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

Speaking of voices from the fringe, Senator Macdonald, I am so looking forward to your contribution. I will hurry along because I know you are very eager.

Both the Minister for Communications and the shadow Attorney-General have stated that the bill is not intended to catch legitimate services like virtual private network providers, but the bill does not make it clear. Again, I am hoping that this is a relatively uncontroversial amendment. VPNs have a very wide variety of legitimate uses, and I think it is extremely concerning that this bill has left vague the fact that it may be possible for a court to decide that the primary purpose of VPN services is to facilitate or to infringe copyright.

The structure of the bill makes it very clear that, at least after the first several actions, it is very unlikely that these blocking injunctions, that will come, most likely, from foreign rights holders, will be blocked either by the affected website owners—who may be based overseas and who are not necessarily going to want the expense of defending an Australian legal case—or the ISPs. So why would the service providers, particularly after the first couple—we can assume some goodwill here but maybe not hope that it would extend too far—be fronting up expensive legal cases in defence of their users? iiNet did that—they took that all the way to the High Court—and iiNet has been quite ferocious in defence of their users' privacy. This bill appears designed to circumvent that kind of goodwill and make it very expensive or very costly in the future.

The experience in the UK, where a similar regime prevails, shows that ISPs are likely to only contest the first few injunctions before waving through most of what comes afterwards. And that—again, to foreshadow—goes to why we have proposed, in another of our committee stage amendments, that much wider standing should apply, so that the courts can hear from affected third parties or others who might want to put a public interest point of view or who have a private interest even though they are not the ISP or somebody more immediately affected.

Say, for example, you use a cloud hosting provider, or you use a particular service for business purposes, and you suddenly find one day that it has been wiped out and you can no longer reach it. You may have nothing to do with breaching copyright, but a court somewhere has decided that it was facilitating copyright infringement. What right do you have to contest that application in court if your private data is no longer available to you or your business in this country? That is the kind of risk that we are playing with here.

So, when it comes to the end of this debate—and I understand very few speakers have been put forward—we will be moving a second reading amendment, and I will foreshadow it now. I will move now, for voting on later in the debate, that this debate should be adjourned. Our amendment is quite similar to an amendment that the Labor Party moved in the House, and it is again a little bit similar to what Senator Collins foreshadowed, except that our amendment would have some practical effect. It is not rhetorical. We propose that this bill debate be adjourned until the government has responded to the ALRC's review of copyright reform of November 2013. Senator Collins name-checked it on the way through, and quite rightly so. That was where this agenda was last canvassed in a reasonably broad and consultative way by people who were not simply the rights holders. There were $4 million in donations to the major parties. That kind of influence is not something that the ALRC was subjected to. So I hope that we will get support that this debate should not proceed and a vote should certainly not proceed until those bigger issues have been looked at.

I think, as I said at the outset, that this bill combines elements of laziness, and it is also dangerous and it is not something that we should be rushing forward. It is a bill that, in my view, appears designed to expand, down the track. So I would call on the Labor Party this afternoon to actually be the opposition and try and hold this government to account, for a change, in defence against not just the unintended consequences but the quite real consequences of passing the bill in its present form.