to commence a legal action appears to be almost impossible in Australia.

The committee recommended that 'the Australian government consider options for greater enforceability of Australian laws for social media platforms, including amending regulation and legislation to effectively bring digital platforms under Australian jurisdiction'. The Greens supported this recommendation and further recommends herein that the government act urgently to do so. If the government are serious about reining in the power of the tech giants, combating scams and keeping our kids and community safe online, then they will make sure any legislation is enforceable on those they seek to hold to account.

Whilst the Greens are supporting this bill in the House, as we recognise Australia urgently needs regulation to combat scams, we urge Labor to prioritise the interests of people, not multibillion-dollar corporations, by amending the bill to include a presumption of reimbursement and ensuring that offshore tech companies are held to account.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to offer my strenuous support to the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024. It's a really crucial piece of legislation that will safeguard Australians against the growing threat of scams. It's a bit of a pity the Greens' member for Griffith is leaving the chamber now, because I can tell you that the 120,000 people I represent in the City of Newcastle are extremely thankful to have a government that is taking this seriously and putting forward the world's first and strongest piece of legislation in order to deal with what has been despicable behaviour causing untold pain and suffering for many thousands of Australian people. How do we know this? Because we all talk to our communities. I will come to that in a moment.

The current scam protections are clearly piecemeal, and they are inconsistent across our economy, which means that consumers, the people that we represent, do not have the protections they need and deserve. They are also stymied by the responses across different kinds of industry providers.

Scams, we know, are a pervasive threat in our society. They take on many forms, from an email or phone call that promises a windfall but in fact ends with the loss of your hard-earned life savings to the complex financial schemes that prey on the elderly, those that are in distress—the very people that we know are most vulnerable. Scammers are also becoming increasingly sophisticated in their operations. They're using technology and, indeed, psychological manipulation to exploit their victims. As we know, scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the tactics that they deploy as well. We need to be much better at coordinating our efforts to stop them.

I want to highlight upfront the real human cost of the scamming industry, which has really threatened so many Australians now. Over the last couple of years, I, like all my Labor colleagues, have been hosting scam information forums in my communities. Indeed, the minister has attended some of these in my electorate and in other electorates across Australia, because we know how devastating the impact is, whether it's an investment scam—I've had devastating stories from people in my electorate who have lost their life savings. Imagine how you feel at retirement losing everything you had put aside. We've got people who have fallen prey to romance scams. They are especially vulnerable people in that they are usually too embarrassed to come forward. They're ashamed. They feel like they've fallen for something.

But I say to those people—indeed, all people who feel like they cannot come forward to report these scams—please know that you are one of many. You are not alone. You are not a mug. You haven't been hoodwinked, because these people are highly sophisticated criminals that are now so manipulative and know so much about your personal information and data that you think they are absolutely ridgy-didge when they speak to you on the phone or send you those emails. I say to Novocastrians again and again: there is help. It's not good enough now, but this bill, which I will come back to now, is going to help enormously. That is why this House collectively should support this legislation before the Australian parliament today.

The Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 being introduced is, as I mentioned, world-leading legislation. It is also central to this government's broader agenda on consumer protections. If I've got time, I will try to come back to that broader agenda as well. It is this framework which is an economy-wide reform to protect consumers from scams by requiring the private sector to adhere to consistent principles-based obligations and strong, tailored industry codes that are enforceable. At its core, this bill seeks to create a national coordinated framework that brings together multiple sectors, including government agencies and financial institutions, the telecommunications providers and the consumer protection groups, to address scams in a unified manner. We're not picking off one sector from another; we understand this requires a whole-of-government, whole-of-community approach. We are bringing people together, not trying to divide them up. It recognises that an ecosystems approach is required to reduce the gaps, which we know are exploited by the scammers. We can't afford to have people splintered off and not on board with this bill. If we're genuine about delivering strong consumer protection to our consumers, the very people we represent in this parliament, then we need everybody on board.

I urge all parties—it doesn't matter if you're sitting on the crossbench or on the opposition bench—to get on board. It's important to understand that this is not just a legal initiative. We are making law here, absolutely, and that is our job, but it is also a comprehensive commitment to protecting individuals and businesses from the devastating impacts of scams. We're not just a bunch of lawmakers here; we are also ensuring that we are part of a comprehensive commitment to the Australian people this is about protecting them and protecting those small businesses that are also caught up in this dreadful scam industry. We know that this is a really big challenge in our digital age. It's an acknowledgement that in today's interconnected world we must work together to prevent and respond to scams effectively.

It's no secret that scams are on the rise in Australia. Any member of parliament would know that from their communications with their constituents. We know that with technological advancements the internet has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. However, as our lives have moved online more and more, so too have the perpetrators of these scams. We know they are absolutely in that space; they are increasingly sophisticated, as I mentioned earlier; they are ruthlessly deceptive; and they are unrelenting in their pursuits. In 2023 alone, Australians lost more than $2.7 billion to scams. That is a terrifying figure. I know it's pretty hard to imagine what billions of dollars looks like or feels like. Perhaps it might be easier to reframe that: Australians are losing an average of $7 million every day to criminal scams. That's the size of the problem we seek to deal with today.

It is more than just an economic expense, as I tried to put forward at the beginning of this discussion. This has profound psychological and emotional impacts for our constituents as well. There is such a significant human cost here that the government's trying to tackle as well. From identity theft to phishing and from fraudulent investment schemes to romance scams, no-one is immune. Scams are not just financial losses, as I said. They result in this profound distress for people, destroying relationships, ripping families apart and leaving long-lasting scars on the lives of individuals and all of their families. It's even more alarming that scams increasingly target the most vulnerable members of our community—the elderly, people who are experiencing financial hardship and even young people who are just less experienced at spotting the threats. This leaves many people, as I mentioned, exposed and vulnerable to manipulation and deception at the hands of what we now know are often organised criminal syndicates. These are not just rogue operators; these are very sophisticated, highly organised criminal syndicates that are out to exploit.

