Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Here we are debating a bill that has been discharged from the Notice Paper. Why is that? I think it's just so that some people can have another kick at this bill and perpetuate more and more mis- and disinformation about this bill. Seriously! That's all we've heard from the very beginning until right now, as my respected colleague Senator Cadell has been pointing out his views. We hear over and over again questions about things that are not actually in the bill. We hear about issues that people have with the bill that are not contained in the bill. All I can say is this total approach has been politicised. It's been a completely political exercise, as opposed to an exercise in unpacking the actual detail of a piece of legislation and looking at the reality of it.

This has happened over and over again. We had a joke, actually, during the committee hearing, where I would say to people, 'No, we're not going to lock up your granny,' because that's where people kept going. This bill, as it stood, was not going to lock up anyone. The fact—not an interpretation and not an opinion but a printed fact—is that that piece of proposed legislation had no criminal penalties. We all know what that means. Obviously, some of you don't. But, fundamentally, it means there were no criminal penalties. It means no-one was going to get locked up. That is just one example of the kind of rubbish that was put over and over again while we were debating the passage of this bill. There was constant misinformation from my colleagues across the room.

So we have lost the opportunity to protect people online. We have lost the opportunity to make a better platform to stop that harmful information being spread at speed by people who are doing it with malintent. This is a real problem. Of everyone that wrote to the committee and that spoke to the committee, the vast majority accepted that we have a serious problem in this country with some of the information that is distributed—again, as I say—at speed and with malintent.

We are not talking about opinions. We're not talking about myself and, say, Senator Rennick having a disagreement about something. I'm allowed my opinion and he is allowed his opinion. We can have a debate. There was nothing proposed in the bill that would have ever stopped that, whether we did it in this chamber or online. This was not about opinion. A vast amount of the information that has circulated about this bill is just fundamentally wrong.

So now we're left in this situation where we had a perfect opportunity to bring forward this bill that was measured, balanced and would have made things better—but, no, we can't do that because there's too much political opportunity for those opposite. There's too much political opportunity for them to put it to one side and think about the people in this country, to think about the harm online and actually do something about it. But, no, we can't waste that political opportunity, can we? And so we stand here again.

I have lost count of the number of times I've stood in this chamber on a particular piece of legislation where the opposition didn't want any of it and our friends in the Greens want way, way more. The balanced approach, the compromise, is something that neither of those two groups in this chamber are prepared to come to the table on. That is a disgrace. This chamber should be better than that. We should be looking at this bill as a good and balanced piece of legislation that would genuinely go towards helping people out there in our country. It would protect people, not silence them. But we've wasted that opportunity, so I hope that you all feel deeply proud of yourselves.