Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Emergency Management) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion, concerning the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024, as the Minister representing the Minister for Communications. The way Australians and, indeed, the world consumes information is changing. More and more, we access information online and we access it through social media platforms. To call this a revolution is actually to understate it; this is a profound change in the way we work and our world works. Governments have a responsibility to respond both to the opportunities and the challenges presented by this change.

There are benefits that arise from these changes, but there are challenges too: ensuring equality of digital access for the information online that people want; the exposure of some of the most vulnerable people in our community to scams and exploitation; the use of platforms to bully and harass; young people's access to a range of inappropriate and sometimes addictive material; how best to fund the news that is the pillar of our democratic arrangements; and the spread of misinformation and disinformation that is often deliberately designed to disrupt our democracy and to damage social cohesion.

The responsibility to deal with all these challenges does not just lie with the executive; the responsibility to deal with these challenges lies with this parliament. To quote the minister in a speech she gave a few weeks ago:

For policy makers to take an elevated view of how technology can shape our future for the better, we need to deal with the excesses of social media, and other emerging technologies like AI, otherwise, they will continue to disproportionately dominate public debate.

We must get to a place where public trust in technology and innovation are in a virtuous circle.

I am confident in our ability to do this.

The truth is there is no consensus on the governance of digital platforms and how to keep children safe and healthy in the digital age.

Yes, the task of change is hard and the road is not straight—but what is clear is that doing nothing is not an option.

Those are the minister's words.

The Albanese government's approach is not to pretend this isn't happening or to pretend, as others do, that the answers to these challenges are simple. We have sought to work with the community, stakeholders, media old and new, and the parliament to deal with this, to devise solutions that mitigate harms while allowing every Australian to enjoy the benefits. The community is rightly concerned. The community is looking to all of us for solutions, and our government is putting forward solutions: passing legislation to create new penalties for privacy violations like doxxing and creating and distributing deepfake pornography; quadrupling base funding for the eSafety Commissioner; backing in the News Media Bargaining Code; working to combat scams; and seeking to legislate age limits on access to social media. And we intend to complement this by establishing a digital duty of care.

As everyone in this place knows, we have also sought to regulate the spread of seriously harmful misinformation and disinformation. The first role, the first responsibility, of this parliament should be to make laws that keep Australia safe, and the combating misinformation and disinformation bill was an opportunity for the parliament to do this. Doing nothing in the face of growing problems of mis and disinformation means doing nothing about the concerns of 80 per cent of Australians and a number of statutory agencies. Our regulators and agencies, who are at the front line when it comes to keeping us safe, have identified the threat posed by misinformation and disinformation; the ACCC, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the AEC, ASIO and NEMA have all spoken about this. We're talking about content that is verifiably false, misleading or deceptive, that is amplified by algorithms and that can cause serious harm—including content spread by malicious actors via bots and troll farms.

Failure to support this bill means this bill will not be legislated, and it means that we will not be in a position to help keep Australians safe with laws that address 21st-century challenges that we and other democracies face. Our best chance for finding good answers to the questions that confront our nation is in our collective capacity to have a well-informed and inclusive public discussion. The spread of serious disinformation in digital public squares often by people who intend to sew discord and distrust makes that task all the more difficult. And it's incumbent on democracies to grapple with these challenges, to do so in a way that puts citizens first. Misinformation and disinformation are an evolving threat. No single action is a perfect solution, but we must continue to improve safeguards to ensure that digital platforms offer better protections for Australians. These are challenging questions. They are not assisted by three-word slogans or simplistic responses to complex problems. They are not assisted by inconsistent approaches, with some in this place supporting certain regulatory tools in some contexts and bitterly opposing them in others, and they are not assisted by cynically ramping up fear before backflipping on a previous commitment. The coalition committed to legislating safeguards when they were in government, but they have since chosen another path. The Australian Greens don't want self-regulation, but that is exactly what they get by opposing this bill. It is another example in the growing list of examples where the Greens would rather vote with the coalition than work with Labor to advance reform on an issue that they say is important.

Some senators thought this bill went too far; others thought it did not go far enough. But it's clear that the bill as introduced—on this case, the Senate was not prepared to find common ground or support it as a step in the right direction when it comes to holding big tech to account. It's for that reason that the government does not seek to proceed with the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. The government invites all parliamentarians to work with us on other proposals, to strengthen democratic institutions, to keep Australians safe online, while safeguarding values like freedom of expression. It is incumbent on democracies to grapple with these challenges in a way that puts the interests of citizens first and protects our society against those that would use our openness against us.