Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (Senator Conroy) to a question without notice asked by Senator Ludlam today relating to Internet filtering.

I want to briefly comment on the response by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy to my question earlier about mandatory internet filtering. The reason I put the question to the minister in the form that I did was to clarify whether the government’s intention is to provide an opt-in internet filtering system in Australia for concerned parents or other people who might want to provide a filtered internet system for their families or for themselves, or whether the minister intends to go down the track of a mandatory feed. With some regret, I must admit that the minister’s comments have caused a great deal of concern. He has probably inadvertently muddied the waters quite substantially about the system that the government is proposing.

In estimates hearings on 20 October the minister listed a number of countries as trialling or having in current use mandatory internet filters. He listed a number of countries, including the UK, Canada and those that I mentioned in my question earlier. The reason I put the question to the minister in the form that I did is that none of those countries—the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand and Finland—has mandatory content blockers on their service providers. That is not even under trial in these places. It was trialled briefly, I believe, in Sweden, but it was optional, not mandatory, and that was embroiled in controversy last year when police tried to add certain kinds of peer to peer trackers to the list of what were meant to be simply child pornography sites. So we immediately saw the proposed expansion of the list that was being run in Sweden by police for completely unrelated purposes. I would put it to the minister—and I hope he would agree—that the list of countries which have mandatory filtering is not one that we particularly want to join. I am speaking of Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Burma and some other countries. These countries are in many ways highly repressive, and I do not think that is a precedent we want to follow in Australia.

The problem with the concern and alarm that has been raised in the online community is that the minister has been very careful not to clarify what kind of system the government is proposing for use in Australia. We saw the same rather evasive approach in response to my questions earlier. All we are really after from the minister is, firstly, a retraction of the statements that he made before the estimates committee on 20 October, because quite clearly the story has changed—and at least that is quite welcome. The minister is not proposing that the countries that he listed a couple of weeks ago have mandatory content blockers. Also, we would like a clarification of what the government intends. What the minister said in the press was that, when this trial is proved successful, the government will move to institute such a system in Australia and that the process will be consultative. I do not see a great deal of consultation going on. The process is just rolling out, and a great deal of concern has reached my office and I presume also the minister’s office. So I would really appreciate some of those concerns being taken seriously.

Question agreed to.