David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Surely the house of review should be voting in support of actually reviewing legislation. Yet what we've seen from the major parties is that, when there's something in it for them when it comes to electoral reform, they're happy to ram it through. There's no need for any scrutiny. When it comes to something that they want to take to an election and say, 'We delivered this,' they don't care about whether it's actually going to work, they don't care about what the experts are actually saying about this policy. They don't want to hear about it. They're very happy to team up when it suits them. And that's no surprise because we have seen, in the past three days, a number of experts raising concerns about this electoral reform and this charade of creating a level playing field. It is really about entrenching the duopoly. It's more money for the parties come election time; it's 'a level playing field' with loophole after loophole after loophole.

In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis we have the government bringing forward electoral reform, which doesn't come into effect until 2028, ahead of things like a mandatory food and grocery code. That's disgraceful. Tell that to the millions of Australians who turn up to the checkouts at Coles and Woolworths and look at how much it's costing them. And is it any surprise that the Coles and Woolworths of Australian politics don't want to deal with that? What they want to do is ram through electoral reform that is actually about an extra $20 million for their coffers every election. They'll get an extra $30,000 per MP per year for administration costs, and yet this place is very happy to put extra reporting duties on Australians, on small businesses. I don't see a $30,000 taxpayer handout to deal with the added requirements, so why is that the case when it comes to the parties?

At the same time, truth in political advertising legislation can wait. 'We'll introduce it, but it's not a priority.' This is a total stitch-up between the major parties. The fact is these things need scrutiny. When it comes to electoral reform, for more than 400 pages JSCEM talked in broad detail about the kinds of things the government should do. It went into no detail about the level of caps, how that would work, and we're already seeing experts raise concerns.

When it comes to social media and age-gating, people are rightly concerned about the impact of social media—what it means for young peoples' health and wellbeing, what it means for their childhoods—where you have the highly addictive product of smartphones run by companies that don't seem to give a stuff about what they're doing to the mental health of young people. And so rather than dealing with this huge problem in society, we have the government cooking up a silver bullet that experts have told me this week has been tried in 10 countries and has failed in 10 countries. The government is taking a one-off approach and they say, 'Right, no-one under 16 on social media.' That has to be part of a much broader suite of reforms, of actually putting the onus on social media companies to clean up their act, to make their product less addictive, to make it safer for people, to show us what the algorithms are actually doing. And, surely, have them start paying some actual tax here in Australia. Stop these social media companies shifting their advertising revenues overseas, taking a billion dollars worth of Australian ads and saying, 'We'll shift that off to our parent company.'

Why are you willing to do this but not actually do the hard thing of looking at the broader system? And while you're at it, let's invest more in the areas that we want people to be spending time at. Community sport is underfunded in this country. We jump up and down about the Matildas, but I still haven't seen more investment in women's sport.