This bill is designed to address head-on the issues that I have mapped out by introducing this comprehensive framework that will prevent, detect and combat scams in our country. I know I'm going to run out of time for a lot of the detail of the bill, and I appreciate many of my colleagues having gone through that previously, but I cannot stress enough the importance of strengthening the regulatory environment. This is a bill that has undergone a lot of consultation, and it is now incumbent on this parliament to provide passage of this legislation so that we can really start swinging into action on this issue. We shouldn't be waiting another single day to get this through this House. We want to be very proactive about consumer protection in Australia, and we want to be proactive about the education that we should be providing to consumers now.

One of the key aspects of this bill is its focus on consumer education, and I really commend the minister and the government for ensuring this is a part of the bill. It recognises that scams cannot be fought through regulation and law-making alone. We need all our citizens to understand the threats and the ways to best protect themselves, and we need a whole-of-government, whole-of-community approach. We must make sure that Australians are informed, aware and equipped to protect themselves from the ever-evolving range of fraudulent activities. This bill mandates the creation of a national public awareness campaign that will run across multiple channels, and that's important because we know people are getting their information through all sorts of different means now. The campaign will educate people on how to recognise the warning signs of scams, how to protect their personal information and what steps to take if they suspect they have been targeted.

Currently the Albanese Labor government is running the 'fighting scams' awareness campaign. That's already out there, trying to equip Australians with tools to protect themselves. The campaign is running on TV and online ads using three very simple but memorable steps to empower Australians to identify these sophisticated scam tactics. I want to briefly put those on the record. The three critical steps are as follows: firstly, stop. Stop right now and think about whether or not you should be sharing your personal information. That's the first question you should ask yourself. Secondly, check. Do you know who you are dealing with? The third step is to protect—protecting yourself against the scams by reporting them to the scamwatch.gov.au body. This public information and awareness campaign complements work being led by the National Anti-Scam Centre, and, under this bill, these types of advertisements will be supported by easy-to-access resources where Australians can report scams and receive guidance on how to handle suspicious activities.

I know, like most members on this side of the House, who have been running our scam information forums in our electorates—I've had the minister at one of mine as well—that trying to make sure we inform our constituencies about ways to best protect them is absolutely critical. We do have information available at our electorate offices. We do have a national anti-scam centre on our side. We'll be enhancing enforcements and penalties through this legislation, which will hopefully be passed in the House today. This is about building a safer, more secure environment for all Australians. It will complement a lot of work that Labor has already done to try and improve our privacy laws and our consumer protection laws to really make Australians as safe and protected from this evil scam industry as possible.

Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As we've just heard from the member for Newcastle on the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024, I think we're just so inundated with scam messages daily on our phones, on our emails and even on social media as well. You get messages such as, 'Click this link to track your parcel,' pretending to be from Australia Post, or, 'Check your tax return status,' from a so-called ATO email that actually ends in gov.faithweb.com. For those who are tech savvy, these scams are pretty obvious. We delete them, block them and then move on, or also report them. But what about those who don't recognise the scam? A gentleman called my office recently after receiving one of these fake ATO messages. He wasn't fooled, but he was worried, not for himself but for those who might fall for it. He told me: 'What about older Australians? What about those with limited English or people who aren't familiar with digital scams? They wouldn't know what to do.' He's right to be concerned.

My office has helped countless constituents who have been scammed through text messages, emails and fake social media messages. Some have lost thousands—hundreds of thousands—of dollars. Others have had their personal data stolen, leading to identity fraud and long-term financial distress. Let's be clear: these scams target everyday Australians. The pensioner who gets a fake Telstra call and hands over his or her bank details, the small-business owner tricked into transferring their money to what looks like a supplier—these aren't just numbers; these are real people in our communities who are losing their savings, their security and their trust in our financial and digital systems. In 2023 alone, Australians lost $2.7 billion in scams. That's $2.7 billion that could have been used for mortgages, groceries, education or medical bills. That's why we need stronger protections—not just words and not just promises, but real action.

The Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 is a good step forward. It places clear responsibilities on businesses, banks, telcos and digital platforms to detect, prevent and report scams. It introduces civil penalties of up to $50 million for companies that fail to protect their customers. This is important, because we know that the private sector plays a huge role in preventing scams. When financial institutions fail to detect fraud, scammers win. When social media platforms fail to shut down fake accounts, scammers win. When telcos allow scam calls and messages to flood our phones, scammers win. This bill sends a clear message. It is no longer enough to say, 'It's not our responsibility.' Businesses must be part of the solution.

But is this bill enough? No. Consumer education must be a priority. The best defence against scams is awareness. Right now, most scam prevention resources are in English, and that's simply not good enough. I'm glad for Scamwatch and that—as the member for Newcastle said—there is a big education campaign being held to educate our community regarding the number of scams that are impacting them. In an area like Fowler, we have a diverse, multicultural community, many of whom speak a language other than English at home. Yet when they receive a scam message, where can they turn?

A simple government pamphlet like The Little Black Book of Scams from the ACCC is a great step forward, and we're very grateful that, in working with the ACCC, they have been able to provide my office with this Little Black Book of Scams in languages, and I have them available in Vietnamese, in Chinese and in Arabic. They're the top three languages in my electorate of Fowler. We definitely need multicultural education campaigns. We need easy-to-access materials. We need community workshops that teach people how to recognise, report and prevent scams. I urge the Albanese Labor government to invest properly in outreach efforts. Education saves lives. In this case, it saves bank accounts, savings and financial futures.

Getting scammed is not just about losing money. It's about the mental, emotional and financial stress that follows. It follows on for not just months but years. Many victims, especially seniors and non-English speakers don't know where to turn. They feel embarrassed, ashamed and helpless. We need a dedicated scam-victim support service, easier reporting processes so people don't have to jump through bureaucratic hoops and more funding for agencies like AFCA, the Australian Financial Complaint Authority, which helps Australians recover lost funds. My office has worked closely with AFCA, and I thank them for their commitment. But I know that they need more resources to help more people.

I support holding businesses accountable for scam prevention, but we must acknowledge the challenges faced by small businesses, especially those already struggling with rising energy costs, increased insurance premiums and regulatory burdens. Many of our small businesses are already drowning in red tape. Now, with the push for net zero emissions, they're also dealing with green tape—more compliance costs, more paperwork and more hoops to jump through. If we expect them to invest in scam prevention, we must also ensure they have the resources to do so. That means clear guidelines on compliance, government support for cybersecurity upgrades and no unnecessary regulatory burden that forces them to close their doors. We need a balanced approach, one that protects consumers without crushing small businesses. As we know, small business is the backbone of our economy.

