Anthony Chisholm (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

With regard to the amendment, the government is not supporting the amendment. The bill repeals existing offences relating to private sexual material and creates a new offence that applies where a person transmits sexual material depicting an adult person using a carriage service and the person knows that the person depicted does not consent to the transmission of the material or is reckless as to whether the other person consents.

The proposed amendments take a completely different approach and seek to reinsert the more complex concept of 'reasonable expectation of privacy' back into the provisions. This is not what was considered or recommended by the inquiry of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee on the bill. The advice of the CDPP is that there may be no reasonable expectation of privacy in an image that has been digitally created or altered. The proposed amendment would not resolve this issue as it does not engage with the question of whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in, for example, images or videos that are already publicly available. I note that the Law Council of Australia, in their written submission, also agreed with the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions that existing offences may not adequately cover the situation where deepfake sexual material is shared online without consent.