Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to make some comments about the Online Safety Bill 2021 I think it is important to note that the trend in this area of regulation and big tech, as it's widely become known, is only going to increase. Big tech has changed our lives for the better and it has also brought new risks which need to be managed by policymakers. That is what this bill is an attempt to do. It is an attempt to intervene into the market and into the way that these schemes operate to protect people. That is an important starting point because the philosophy that you bring to these debates is important.

Our view has always been that it is important to inject policy and regulation wherever there is consumer detriment. This is not a capital and labour thing; this is a consumer protection thing. The government has built up a decent record here of being prepared to intervene where there is consumer detriment or where there is broader community detriment in relation to technology companies. It's been widely said that tech companies are the railroads or oil companies of the 21st century. These companies have so much power. They have done much good, but they have the potential to do much bad.

Over the last few months we've seen world-leading media bargaining code legislation. We have led the world in trying to ensure that publishers and public interest journalists are paid for their work. We have also been prepared to intervene to ensure that consumers are protected. Social media really is the wild west. I am not in favour of regulation for regulation's sake, but there is so much content on social media which already contravenes our laws—many of them state laws, I should say. But I don't think we should be reluctant about moving into this territory of ensuring that big tech organisations have an appropriate level of regulation.

The conduct of the engagement of the big tech organisations during the media bargaining code legislation debate was probably the worst lobbying I have ever seen in my life. People would be aware that large companies threatened to leave Australia and threatened to do all sorts of things. I think once you have a global company threatening a democracy, threatening a country, the country has to win, because we can't get into a situation where companies are so large that they are effectively able to boss a democracy around. We have been here before. People can go back and look at what Theodore Roosevelt said about all these things. We borrowed much of the antitrust principles in Australia as well through our own competition law.

So this is a very welcome initiative. What it really does is bring to bear a simple, single framework for online safety. I think setting out the basic online safety expectations and arming the eSafety Commissioner with the power to effectively ensure that people are protected will be broadly welcomed. The concerns that I have here would be widely shared across this parliament—that there is bullying and abuse that goes on online. It is rampant at times. It is leading to people doing all sorts of dreadful things. I think that the commitments we made back in the election campaign to increase penalties for the use of a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence from three to five years is really important. I think it's one of the most important commitments that we took to the last election. People are being bullied. People are being abused. Often it occurs under the cover of anonymity. There's nowhere else in our world, in our society, where you can, under the cover of darkness, pretend to be someone else and basically attack people—you can use all manner of things to attack people, and to try to destroy their lives—and it's just not good enough. You can't do it in broad daylight. You can't do it in any other theatre in life. The policy here, to effectively reign in carriage services, is a very important one.

I won't bore you with the talking points, but the point really is that this will be a clear framework. It is important that we respect the system of parliamentary oversight, and it is very welcome that the basic online safety expectations will be set by the minister and be disallowable by either chamber of the parliament. In this place, in this debate, just as you see in any other similar debate, we don't want to pass down to regulators rule-making capacity. These are important rules. We're balancing civil liberties against the desire to protect people, and these are judgements that should be exercised by a minister and they should be disallowable, and that is the intention. The eSafety Commissioner will do a great job here—I have a lot of confidence in the incumbent—but the framework of having the minister setting the regulation is an important one.

Ultimately, we want to have a system where Australia is not a backwater. And while we want to see technology used—technology is good—we also want to make sure people are protected. What we don't want to see is people being bullied and harassed online. We don't want to see people attacking people under the cover of anonymity, because they're too gutless to say who they really are. That's not the sort of debate we want to have. That's not the sort of country we want to have. I, personally, want to see that sort of behaviour reigned in. Social media is the Wild West. Anything goes, and it is not good enough for people to use social media platforms to break the laws of Australia.

We have laws in New South Wales against anti-incitement and defamation, and social media should not provide a back door to breaking the law. It's very important that this scheme is ultimately going to protect people from cyberbullying, from image abuse, and is done in a way which balances out the privacy concerns that are going to be legitimately held and that the rules are made by the minister in that way. This is a very important piece of legislation. It is utterly consistent with our Liberal philosophy to intervene where it's in the public interest, and it builds on the media bargaining code, which was a very important win for Australia. It was so important that we prevailed once the big tech companies started to threaten our country. We cannot have a situation where large tech companies, which have more power than almost any other non-state actor in the world today, can bully and defeat a country. Australia has led the world again. This is a very important bill, and I commend the bill to the Senate.