Why are scammers so successful in Australia? It's because our Privacy Act is outdated. Scammers thrive because they can buy, sell and trade our data too easily. Reset Australia, a leading digital rights group, has warned that our privacy laws are too weak. So I ask the Anthony Albanese Labor government: When will we see real reforms to stop companies from selling our data? When will we strengthen privacy protections to keep Australians safe? We cannot fight scams effectively if our own laws make us vulnerable.

This bill is a step forward, but it must be more than just a box-ticking exercise. We need stronger education campaigns in multiple languages. I hear that we've got a scam campaign going on, which is fantastic. We need it in multiple languages. We need better victim support services so people aren't left helpless. Again, I can speak for my multicultural community. We really need victim support services to also be in languages. We need real support for small businesses so they can protect their customers without going under. In my electorate of Fowler and in many others in the Western Sydney area, lots of migrant families run their small businesses. We really need to do an outreach program to ensure that they're also protected. In that way, they can actually contribute to helping us prevent scams. We also need urgent privacy law reforms to stop scammers at the source.

We owe it to Australians to make real changes, not just more bureaucracy. Scams don't just steal money; they steal trust. They leave people fearful of technology, worried about security and disillusioned with the system. We must act now, before more Australians lose their savings, their security and their confidence in our financial system. Let's not wait for another billion dollars to be stolen before we take real action. Let's fix this properly, because every Australian deserves to feel safe online.

Matt Burnell (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I welcome the Scams Protection Framework Bill 2024. It's not perfect, but it certainly goes a fair way to helping Australians fight against the growing threat of scams, because so far we are failing. Consumer groups have been raising the alarm for years in relation to this, and governments have been deaf to their concerns. There has been a lack of action from industry, banks, social media companies, telecommunication sectors and, realistically, the previous government and government to date in relation to fighting back against scams, protecting Australians and helping them actually recoup some of the losses.

In 2023, despite the banking sector implementing a voluntary code on scams, consumers were still wearing the cost of scams. Australia is amongst the top five most-scammed countries in the world. Australians were scammed more than $2.7 billion in 2023 alone. In 2022 it was more than $3 billion. We need to remember that these are not just numbers; these represent real people, real families, who are financially and emotionally devastated. The reality is that it's probably also the tip of the iceberg, because often people simply do not report scams; they're too embarrassed about having been duped. Sometimes it is a lifetime of savings that has been lost.

In my electorate of Warringah, we hear from many constituents about their experiences and feel the emotional distress that being caught up in a scam causes. It can come from young people and older people. It really does not discriminate. All feel a sense of shame and embarrassment that they have been duped. So my message to everyone is: please report it. Do not feel that shame, because it happens to so many people in our community.

Last year, an email came in from one of my own electoral officers, whose email was hacked, resulting in phishing scam emails being sent out to members of parliament in this chamber and having to be recalled. So we know we need greater protections. I welcome this Scams Prevention Framework legislation. It is a crucial step towards safeguarding Australian consumers from increasingly deceptive and harmful practices.

This bill does provide for the protection of Australian consumers from fraud, encourages corporate accountability and brings Australia further in line with comparable jurisdictions, like the UK and Singapore, but we haven't gone as far as some have. The power of the legislation will be in how consumers continue to report scams and how entities, banks and telcos act on those reports and do what is needed. Through reporting scams quickly to Scamwatch for consumers, consumers can disrupt a scamming activity and prevent it being effective for future victims. No matter what, when you get those spam SMSs and scam emails, reporting them to Scamwatch is incredibly important. It is part of that process of pre-bunking and protecting consumers. It ensures the scheme is robust by providing valuable intelligence to the industry to act.

I support the intent of the bill. However, I'll be moving an important amendment to strengthen the integrity of the framework and ensure that vulnerable customers will be able to have equal access in receiving compensation from regulated entities. There is a remaining concern that there is an information gap and a power gap, but there's also the concern that those that generally are able to recoup or to assist with recompense to victims are ultimately those that have access to the information and the data. There is a huge disadvantage when it comes to victims compared to entities.

The proposed bill places the onus on already vulnerable consumers to take on their bank, telco or social media platform, and it essentially is asking a victim to prove that the institution did not meet the requirements of the Scams Prevention Framework. That is a simply ridiculous proposition—that somehow a victim will be able to establish whether or not a Meta has generally met the requirements to ensure the Scams Prevention Framework is working. The onus introduces a significant barrier to getting any compensation for victims from these companies. It's a legalistic, resource-draining, time-wasting and complex task for the victim. Victims without the assistance of advocates will fall through the gaps. They're set up to fail under the current set-up of the proposed bill.

The amendment I have proposed and discussed and negotiated with the government places an obligation on businesses through an increased detailed certification requirement to show that they have met their obligations under the Scams Prevention Framework Bill, rules and sector-specific codes. The onus falls on them to show that they have complied. This amendment will be necessary, and I'll monitor the implementation of the amendment through the rules and the codes to make sure that regulated entities provide customers with the specificity that is required to prove that they have met their obligations. It can't just be that a Meta or a bank ticks and flicks whether or not they have complied. We have to make sure that this works and that they genuinely have assessed their processes and implemented the precautions and the Scams Prevention Framework. That means that if they haven't then they should be liable and victims should be able to get compensation.

This should help to bring greater transparency to the framework and empower consumers to have a fair go in getting dispute resolution and ultimately, hopefully, get compensation for their losses. The amendment has already been flagged by Treasury in the explanatory memorandum of the bill, and my amendment will make it law. Similarly, greater transparency means that companies will also have a clearer understanding of what is required of them under this legislation, providing them with regulatory certainty.

Consumer groups have consistently raised concerns about the slow response from industry and government. We already have strong frameworks in place for other areas of consumer protection, so why is it taking so long for scams? It has for too long been put off. Nevertheless, consumer groups are concerned that more can be done. This legislation should only be viewed as a start. During the period of review, it will be important to assess how well it is working.

