David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I first of all rise to acknowledge the, woe of my colleague, Senator Waters, in this space, for her work on the committee and her contribution to the chamber, and endorse whole heartedly her contributions and credit her work on the committee. This is a bill that does a very, very small thing. It extends an existing offence about the transmission of sexual material without consent, which has been on the statute books for years and years to also include material that was produced using technology including deepfakes. That's what it does. You would think, from the comments from the Prime Minister down in the government, that this was some extraordinarily significant achievement from the government.

The Greens have been on record as saying that they support this change and support this incremental change to the existing offence of using a carriage service to transmit sexual material without consent. We support that, but we really could have legislated for this in an afternoon with the broad support of all parties and a very rapid committee process, because the change is, to be quite frank, extremely marginal in terms of the impact it's going to have.

One of the concerns that has been repeatedly raised in this space with my office is that the existing offence under the Criminal Code of using a carriage service to transmit sexual material without consent is almost never policed, and another is that, when women make complaints to the police, at a state level they get told it's a federal matter, and for a federal matter they get told it's really a state matter. The police seem largely disinterested in investigating. There don't seem to be any good guidelines for how the police should go about acquiring the relevant information needed to find out where the offence was committed. There don't seem to be the specialist resources in place to assist state, territory or federal police to undertake the necessary investigative work to work out from what device and by who the material was sent. None of that seems to be in place. It would be good to see the government investing in those resources, asking those questions of the Australian Federal Police and, through the standing committee on police ministers and the attorneys-general, getting those questions asked of state and territory police. That's the hard work of government that needs to be done in this space, but we're not getting that. We got this bill as though it's a solution.

The concerns that I have are that we'll pass the law and the government will say they've taken this action and that, somehow, this passing of the law itself will make women safe in this space, but history would suggest that that, of itself, won't do it. The policing culture needs to change to respect women when they come and make complaints, and I would refer the chamber to the report that was released last week on missing and murdered First Nations women and children and the additional comments to that report given by my colleague Senator Cox and me, which pointed out the deep disrespect police can show women when they're reporting their missing children, the physical assaults that they have received or the violent threats that they've received. Does anyone seriously think that there's a huge gap—that there's suddenly a totally different set of police forces across the country who are respectfully responding to women when they talk about their images being shared without consent online? I don't believe there is any meaningful difference.

So, yes, let's amend this bill. Let's amend this law. Let's criminalise the non-consensual sharing of deepfakes. Let's do that, where it's involving sexual material without consent. Let's do that, but don't anybody pretend that the problem's fixed with the passing of this bill. Don't even pretend that it's fixed with passing this bill.

I also move the second reading amendment that's been circulated in my name—as I'm corrected by my august leader in this chamber, I foreshadow that I will be moving a second reading amendment as circulated in my name.