Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to address the Senate on the question of the Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021. I must start this contribution by reflecting upon where this legislation fits into the Liberal tradition in Australia. We have always been a party that has supported markets, that has believed that markets ultimately deliver better lives. But we have been prepared, in the past, to intervene where there has been market failure, or in the public interest.

This is something that I reflected upon in my first speech in this place some 18 months ago. At the time I quoted Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke about his own philosophy of intervening in a coal strike of 1902—not for the basis of labour or for capital but in the public interest. Roosevelt said at the time:

Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, labouring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.

That is exactly the philosophy that we take as Liberals in Australian liberalism and that is a feature of this bill, because we have come to the view that big tech companies are a threat to our liberal democracy and they have an inordinate amount of power over our society and over our economy. They are the railroads and, indeed, they are the monopolists of the 21st century.

Big tech is lightly regulated when you compare it to the sort of regulatory burden that would face a telecommunications company or an energy provider or, indeed, a bank. So we have made a judgement, based on evidence, that there has been market failure which has led to the drying up of money for public interest journalism. The simple example here is—and I make this point as someone who used to work at SPC on the tomato line—that you wouldn't go into a shop and steal a can of tomatoes and give it away for free, which is effectively the deal you see when tech platforms appropriate, in some form, journalists' products and then give them away for free, thereby collecting advertising revenue on that basis.

The ACCC undertook a landmark report into digital platforms in this country, where they found that for each $100 of online advertising in Australia $50 went to Google and $28 went to Facebook. So these laws were often known as the Google and Facebook laws. The way these laws will operate, as I'll step through them in a moment, is they will see the designation of Facebook and Google as the initial two cabs off the rank. This is not about trying to retrofit changing market dynamics. It's not trying to engineer the economy. It's simply saying that where there is journalism produced, appropriated and given away for nothing that should not happen. There should be a financial transaction between the media company that is creating the journalism and the tech platform which is using it to drive revenue. It's not about going back in time and regenerating or rebirthing Video Ezy; this is about crossing the Rubicon and providing a limited set of regulations around big tech companies in Australia.

This is the beginning—this may be the end but, hopefully, it's closer to the beginning of my parliamentary career. Over the course of that I imagine you'll only see more regulation in the big tech landscape because these organisations are effectively utilities. They are essential services that people in our country rely upon. As we've seen this very week, people rely upon these market based institutions to access information. Just as we regulate telecommunications companies, banks and energy companies, we should always look at utilities through a prism of competitive neutrality.

Of course we're not the only liberal democracy which is grappling with the challenges that public journalism face today as a result of big tech appropriation of their property. In France, which I think has been the first mover, alongside Australia, two weeks ago Google announced that they would be paying French publishers almost $100 million for content. In the European Union and France, they are using copyright law. We have chosen to go down the path of using competition law in Australia. As people are aware, the world is watching how we progress with these reforms.

This bill is based on bringing the parties to the table—that's what it does. It designates a power to the Treasurer which he or she can apply to organisations which are designated to be these big tech organisations. Google and Facebook are the first two.

Over the past few weeks there have been many threats. All sorts of things have been said. Only a month ago it was said that these laws would break the internet. In the past few weeks we've started to see deals being done in Australia by Google with news outfits. I have to give credit where credit is due: Google is doing the right thing. I can't say the same for Facebook, which in the last week has gone rogue and decided that it would use its immense market power in a petulant way to switch off not just news information but community based information, health information and charitable information. For what purpose? Just to demonstrate its immense market power. Facebook going rogue and removing genuine news content from its platform has left it as the home of fake news and cat photos. That is not surprising to me, because Facebook's performance at the Senate Economics Legislation Committee was nothing short of petulant. I was disappointed that they couldn't put forward their Australian based head. There may have been a reason for that, I don't know. It reminded me very much of Rio Tinto's ham-fisted management of the destruction of the Juukan Gorge, where they effectively said that there were people in London trying to manage relations on the ground with the PKKP people.