There are a couple of other concerns that I'd like to raise. While I support the bill, I think it's necessary to raise for future consideration the codes and the rules. The government has removed the provisions relating to identification and special treatment for vulnerable customers from the exposure draft, so there is no direct oversight over these particularly at-risk customers. Further, the bill doesn't provide any obligations or support for ongoing education and awareness programs from the government. As I've mentioned previously in this chamber, due to the lack of government initiatives in my electorate and around Australia, our communities have taken education and digital literacy into their own hands, but more can be done by the government. For example, locally we have an organisation called Manly Computer Pals, and at Christmas last year they ran tutorials for seniors to help them avoid possible scams and raise their own levels of digital literacy.

We need to follow communities' leads and provide more information and education to make sure we arm consumers with the information and the tools to better protect themselves against scams, because the reality is that, as I said, scams happen to everyone—all age groups. Young people—in particular, the young professionals—get scammed in relation to funds they simply can't afford to lose. For example, a young constituent of mine wrote to me about losing a house deposit of some $100,000, as he was scammed when someone impersonated his lawyer. As, in this era, bank cheques are a thing of the past and many transactions are done electronically, that deposit was lost.

The real question then falls on who should be responsible for that compensation. Obviously, the financial institution has access to the data, right? They can see who the money is being transferred to. One of the calls is that we should have greater friction to ensure that financial institutions go through that step of checking with the customer, 'Is this really who you want to be sending this money to? Is this the right person?' Of course, there might be frustration for the customer from that increased friction and delay, but I think that is better than seeing money being scammed and going to the wrong providers.

That friction is within the power of the banks. At the moment the debate as well is that, if the banks were made solely liable for compensating victims of scams, that would incentivise them to put better friction in place because their money would be on the hook. Instead, the government is going for a model that's not an automatic compensation model, where there's a shared liability between platforms and banks and consumers to enable that compensation prospect. I think we need to monitor this carefully. Other jurisdictions have gone towards more of an automatic liability and compensation process.

It's important to make financial institutions more responsible through greater accountability, forcing them to take greater actions on scams. We know they say, 'We're working on it,' but they're not always doing enough. At the same time, I do hear their complaint that we can't just completely let consumers off the hook for that responsibility of due diligence. We all bear a responsibility when we are actioning or authorising a transaction to take a moment to verify that transaction, to make sure we are in fact not being scammed, but also to verify who we are authorising a transaction to. I do accept that there has to be joint responsibility from all in preventing scams.

Of course, there's also the role that social media platforms and online platforms play in publishing and enabling scams to happen because they give them the platform. For example, a scam is brought to a person via a Meta platform like Facebook; a transaction occurs, and the bank proceeds with the transaction. Should the bank be liable for the loss because they've enabled the money to be transferred? Should Facebook be liable because they have given a platform for the scammer to reach the consumer? Or is the victim responsible because they haven't taken due care and diligence? So where we allocate responsibility is important, but at the moment the onus falls too much, too heavily, on the victims, and there is not enough responsibility put on the big institutions, who have access to the means, the capacity and the resources to put in place greater protections.

This legislation is a step towards introducing that, but it is still being criticised as not being strong enough. We see New Zealand and Singapore moving in the direction of the UK by introducing measures for greater liability of the financial institutions, the argument being that the banks can see who the money is being transferred to. They can see what's happening. They have the capacity to prevent it. They then also have the means to recoup money from a Meta or a Facebook, for example—the next step of recovery—if the responsibility lies with them.

I hear the concerns of consumer groups that there is still too much onus on victims, and I'll monitor closely whether or not we have an improvement in the amount of money victims are able to be compensated—whether this legislation goes far enough. The UK has gone out the furthest. As I said, New Zealand and Singapore are moving in the direction of the UK. I think Australia and the government need to be mindful of whether or not this legislation works. Hopefully, this is about more than just providing an avenue to recoup money for victims. It has to be about protecting the integrity of our systems to build a greater sense of security in an increasingly complex digital world.

Scammers are evolving, as many in this place have noted. So too must our response to them. Whether it's through fake investment schemes, identity theft or fake job advertisers, Australians are being targeted with alarming frequency. As I said, in my office I receive regular phone calls from constituents who have been scammed. They get in contact with the office because they are distressed and have little to no way to seek redress or to get their money back. We really need to make sure we are doing more. For example, one constituent called with an online jobs scam which resulted in a loss of $40,000. She was out of work and struggling to find new work to support two young children, she had an unexpected large repair bill with her house, and she was lured into a scam mimicking a big employer. As a result, she lost significant money, which really made a difference. These are sophisticated scams. They're set up with group chats and staffs and terms of employment. It's really important that that be reported and that we have the resources to crack down on it.

Individual stories tell us a lot. They tell us about the sophistication. We need to make sure we do more. I would like to thank CHOICE and the Consumer Action Law Centre, who have relentlessly advocated on behalf of scam victims. We know we can do more. I will support this legislation—as amended, when I do so in the consideration in detail stage—but I urge the government and the opposition to keep a vigilant eye to make sure compensation for victims improves in Australia.

Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pride to belong to a government that's bringing this type of legislation into the House. I think the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 is something that both sides of the House are very supportive of. All of us value receiving text messages, emails and phone calls from friends, family, colleagues, business associates and companies that provide us with information, the products that we need for our work and the services that we need to go about our daily lives. Whether it's a quick hello on the phone, news of a particular sale that's taking place or a gentle reminder about an upcoming appointment, these messages keep us connected and informed.

There's also another type of message and text message and email that none of us want to receive, and that's the one that leads to financial loss. We've heard many examples here today from both sides of the House of thousands and thousands of dollars of financial loss, of hardworking Australians' cash lost through text messages, emails, the internet and the whole range of tools and mechanisms that these scammers use. Unfortunately, these scams are all too common nowadays. Each and every one of us in this House has seen constituents that have been scammed and have come to see us seeking retribution or seeking to recover their money.

