Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) | Link to this | Hansard source

The Social Media (Anti-Trolling) Bill 2022, announced by the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General last November, is yet another example in a shamefully long list of self-promoting marketing announcements from this government followed by utter failure when it comes to delivery.

The government has chosen to finally get around to debating this bill in this place only after the Senate has risen, in the full knowledge that this means the bill cannot become law in this term of parliament. This fact alone shows that this government was never serious about dealing with the two important issues it claims this bill will deal with: the very real and very ugly problem of online trolling and, separately, the decision of the High Court of Australia last year in the case of Fairfax Media Publications v Voller. We support measures to combat trolling and we support legislation to respond to the implications of the Voller decision, but we have many concerns about the way in which this bill seeks to achieve those twin objectives.

I want to make clear that Labor understands this bill would require very significant amendment to be made fit for purpose. In this context, I note that even the government members of the Senate committee inquiry into this bill recommended significant amendments be made to this bill before allowing it to become law. If this government had any real intention of passing this bill through the parliament, we would be moving the necessary amendments in the Senate before passing it into law. But, clearly, with the Senate having risen for the last time in this term of government, it was never the government's intention to pass this bill.

The Prime Minister's intention, as we have seen so often before, was only to announce these laws, and, having got his headlines, to consider it a job well done. What an insult to all those people and all those organisations who have lobbied for action to protect people, especially children, from the harms caused by social media trolling. What an absolute insult to the many organisations and witnesses, like Sonya Ryan, who came before this parliament and spent so much time working on submissions and giving evidence for a bill the Morrison government didn't even bother introducing until it knew that it had no chance of ever passing. No doubt during the campaign which is to come we'll see this Prime Minister boasting about the achievement of having introduced a bill to the parliament. I hope people bear in mind when they hear this Prime Minister boasting about his supposed achievements, his imaginary achievements, that they remember that he and his Attorney-General didn't even bother to introduce this bill until it was too late for it to pass the parliament.

As we well know, delivering on promises has never been something this Prime Minister has the slightest interest in. Just think about the national anticorruption commission promised to the Australian people by this Prime Minister more than 1,200 days ago that is still nowhere in sight. The budget delivered on Tuesday reinforces this broken promise, showing the government intends its long-promised, never-delivered national anticorruption commission to have precisely zero staff this year and next. The Prime Minister was still claiming as recently as yesterday that he'd done something about the national anticorruption commission. He said, 'I tabled legislation in the parliament.' Well, he didn't actually introduce a bill. That's how we make laws in this country, but this Prime Minister appears, even now, not to understand that. He has never introduced legislation in this House to make a national anticorruption commission possible; he's just made announcements after announcements.

I'll now return to the subject matter of this bill. When announcing this bill in November last year, the Prime Minister claimed it was an important measure to protect young Australians by 'unmasking the trolls', apparently so children could then launch defamation actions against each other in the Federal Court. The Prime Minister and his Attorney-General even made the announcement of this bill in front of a crowd of children, with the Attorney-General saying it was a measure 'to protect Australians and, in particular, young Australians online, because that is what we all deserve'.

So let's look at what they've done with this bill. First of all, Australians should look at the timing. It seems this government is so concerned to protect children and women from online harm from trolling that they left this bill to the last day, the last instant, of the parliamentary sittings, when the Senate has already risen. The government has brought on for a debate a bill that it full well knows cannot possibly become law in this term of government and that will lapse when the election is called in the coming days or weeks. Government members may cry crocodile tears and say that they've run out of time because they had so much else to do, but they've only run out of time because they planned to run out of time. How else can the Prime Minister explain why he scheduled only 10 days of work for his government in this House of the parliament between the parliament rising in December last year and today? It's now 31 March, but between the first week of December 2021 and 31 March 2022 this Prime Minister thought it was an adequate workload for his government to only have the House of Representatives sit for 10 sitting days.

It's a pathetic contempt for this parliament, for this House, that the Prime Minister has seen fit only to list the sittings of this parliament for those 10 days. This government schedules 10 days of sittings in four months and only five days of Senate sittings and then dares to claim that it's run out of time to deliver the laws that the Prime Minister said were an absolute priority. The Attorney-General said, as recently as a matter of weeks ago, that this law was an absolute priority. The Prime Minister sets the parliamentary timetable, so claiming that their government has run out of time—and it surely has!—to legislate on this important matter is just another 'I don't hold a hose' moment from a Prime Minister who takes responsibility for nothing.

Returning now to the issue of trolling, I say again that we in Labor acknowledge the importance of taking action against the ugly, harmful and cowardly practice of online trolling. We in Labor believe that social media platforms have a responsibility to take steps to stop their platforms being misused by anonymous users to incite violence, spread disinformation and abuse and defame people with impunity. However, it is concerning that so many experts in the legal community as well as so many online safety advocates and so many victims of online abuse have questioned whether the bill in its current form would in fact be able to tackle online trolling. We're particularly concerned that, as presently drafted, this bill would not provide the vast majority of Australians with any practical means to redress the harm caused by online trolling and that the introduction of the measures in this bill might, without significant modification, in fact make matters worse.

It seems that many of the deficiencies in this bill, as an antitrolling law, arise from the fact that it was never intended to be an antitrolling law. The original name of this bill was the Social Media (Defamation) Bill, and that is a far more accurate title. Notably, the Attorney-General's own department who prepared this bill admitted that the antitrolling bill had very little to do with antitrolling. They said, and I quote from evidence given at the Senate inquiry:

Certainly, it's been … a matter of observation and feedback in the consultation process that the title is potentially misleading. I can be clear that the bill is about defamation and it is not intended to address broader types of online harm. The reason for it being in the title of the bill is that the behaviour that we are looking at is one form of trolling, but it certainly is not intended to suggest that this bill seeks to address trolling generally, nor online harms generally. It is a targeted bill that is about defamation and only defamation.

Those are the words of the senior official of the Attorney-General's Department who gave evidence before the Senate committee. Questioning during the Senate inquiry into this bill revealed that the misleading name of this bill was the result of a direction to the department from the Attorney-General's office, so the name of this bill that's now before the parliament, very belatedly and too late for it to pass the parliament, is something that came from the Attorney-General's office, no doubt part of the announcement strategy that this Prime Minister is so fond of.

Evidence from many witnesses appearing before the Senate committee inquiry into this bill established that not only does this bill fail to provide any practical means to combat this scourge of online trolling in providing blanket protection from liability to those hosting defamatory comments on webpages they own and administer as well as the extensive legal safe harbour it provides to social media companies hosting defamatory material, but this bill is likely to make the problem of online trolling worse.

In this context, leading defamation barrister Ms Sue Chrysanthou SC submitted that the bill not only fails to protect Australians from online trolls; the sweeping defences from liability it provides effectively make this bill 'a trolls' charter'. Those are her words. The submission to the committee inquiry led by Ms—

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 1.30 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.