Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I know we tend to avoid drifting into hypotheticals, so forgive me if you think that is what I am about to do, but I cannot work out any other way of assessing whether the government knows what it is doing or I am simply misunderstanding the way that the act is going to operate. There is a VPN service provider out there that provides services to one million people, and they are using that for all manner of legitimate purposes in the way that we use the parliamentary VPN when we are distributed all over the country. I log on, I take out a subscription in that company and I use it to infringe copyright on a third-party site located somewhere else entirely. Are you seriously telling me that because of one bad egg—one user who is using it for dodgy purposes—you are going to knock that business out from its entire Australian customer base? I am reasonably sure that is not what is intended, but it is the way that you are making it sound, so please help us out. I get that you are going to block that site that I might be visiting using a VPN, but I do not understand how you can be proposing to knock the VPN business off the Australian internet at the same time.