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

I think I have made my point. Unless other senators have any general questions regarding the operations of the bill, I will start moving through the Australian Greens amendments. We are working from sheet 7710. Amendment (1) deals with avoiding geoblocking. In a nutshell, it proposes to amend the Copyright Act to explicitly state that evading geoblocking is not copyright infringement.

Minister, I think you addressed this in your closing comments, just before you closed the second reading debate, which I was glad to hear. Key figures on your side—through you, Temporary Chairman—of politics and also from the Labor side have stated that they believe avoiding geoblocking is legal. That was made pretty black and white in the IT pricing inquiry, but the bill is currently unclear on this and needs to be cleared up and made black and white.

The amendment will make it quite explicit that avoiding geoblocking is not any kind of offence. We can go some way towards educating Australians on how to avoid geoblocking, which was another recommendation of the IT price-hike inquiry. I will give the government the benefit of the doubt on this, and Minister Turnbull has mentioned this a couple of times, that they do not appear to want to criminalise geoblocking. So why would they pass a bill that could conceivably be interpreted as doing that?

I hope this amendment will see favour with one or both sides of politics. I suspect that when government and opposition spokespeople speak to the amendment they will profess to support it, in spirit, but will not vote for it in the letter of the law, and that is a rather poor way of legislating. So I am looking for a reading from the opposition or the government as to whether they (a) support the principle, and (b) would support it going into the act.