The scammers target individuals with these deceitful messages, pretending that they're legitimate communications from a bank, a government agency, telecommunications companies or even Australia Post. I get one regularly—a text message every night at about midnight from 'Australia Post' saying that my parcel is being delivered and to put in some numbers and names. They're gathering information. I know that it's not Australia Post because I've got nothing to be delivered at this point, nor have I ordered anything. You can report them. As you delete that message, we now have a system that comes up automatically and says, 'Would you like to report this as a scam message?' You press the button, and off it goes. I did report it, and I've never received another one since. But they're very elaborate. They will morph and form into a different type of message. That's just one example.

You see, the Australia Post logo is very well respected. It's something that has been part of our lives all our lives. You see it, you trust it, you believe it. The reality is that we should be very careful with what we click on. We should be very careful when we respond to text messages from entities that perhaps are not our family, our friends or people that we know. Sometimes we're all too eager to click and see where it takes us to. The one bit of advice that I can give and that most people have heard today is to take a short breath. If you're not sure, don't click on it. If there's something that you feel unsure about, speak to someone else about it, and if it seems too good to be true it most probably is too good to be true. That's an old saying that goes way back. I think our gut instincts sometimes tell us that things are not quite right.

Recently, in Adelaide I've had a couple of forums. We had a seniors forum where one of the sessions was on scams and protecting people. And the other forum was one I held in my electorate of Adelaide with the Assistant Treasurer and a very good friend of mine, Stephen Jones. I'll take this opportunity to wish him all the very best after his announcement. He's done an absolutely outstanding job as Assistant Treasurer. One of his targets has been scammers, and, as I said, he's done an exceptional job with the legislation and with weeding these scammers out.

At that second forum we had approximately 100 people in the room, and we spoke to the residents of Adelaide about how these scams affect individuals and the community. It was striking that, when the Assistant Treasurer asked the audience if they had ever received a scam phone call, text or email, every single person in the room put their hand up. And each and every person had a story to tell. What was even more astounding was when we asked the question of everyone in the room, 'Who has been directly affected by a scam or knows someone that has, whether they're a part of your family or someone very close to you?' and two-thirds of the hands in the room went up, approximately 70-odd people out of 100. That was astonishing. It goes to show that every single person either has been touched by it or knows someone that has been scammed. That's why the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024 is very important. It amends the Competition and Consumer Act to establish the Scams Prevention Framework to prevent and respond to scams that impact on the Australian community.

At our seniors forum in Adelaide we had over 200 people attend, and we did a special session on scams. Again, the same questions were asked, and it was approximately the same ratio. Pretty well everyone in the room put their hand up to say that they knew of someone that had been impacted or that they themselves had received text messages or emails.

There were some great examples that day of how elaborate these scammers are, and there was one which they spoke to us about. It was a billing scam. A gentleman who was there spoke about his son, who was a tradie. His son would buy equipment from different suppliers to conduct his trade in the building industry, and every month they would send him an account, and he would pay that account directly into the BSB and bank account of the supplier of the goods. One month he got the account with the same letterhead and everything. He looked up the BSB number, and he'd been told it had been changed. So he sent off the payment to this particular bank account, only to receive the following month a reminder bill from his normal supplier saying, 'You haven't paid the bill.' He was up in arms, obviously, as you can just imagine. He pulled out his records, sent them the details and said: 'This is where I've paid it. Here's the BSB number'. It was the wrong BSB number.

It was not because he made a mistake but because someone, though an elaborate phishing system, had been able to get the supplier's details and letterheads and change the bank account and the BSB numbers. So that money went into a scammer's account. By the time they got on to the police, the police were investigating it, but the scammers had taken the money and disappeared, and they would have done this to hundreds of other people. So, again, be very careful. When you're paying your bills and you just get a BSB number, check with the supplier, check with the person you're paying, to make sure that it is correct. This was another elaborate way of siphoning money from people. This poor chap, his father was telling us, not only lost thousands of dollars to scammers but also still needed to pay the bill to the correct suppliers, another added cost that was about to take him under. Because of that extra burden, he may not have been able to survive the following month. That's one example.

Another one that appeared recently, certainly in South Australia, in my home state—it was reported in the Advertiser, the local paper in Adelaide—was the scanning codes. I'm sure it's happening all over the country. When I read about it, I sent the article immediately to the Assistant Treasurer. This is where you walk into a restaurant and you view your menu or, perhaps, you're paying your parking meter and you scan the code and these scammers create their own codes and go and put them on top of the code in that premises or on the parking meter or wherever it may be. Therefore, when you scan, you're scanning into their website, which then tells you where to send money et cetera or to pay the bill. This then goes into the scammer's pocket.

We know that they're getting more and more elaborate and we know that overseas there are such things as scam factories. We would have all seen on 60 Minutes late last year the investigation that they did into an Asian country where up to 120 people were working in what's called a scam factory. This is where people are on the phones, calling internationally, all over the world, trying to find people that they can scam. It was a very elaborate set-up. Many of these people were brought in from Third World countries, were basically working like slaves and were beaten et cetera in these factories.

I would suggest to anyone who hasn't seen this episode of 60 Minutes to watch it. It would have been around October of last year, where they did extremely good investigative reporting and traced back money that had been scammed through these factories here in Australia, in the US and in the UK. It was everything from dating services and love stories to elaborate money-making schemes. What these people would do is ring and ring and gain the confidence of the other person on the phone until they were able to extract the money out of them. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. In one case, a woman from the UK had been scammed out of her entire life savings of over 100,000 pounds. It's very elaborate. Again, it's about being cautious. If there is something that is too good to be true, it usually is.

Recently, I was contacted by constituents who were having a big family wedding. They had an extended family. Part of their family lived in the US, and they wanted these particular family members to come over to Australia for the wedding. They applied for the visa and they were knocked back. This was for an Australian visa through the home affairs department website. They could not work out why they had been knocked back. They were an elderly couple. They had their own retirement plan and pension, and they were fairly well off in the US. They were coming over for a wedding, for a two-week stay, and then going back.

We looked into it, and they told us about the responses they got from the application on the Home Affairs page. When we contacted Home Affairs on their behalf and gave them the details—the emails they had received—we were informed by Home Affairs that it was a scam site that they were using. They paid about US$190 to apply for the visa—this amount does not exist; I think the fee for a visa is miniscule—and they had been scammed. When they kept on going back into this website, it would send them a scam email saying, 'Your visa application for an e-visitor visa is being considered.' So it was all about delay. Every email they got was about delay. These would have been done on AI—very robotic and very elaborate. We were finally informed by Home Affairs that this was a scam website that many people had fallen for in the US. Apparently it has disappeared. We finally did get the visa for the visitors to come to Australia to enjoy the wedding with their family—after they'd lost US$190 for three different family members, which is a very sad case.

