David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The Copyright Amendment Bill 2026 is a good bill. I thank the government for bringing it forward, and all the public servants who worked on it and those in the minister's office.

I want to talk briefly about copyright at this critical point in history, where we're seeing AI companies and big tech hoovering up copyrighted works to train their models with what seems like no regard for copyright holders. This is the role of governments—to step in and say: 'We have a system of copyright, and it's served us well. We have it in recognition of people who create works—artists, authors, and others—in recognition that their work is theirs. They own it. Utilising that work should be a negotiation, and they should be paid for the use of that work after the negotiation.'

It seems there are only two instances in Australia where we infringe upon that right. One is with artists, when it comes to the cap on what commercial radio and the ABC have to pay artists. There's no negotiation there; we have a one per cent cap. The other is when it comes to AI—and I have very serious concerns about what artificial intelligence means for creatives, for copyright and more broadly for our economy. I just haven't seen anything from this government—or both the major parties in this country—that shows they are willing to stand up to big tech, particularly in the time of President Trump and his relationship with big tech, and what that means for our ability to stand up to big tech given our reliance on the US when it comes to AUKUS and other things.

There are many Australians both questioning AI and questioning why we aren't allowed to stand up for our own artists in this country, for creatives here in Australia. It is important that the Senate says, 'We will protect copyright of creatives.' It's not good enough that you are a multibillion dollar company that has a huge amount of clout; that doesn't matter. You've got to pay copyright holders to use their works. I think it will get caught up in the guillotine, but I foreshadow a second reading amendment that very simply states that—and I would urge Senate colleagues to back copyright holders in Australia and back that second reading amendment.

We need to stand up to AI companies. We need to stand up to big tech. We need to stand up to this surveillance capitalism that is not working for us. They are monetising our attention. They are making, when it comes to big tech, extraordinary profits and finding some pretty creative ways of not paying us here in Australia. My sense—and we canvassed this a little bit during question time—is that some expectations from the government are not going to cut it. We need a government that is willing to stand up to big tech, to stand up to the AI giants who are in this arms race to develop the best model, to develop artificial general intelligence, and what that may mean for our economy and for societies around the world. We haven't even got into the some of the potential job losses from artificial intelligence; I don't think we're even tracking them at the moment here in this country—no safeguards, let it rip. It really doesn't cut it more broadly with AI. When it comes to copyright, we need to reaffirm that we believe that copyright is a really important part of how we deal with people's creative works in this country.