James Paterson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to make a contribution to the debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021. As other senators have done so far in this debate, before I turn to the bill itself I want to make some observations about the events of the last week. As I've said many times before, as somebody who believes in private property rights, I accept the fact that a social media company who wants to run their platform without any news on it has every right to do so. However, their users—and everyone else—are entitled to make judgements about them if they do so. In their desire to avoid the implications of the news media bargaining code, Facebook has removed news from their platform and delivered a significantly diminished service to their users as a result. As we've heard throughout this debate, many Australians do turn to Facebook for their news and current affairs, and they are now not able to do so. Inevitably, Facebook will become a less attractive platform for them as a result.

In my capacity as Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, I am also concerned about the implications of this decision for the spread of misinformation and disinformation. The spread of misinformation and, in particular, state sponsored disinformation, is of great concern. It contributes to many of the problems that the PJCIS will be examining this year, including foreign interference in our democracy and increasing extremism and online radicalism, and they are also apparent in debates about the safety of vaccines.

Some examples of this misinformation appear to be, at face value, at least trivial, like a recent viral post purporting to explain that the real reason why we celebrate Australia Day on 26 January is not in fact because of Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet landing on that day in 1788 but in fact the passage of a citizenship act in 1949. I've no doubt many senators received the email I did and saw the Facebook post that that originated from.

But there is a much darker side to this too. One very troubling recent example of an apparently state sponsored disinformation campaign was exposed in The Daily Telegraph by Ellen Whinnett. She wrote about the experience of a young researcher, Vicky Xu, who, courageously, has exposed the shocking mistreatment of the Uighur people by the Chinese Communist Party, both in her capacity, previously, as a journalist and then as a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. For her troubles, she was targeted by a transparent attempt to discredit and intimidate her in the form of a social media video which smeared her reputation. Regrettably, Western social media companies, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, were all vectors for this disinformation. Some of those platforms took far too long to address it or only did so after receiving a media inquiry about it.

There have been proposals for quite heavy-handed government-led solutions to these problems that I fear could easily end in a form of state censorship. As a supporter of free speech, that is the last thing that I want to see happen. I would much rather see social media platforms take their own initiatives to combat these problems, as Facebook has been at pains to assure this parliament and other legislatures around the world they are doing. But one of the best tools we have to combat false information is to make it easy for truthful information from trusted sources to be more easily shared. With their decision to ban news in Australia, Facebook has—perhaps inadvertently, perhaps unintentionally—made that task much harder.

I believe—contrary to some of the things we hear in this chamber and elsewhere in public debate about the Australian people—that, by and large, actually, most Australians are pretty savvy about the information they consume. Polling shows that Australians place different levels of trust in different media channels, such as television, radio, print and online, and they even differentiate in their level of trust in individual news outlets or news brands within those categories. But, if they lose one of their main avenues to access that information, inevitably the overall quality of the information they can access about events and the world will decline—particularly as what is replaced in their news feeds will not just be photos of friends and family and music and cat videos, but also the sorts of wild and lurid posts that can unfortunately go viral on those platforms.

In a climate where confidence in vaccine safety and efficacy is so important to Australians returning to a normal life, this is not just an academic concern. We will all pay an enormous cost if access to factual, evidence based information about COVID-19 vaccines, for example, is replaced by false information which needlessly undermines Australians' trust in them. In that light, it is particularly unfortunate that, in seeking to remove the ability of Australians to share news on their platform, Facebook also, apparently inadvertently, took down a range of official sources of health information, along with charities and others who are really quite distantly removed from the provision of news. Facebook may have unwittingly contributed to a problem I believe they are genuine in tackling, and I urge them to carefully consider the implications of their decision.

Throughout this debate, I've met with and heard from both the media and tech companies, and I understand the different perspectives they bring to it. I also participated in the Senate select committee on public interest journalism in 2017 and 2018, which first grappled with many of these issues. It was a classic Sam Dastyari/Nick Xenophon trip down memory lane—I think Senator Hanson-Young participated in it also—but it was launched for very good reasons and in recognition of the important role that public interest journalism plays in our liberal democracy.

Of course, our democracy is not just the act of voting at a polling booth every few years; it's the complex, fragile and interrelated institutions that help hold democratically elected leaders to account. In addition, of course, to the role that parliaments, independent courts and civil society play, journalism plays an indispensable and vital role in that process. It's completely understandable why media organisations, academics and Australians more generally are concerned about the loss of revenue that media organisations have suffered from the transition to a digital online world and the impact that has had on the public interest journalism they provide. It has clearly made it much more difficult financially, economically, to provide support for public interest journalism in the digital world.