These laws are very welcome. They are welcome because we need to put laws in place to be able to make it difficult for scammers. We know that we'll never get rid of them completely because they are very elaborate and, with the intricate computer systems et cetera, we know that they will just keep on morphing into something new. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant and on top of it. We should be chasing them and hunting them down to ensure that money is not scammed from innocent Australians. We've seen far too much—far too many scams. This Scams Prevention Framework Bill will go a long way in assisting, and I suspect that, in years to come, we'll have to continue looking at this bill, amending it and making it even tougher and harder for those scammers.

The bill introduces principles based obligations that require regulated entities also to take certain actions in relation to scams. We're talking about the financial institutions: the banks and insurance companies. They have a responsibility as well to prevent, detect and, very importantly, report—we found that many scams were going unreported—and to disrupt and respond to scams relating to services that that particular entity provides. Contraventions of their obligations may result in civil penalties, as well. It's important to get that message through.

Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

According to the explanatory memorandum for the Scams Prevention Framework Bill 2024, four per cent of Australians were impacted by scams last year—that's nearly one-in-25 people. When you talk to members of the community, it feels like many more. The combined total of the losses we know about reached $2.7 billion—enough money to fund the government's changes to HECS and HELP indexation this year.

These numbers are so hard to grapple with because they're so large—until it becomes personal. A young man recently contacted my electorate office, having fallen victim to an investment scam that cost him nearly $200,000. He's a bright, young guy, trying to build a future, who had worked hard and saved—and just like that, it was gone. Now he is under unimaginable stress, navigating regulators, local police and Interpol and receiving mental health support. This is the experience of a growing number of Australians.

They are no longer those obvious scams that I used to warn my mum about, I'll be honest. It is a case of everyday Australians, savvy Australians, people who know what they are doing and who are really thoughtful about trying to guard against scams, losing vast sums of money—home deposits, their life saving—through complex and sophisticated, organised crimes. It's not simple; this is organised crime. It is incredibly sophisticated. The things that people are trying to guard against in their normal, everyday life, the things that we've been warned against—those basic checks that we can make are just not cutting it anymore. These are not just my words to describe it, these are the words of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Deputy Chair, Sarah Court, in testimony to the House Economics Committee last year.

Currently, there is nowhere to turn. Internal dispute resolution within organisations is patchy and varied, and there's an obvious and problematic information asymmetry that prevents its consumers accessing information that might prove an organisation has been negligent. These companies are not incentivised or obligated to disclose information that might support my constituent that I was just talking about. Instead, they play hardball, disclosing information only under the threat of legal action.

Testimony from consumer action groups include anecdotes of corporations dumping pages of legal documents on scam victims, days before the hearing, with the intention to overwhelm and befuddle. Meanwhile, the concurrent framework of external dispute resolution is a hodgepodge of interconnected regulators with large holes in their remits that ultimately serve to confuse, rather than help, victims of scams. It is through this lens that I review this bill. It may be that this bill has good intentions, that it assigns responsibility fairly across a scam ecosystem comprising banks, social media companies and telcos and that it creates rules and standards that are better than the status quo. But I want to know how it will work for people like my constituents. Does it offer them real opportunities for redress? Does it remove the information asymmetry that would be able to demonstrate corporate negligence? Does it incentivise corporations to do their utmost to protect their customers against criminals trying to access the money, or does it create minimum standards that absolve companies of their responsibilities to their customers?

While I am pleased that this bill will address the problems with external dispute resolution, I still believe there are significant weaknesses in the legislation that will undermine its effectiveness. We are operating on an article of faith in these codes that would take nearly two years to implement. It is just not good enough. I cannot vote against a bill that creates a better framework for external dispute resolution in place, but I hold serious doubts about the impact this bill will have on scam losses, prevention and detection without amendment. That's because the bill focuses on inputs rather than outputs. This bill will enable the Treasurer to designate economic sectors to be subject to legislation and make enforceable scam prevention codes. It will require regulated entities to take reasonable steps to put in place governance arrangements that will help detect, prevent, report and disrupt scams. It will also introduce a substantial civil penalties regime to be enforced by the ACCC for regulated entities that do not meet these codes. This bill will create greater precautions on the telcos and, particularly, social media companies.

While this bill falls short in key areas, I do agree that it will support a substantially better external dispute resolution approach than exists currently. Having gone through this with my constituent, I found it extremely difficult to understand what avenues are open, and I am pleased to see that this bill will create a single front door for scams. I acknowledge that this bill will provide clear guidance for how AFCA will be able to deal with and assess scam cases.

But the bill is not enough, because, ultimately, I think it fails to create incentive schemes that will force those with most visibility and resources to tackle these problems at their source. This legislation, as the government seeks to pass it, will not fundamentally address the information asymmetry that exists between banks and their consumers. There are measures that we can put in place to create a race-to-the-top approach, which is actually required, instead of implementing a floor. The evidence of this is buried in the impact analysis by the explanatory memorandum. This analysis states that the legislation will have minimum impact on the organisations above what is already being achieved under industry-specific policies, such as the Safe Scams Accord.

The Safe Scams Accord was implemented in 2023, with the greatest contribution being the inclusion of the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange, the AFCX, which allows organisations to share the details of scam activity and pay verification accounts. The pay verification will be rolled out through 2024 and 2025. This is fantastic, except that this technology has been in place in Europe since 2017. That's eight years now that people in Europe have been protected against these scams, while Australian banks have been dragging their feet. This is the concern that I have—that this bill does not sufficiently drive at the incentives in the banks and in the different actors to really stamp out the scams. It just brings them up to a minimum standard, which they can constantly try and pull back on.

