David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Wong) and the Minister for Trade and Tourism (Senator Farrell) to questions without notice asked today.

Could I first deal with the answers given in response to a question from my colleague Senator Hanson-Young. Senator Hanson-Young asked a simple question. We've now seen a high-profile case in the United States be delivered against some of the biggest, meanest global platforms for the toxic nature of the product they sell—hundreds of millions of dollars ordered in damages. In light of that, Senator Hanson-Young asked when is this government, the Albanese Labor government, going to move from empty words to actually legislating a digital duty of care? I've read the answers, and I've listened carefully to the answers. It was the biggest load of waffle you could ever imagine.

There was an extraordinary inability to come to grips with the core issues. When are we going to get a digital duty of care? Anyone who listened to the answer from the Albanese Labor government would have no idea and, indeed would be fearful that they weren't quite sure how to turn a computer on. That would be the fair summary you'd get from Labor's response to Senator Hanson-Young's basic question. So why do we need a digital duty of care, and why do we need the second tranche of the privacy reforms? It's because this government, the Labor government—and this is consistent with what the coalition did when they were in government—have given a blank cheque to the tech platforms. Whatever they want, whatever data they want to suck out of Australians, however they want to manipulate Australians and however they want to maximise their profit by driving hate and division, the coalition and Labor and their mates in One Nation, who live off that hate and division, say, 'Whatever you like.' They give a blank cheque to these big US tech platforms.

Australians are sick of it. They're sick of a government that refuses and fails to back in the interests of Australians and, instead, deregulates for some of the most noxious players on the planet. What do we need to do? Well, what we could do, first of all, is a lift and shift of the regulations in place in Europe, which actually put some constraints on big tech. They force transparency on algorithms. They force transparency on the data that they hold about Europeans and actually give people in Europe the right to say no. In an extraordinary moment I recall in the AI inquiry we had at the end of the last parliament, Meta came in, and it had just been discovered that Meta had scraped off every Australian Facebook post, Instagram post and photo going back to 2007 that had been put on a public post, and they had fed it into their AI. They fed every single one of them—-every comment, every post, every photo—into their AI, and there was this faux outrage from Labor at the time: 'How could you do this? This is terrible.'

I remember asking Meta, 'Why did you do this to Australian users, and why didn't you do it to European users?' And they said, 'There's a law that prevents us from doing that in Europe.' They actually have laws. What has happened in the, what, more than 12 months since then? Zip, zero, nada—from this government. Our privacy rights, our online protection rights, are not even fit for the 20th century let alone the 21st century. Give us a digital duty of care. Lift and shift from those European regulations and controls the platforms already know how to comply with to give us the right to say no and help put those transparency provisions in so we can at least see what's been fed into these toxic algorithms and make decisions to get away from them. That's what's needed, but why won't Labor do it? Because they are frightened of retaliation from Donald Trump. It's the same story, time after time—complete spinelessness. They won't take on Donald Trump, because they think that he's going to go and say mean things about them if Australia takes on American tech. Well, it's about time to grow a spine.

Can I finish by reflecting on some of the answers from Senator Wong. Senator Wong stated that we've got a fuel crisis, we're working with our neighbours, and we're working with our regions. She mentioned we're working with Singapore. Well, I wonder if Minister Wong has read the statements that were just given by Minister Wong's counterpart, the Singaporean Foreign minister, who, in the last 24 hours, told some basic truths. He said that the US was now 'a revisionist power'—this is the language of the Singaporean foreign minister. He said:

Basically, the underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor.

Imagine if our Foreign minister was speaking with independence and truth like that.