Print newspaper outlets in particular have lost that effective monopoly they once had on classified advertising, which for decades cross-subsidised the important public interest journalism they undertook. I suspect that, in years gone by, people who chose to advertise their house or their car through a print newspaper didn't realise or even really care that they were bankrolling public interest journalism and investigative journalism. But that is the effect of what they did and the migration of that advertising to online sources has had a massively disruptive effect on our media industry. Tech companies, admittedly, have found what is often a much more efficient and effective way for advertisers to reach those audiences. They can do so much more directly, and often more cheaply, but in doing so they are bypassing news media companies. In recognition of the important work that news media companies were able to do because of that cross-subsidisation, we have all been grappling with how we ensure they are sustainably funded going forward.

The inquiry looked at other things, including tax deductible awards for organisations, tax deductible funding for news media organisations, more public funding and even a direct tax on tech platforms. I admit that, during the inquiry process, I was quite attracted to the idea of allowing tax deductible donations for philanthropic contributions towards investigative journalism in recognition of the fact that we allow tax deductible donations towards advocacy on matters like environmental issues, social justice issues, refugee issues and general welfare issues. Why would it not be the case that other things of public value, including investigative journalism, could be funded by generous philanthropists through tax deductible donations? I note that there are in fact many philanthropists who operate in this space in Australia and overseas who do put their own money behind these efforts in a very commendable way. I thought providing them with a tax deduction to facilitate and encourage that was one possible part of the solution to this problem. But I also accept that none of the solutions canvassed by that Senate inquiry was perfect, because this is a difficult problem to solve due to the very nature of journalism in a democracy; and that's probably why none of the ideas proposed by that committee were taken up by the parliament.

For very good reasons, we are all appropriately wary of direct government intervention in the form of funding or regulation of media outlets. By its very nature, if we want journalists to hold governments to account, we want politicians as far as possible from decisions about how they are funded. History and, indeed, sadly, much of the world today contain salutary lessons about why that is the case. Inevitably, with these other options canvassed, politicians would have had a hand in deciding which media outlets would have qualified for funding and the basis on which they did so. All of the problems that would have entailed for their independence are fairly obvious.

A virtue of this code is the fact that the parties have been encouraged to take—and some are, indeed, undertaking—commercial negotiations outside the code in the hope that the code never needs to be invoked, let alone the arbitration provisions of the code, which have been very controversial, I note, through the Senate inquiry and public debate. It is welcomed that Google, for instance, appears to have reached agreeable commercial terms with as many as 50 media outlets without the code being invoked. I think it would be fair to say that most members and senators, and certainly me, have a very strong preference for these issues to be resolved commercially, with the least involvement possible from the government.

I also appreciate that tech platforms, particularly Facebook and Google, contribute enormous value to media companies in the form of the significant referral traffic that they send their way. That's perhaps why no media company has ever elected to remove themselves from those platforms, despite their concerns that tech companies were freely profiting from their efforts. In this respect, I particularly welcome the inclusion of the two-way value exchange in the code. In my view, this is a significant improvement by the government on the original draft code proposed by the ACCC. In my view, it was an oversight of the ACCC not to recognise that two-way value exchange inherent in these relationships between tech companies and media organisations.

It's appropriate to recognise that, while there is value for tech platforms in hosting news on their sites—we all go to these sites to look for news—there's also value for the media companies to be linked to by these platforms. I think it's also sensible that the digital platforms have been permitted to publish standard offers, in recognition of the fact that smaller media organisations are clearly not equipped to engage in complex legal negotiations with large multinationals. I also welcome the fact that there is a one-year review by Treasury of the effectiveness of the operation of the scheme. Even with our best intentions in this place, we should always be wary of the potential for unintended consequences in the laws that we pass.

In concluding my remarks, I turn to the report of the Senate Economics Legislation Committee into this bill, capably chaired, as always, by my friend Senator Slade Brockman, which had an important contribution to make on this issue of further reviews and consultation. It notes:

… even supporters of the bill, felt that further amendments were possible to improve the law. Free TV recommended a series of amendments, as did SBS, the ABC, the MEAA and Solstice Media, amongst others.

Treasury also acknowledged that, despite the many and varied consultations and legal advice, that as is commonly the case for all legislation: 'there are legal risks associated to the bill, both domestic and international.' Treasury also noted that the government, in developing the bill, had considered its domestic and international law obligations.

The committee accepts that there remains the possibility that not all risks have been taken into account, and that further refinement may be needed to the arbitration mechanism and other parts of the Code so that they work in an optimum manner. Accordingly, the committee strongly supports the 12 month review mechanism built into the legislation.

I, too, strongly support a robust and independent review of the effectiveness of this code and its operation to ensure that there are no unintended consequences and inadvertent effects, that it is achieving the government's policy objectives and that Australia does remain a very attractive place for innovation and for tech companies to invest and base themselves here. If we are to be a prosperous 21st-century country, then we want to ensure that we are an attractive, safe and reliable place for them to invest and that they are not discouraged by excessive or burdensome regulation.