However, the impact statement of the explanatory memorandum states that the regulatory cost between the SPF and the status quo is an initial investment of $100 million and an ongoing investment of $31 million. However, the impact analysis estimates that 70 per cent of this cost is accounted for by non-affiliated banks, with the four major banks expected to increase their funding by only $6.2 million in initial investments. That's just six per cent. Ongoing costs would be a measly $1 million and just one additional FTE, according to the EM. This is despite ASIC finding that the scam strategy and the governance of the four major banks was less mature than expected.

Let's come back to the first point that I raised. Australians are losing $2.7 billion every year on scams, and that is the stuff that we know about. Under this bill, banks will be expected to make a net contribution of $100 million in implementing the scams framework. While $100 million is a lot of money, $2.7 billion lost every single year is a vast amount of money for Australian consumers.

The point that I continually hear and I continually want to make is that this isn't about consumers being negligent. This isn't about consumers being silly or consumers falling for really silly tricks—for which, frankly, we all need to have 'buyer beware'. This is about organised crime targeting Australian consumers, using the most effective and sophisticated technology, constantly evolving and constantly getting better at targeting and getting money out of Australian consumers through scams, and the banks are not doing enough to fight this. Australia is one of the countries with the highest amount of per capita losses from scams. The banks here are not doing enough, and I am just not convinced that this bill creates that incentive strongly enough for the banks, where almost all the money has to go through, to be really racing to the top.

It's important to come back to the point that I raised before. If the banks were doing such a great job of this already, why has the account payee verification technology, which was being introduced last year and will be introduced this year, been in Europe since 2017? Why have Australians been so slow to get the benefit of that technology? Because the banks have not had enough incentive to do something about it. This code is a great thing, but the truth is that the banks know more about how to improve their technology to fight scams than the regulators know, and the banks need very strong incentives to really be imaginative, be innovative and fight scams. I do not believe that this bill has enough incentives in there; I think this bill is just another catch-up bill.

I know that the bill and the government have been clear in saying: 'Look, it's great. We're bringing in the social media companies, and we're bringing the telcos in. This is great.' I accept that, and I support that. But, again, let's look at the impact of this work. On page 153 of the explanatory memorandum, it states:

Under Option 2—

that is, the Scams Prevention Framework—

there are unlikely to be significant additional costs for telecommunications providers who are compliant with current obligations.

So it's basically saying that they're not going to have to do anything really different if they're compliant with current obligations. In that case, what is the bill actually going to do? The EM acknowledges that self-regulation has not yet worked, yet this bill will introduce minimal additional provisions on top of what these industries are already proposing to implement. Australian corporations, particularly banks, are investing a lot in relation to scams. I acknowledge this, but it is clearly inadequate. Instead, this bill will give corporations a basic set of minimum standards, which will be quickly surpassed by scam innovation, to allow them to demonstrate to consumers that they have met their obligations. So banks will say they've met their obligations, and consumers are still going to get scammed.

The impact analysis of this legislation is also missing any consideration of a UK style reimbursement model. While I hold reasonable reservations about a complete reimbursement model, I think that this bill has completely failed to even consider stronger options and compromises, such as those brought forward by a coalition of consumer groups, including a presumption of reimbursement. The evidence emerging from the UK, despite the arguments over data, is that the scheme is working. I would have liked to have seen a stronger option modelled in the explanatory memorandum.

Given that, this bill, in its current form, needs to be substantially strengthened. Principally, it needs to explicitly address the information asymmetry that exists between regulated entities and consumers and incentivise regulated entities to innovate and combat scams above and beyond what is simply required. I acknowledge the minister's offers and assurances that some of these requirements will be included in the codes, but I'm not entirely convinced by the reasoning for why these cannot exist in the primary legislation. I believe that this bill leaves too much to the regulations and operates too much on faith. Australians have given up faith on this. That is why I will be moving an amendment to this bill that will seek the publication of scam data—including information about scams detected, responded to and reported—from all regulated entities on a quarterly basis. This model is currently used by the Payment Systems Regulator in the United Kingdom, where institution-level data on banks is published, and there is no suggestion that publishing this data has had unintended consequences.

The explanatory memorandum outlines that industry self-regulation is occurring in some sectors, but not at a pace consistent with growth in scam activity. Let's let Australian consumers make informed decisions about who is best placed to look after their money and who is actually protecting them best against scams. Let's make scam prevention a point of competitive tension in the system, rather than a tick-box exercise. While I will trust the regulation to appropriately determine exactly what metrics are reported by each sector, I believe that this can be explicitly included in the regulation.

I want to come back to this: what can the country do to fight against scams? One thing that the country and this parliament can do to fight against scams is make sure that consumers are armed with the best information they can possibly have when choosing where to put their money. It's about knowing which banks are doing a good job to fight scams and which banks need to pull up their socks. That allows consumers to make informed choices when they are faced with organised crime that is driving scams and making it so hard for consumers themselves to detect scams. The government should include this in the primary legislation. That is something that the government can do right now to protect our consumers. I'm still flabbergasted that, at this stage, they haven't.

I also welcome the amendments made by the member for Warringah, which will go some way toward reducing the information asymmetry that currently exists. Under this amendment, which the government has agreed to implement, regulated entities will need to provide certification of obligations within a set timeframe of scam complaint or face civil penalties. I will be closely scrutinising the certification process as it emerges through the regulation to ensure that it is robust and meaningful. These amendments should be minimum requirements.

In conclusion, this bill will substantially improve the external dispute resolution processes from a virtually non-existent baseline, so I will support it on that basis. But the assertion that this will make a really significant difference in terms of reducing scams and scam losses, drive meaningful levels of investment and, ultimately, better protect consumers is, in my mind, highly questionable. This legislation ignores the calls from a consortium of consumer groups, instead taking a pragmatic and, ultimately, soft approach to implement a modest improvement over what we already have.

Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

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

I'll start by thanking all honourable members for their participation in this debate. Everyone's joined the debate with great passion and, I think, a genuineness, and I commend them for that. There wouldn't be a member of this place or the other place who hasn't had direct representation from their constituents on the scourge of scams, so I believe everybody is coming to this issue with a genuineness about wanting to fix the problem.