You've got to be serious. The founder of Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg, is engaged with the Treasurer on a daily basis—they had seven calls on the weekend. But Facebook couldn't put forward their Australian based head to come and address the Australian Senate when it was considering this detailed legislation. That was a very disappointing showing from Facebook. I'm not surprised that they have carried out these ridiculous threats over the last week, which of course they've had to wind back. I understand that, in most cases, the charities community based information has now been restored.

But, of course the news has not been restored. But that is okay. If Facebook doesn't want to have news on its platform, fine. People will go to apps. People will go directly to websites. The Australian government spends $1 billion each year providing news to Australians in the form of the ABC. I am a supporter of the ABC. There are mixed views about the ABC in this chamber. I am a big supporter of it. I think it can always do better. I think the ABC has had issues in the past with bias. But I pay credit to David Anderson, the managing director of the ABC, who in the past week has said the employees of the ABC—that is, the working journalists—should not bring the ABC into disrepute by making political statements. That is a very good point. That is something he has taken from the BBC's director-general, who has taken BBC journalists off Twitter when they have made partisan statements. It would be a ridiculous position for taxpayers to be funding partisan material. The reality is that we spend $1 billion each year on the ABC. There is good news available there. There is good news available at News, Sky and The Guardian. So if there is no news on Facebook, big deal. That's fine. The caravan will roll on and the dogs will bark.

We are better placed now than we were a month ago when these hearings were being conducted. Google was saying that the changes will break the internet. They were advertising directly to the millions and millions of people who use the website every single day. But now they are doing a deal. It really worries me—and this is coming from someone who believes strongly in the value of markets and the utility of corporations—when these organisations are going around saying the internet is going to be broken but now we're going to do a deal. And now you've got Facebook saying the world is going to end. It really worries me. I don't think we should resile in any way from being prepared to put more regulation onto these organisations. For what they do, they are lightly regulated. They don't face capital requirements and minimum service standards. They are not licensed. Yet they have so much information and wield so much power.

Some of the best work done in this parliament is done through the committee system. When this legislation was being reviewed, there was a strong sense on all sides that this was a bill that was doing an important thing for our country. We may not agree with every last component part of it, but we all agree with the thrust of the changes and that they are inevitable.

Some technical amendments to the bill have been circulated by the minister. These are changes requested in large part by the tech companies, which we as a government are happy to accommodate. These go to changes in relation to algorithms and the way arbitration works. At the end of the day, I come back to the point about the tin of fruit. You don't go into a shop and steal a tin of fruit and give it away for free. This is the principle at stake here. Yes, it's complicated. Yes, it can be difficult. Yes, there are lots of lies and lots of threats. But that is the principle at stake. Giving away public interest journalism and putting that at risk is a price we can't afford to pay in a liberal democracy that relies on having that institution maintained.

Facebook, in their overreach, have reminded us all of the immense market power this organisation has. This is just a start. My view is that the big tech companies need to do a lot better at self-regulating. If they don't, then we will be prepared to regulate more. They are engaging in censorship. They have become publishers. I've always thought that they are publishers, because they decide who gets to use their platforms, they get to decide who gets to be published on their platforms. They have decided to take public figures off their platforms in recent months. They have decided to edit the news. They have decided to turn off pages for community events and charities. They are the masters of their own domain. They are publishers, and they are sitting on a cesspool of defamatory material and material which drives incitement.

In my state of New South Wales we have state laws which prohibit incitement, but you can look at Facebook and you will find any number of posts which would offend against those laws. I think it is very wrong that these big tech companies are allowed to get away with breaking our laws. I am positive that this particular issue that we are trying to solve here, which is to ensure that there is a level playing field so that media companies who commission public interest journalism can be paid, is going to pass this parliament. That will be an important step. But it is the start. We need to come back and look at the conduct of these organisations in terms of the way that they maintain content which is defamatory or driving incitement. That is very important. It's an argument for the ages. But I again remind the chamber that this is a bill that is consistent with the foundational strand of Australian Liberalism—that we will always act in the public interest and that we are prepared to come after you, no matter who you are.