Through the debate we've heard stories of the unimaginable harm that scams have caused too many Australians. I have no doubt that these are the results of members reflecting in good faith on the issues that have been raised with them in their electorates. It's a big problem. If we don't get it right, people won't have faith in the rails of modern commerce. Whether we care about it because of the social consequences or because it has devastating economic consequences, we need to act on this. We need to act on this as a parliament and we need to act on it quickly. At $7 million a day, we can't go into recess without this issue having been dealt with, because the consequence is that $7 million a day is going to be lost and the failure of us to act to put this preventative legislation into action will be on all our heads.

When we came into government in late 2022, Australians were losing $3 billion a year. It had been doubling every year. It had been doubling every year because the approach up till then was that this was a private problem that was the responsibility of individual consumers and individual Australians to meet. We don't say that there isn't a role for individuals to deal with this challenge, but it's actually a government problem. It's a problem of business. It's a problem of consumers. It's a problem that we have to work on right across the economy and right across government, and that's what we're doing through this legislation here today.

It's not the first step; it won't be the last. As the member for Lalor has already said in her contribution, the government has stood up the National Anti-Scam Centre to be the focus of coordination and education activities for the government, including those foreshadowed in this bill. We have provided the Australian Securities and Investment Commission with the funding and the capacity to go after the fake investment websites. We're working with the ACCC to enable them to do the same thing inside their jurisdiction, and thousands and thousands of fake websites are being taken down as a result of this. We've been working with the private sector to ensure that, on a voluntary basis, ahead of legislation that we're introducing, new voluntary accords and codes are introduced. There will be a significant uplift as a result of this legislation.

We've all heard through the debate lots of stories. In the last few days, I've heard reports of manipulated video footage of prominent Australians, including the Prime Minister. I'll be surprised if the Leader of the Opposition hasn't had the same. Manipulated video footage is being used to promote fraudulent schemes online via advertisements on social media platforms. These cases have been picked up by the National Anti-Scam Centre and reported to Meta, but I understand that many of these ads are still visible on platforms. This goes to the very heart of why our approach is different to that which has been taken in other countries. In other countries, they've just said: 'Let's go for the banks. We'll make them compulsorily liable for any losses.' That's akin to saying: 'We don't care how the scam reached the victim. In fact, we're not that interested in prevention. All we want to do is deal with something after the fact.' We take a different view. We want compensation, absolutely, but we want prevention to be the first line of defence.

Why are we so focused on social media platforms? Telcos are already introducing message filtering and message blocking. Around a million calls and messages are being blocked a day. More needs to be done. Banks have got voluntary stuff going on. We welcome that. Social media platforms are late to the party but they're slow to be implementing some things. Any member could pick up their phone while they're in the chamber, go to their Facebook app and type in the words 'sell my Australian bank account'. And they'll come up with screens and screens and screens of Facebook sites advising them how to sell or rent their Australian bank account. It's illegal to do. Why is it being done? Because that's how the scammers get the money out of a victim's bank account and then out of the country. They transfer it into a mule account, and that mule account is then used to remove the money beyond the reach of law or recovery and out of the country. Before standing up today, I've done exactly that. I've typed in the words 'sell my Australian bank account'. The first result on my Facebook account is an account that has had eight new posts today, with 10,000 members in total. All of this is illegal, and it's known to the operators of the site. Time and time and time again, they've been told, 'You are a key vector of this criminal activity, and you are not doing enough to stop it.'

This law addresses the problem. It imposes tough new obligations on banks, telecommunications companies and social media companies, all working together. It has tough new standards to prevent, detect and disrupt scams and ensure that they are keeping their customers safe from the criminals that are preying upon Australians. We have looked at other options that are available around the world. Frankly, there is no country in the world that has got this nailed, and there will be no country that has a tougher regime in place than Australia once this law passes through the parliament. This is something that every member of this place and the other place can be proud of, and it's something that we absolutely have to do.

I have heard through the course of the debate members saying that, under the current arrangements, reimbursement of scam losses is woefully inadequate and low. I agree. You know why? The problem is that there is no current standard against which a bank, a telco or a social media company is held accountable to, so our regulators are flying blind. Our courts and law enforcement are flying blind. They have no standard against which to hold one of these businesses accountable and say, 'You have breached this, and therefore you are liable to compensate and make good your customers.' As a result of these laws, that will change. The principal obligations will have fines and penalties attached to them of up to $50 million. Consumer redress will absolutely be part of it.

I've listened to consumer groups and members of the crossbench and others on this. I've listened to the members of the coalition. I've read carefully the comments that they've made in the Senate inquiry on this. I make the offer to the shadow minister, who is in the chamber, to have good-faith discussions with you to ensure that any legitimate issues can be dealt with. We need this bill passed. Every day, $7 million is lost. Nobody wants that hanging over their head. Over the months ahead, Australians will not thank any of us for it.

Lots of things have been said in the course of this debate, and, as is often the case in this place, sometimes people are partially informed—I'm sure they speak in good faith, but they are sometimes partially informed. Because I'm promising to get this bill through the House, I don't intend to address all of the statements that have been made, but what I can tell members of this place with great confidence is that the measures that we have put in place are already working and that the voluntary measures that some institutions have already put in place are making a difference but that much more needs to be done.

I use the figure of $3 billion, which was being lost each year before we came into government. I'm in a happy position to report to members that that number has reduced by 33 per cent over the last year because of the actions that have been put in place by this government. Whilst we could all give ourselves a pat on the back and say a 33 per cent reduction off $3 billion is a great achievement—and it is; we're one of the only countries in the world that can make that claim—when Australians are losing billions of dollars a year, we cannot rest on our laurels. We have to do the things that are anticipated within this bill to improve our protections and we will.

As the member for Lalor and others have said, it won't be the last word on this. I'm sure, as new vectors, new threats and new challenges arise, there will be new propositions that come before this parliament or before a government to ensure that we can continue to lift our standards. But make no mistake: the introduction of these laws will be a significant uplift across the entire economy and will make Australia the toughest country in the world for those criminal gangs to make a dollar in.

I note that there are members from the Treasury team who have been working on this over the last year and a half who are in the chamber today. I want to thank them for their tireless work on this. They are fine public servants who have been thrown an important public policy challenge and they've risen to it. I thank them for their work and I thank all members of the House for their participation in the debate. I commend the bill to the House.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question before the House is that the amendment be agreed to.