Mr MARTYN EVANS (10:05 PM) —I am not leading for the opposition in this matter; my colleague the member for Perth and shadow minister for communications will do that at a later stage in the debate. He will, of course, more formally set out the opposition's response to the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999 . However, it is my intention at the conclusion of my remarks to move on his behalf the second reading amendment which has been circulated to the House.

I think it is important initially to look at what lies behind this bill. The community would be entitled to be very cynical indeed and very suspicious of the government's motives and timing in this legislation.

Mr Entsch —Why don't you oppose it?

Mr MARTYN EVANS —The honourable member will have to restrain himself and await the outcome of this debate to see what will occur in relation to the opposition's action on this. Ultimately, we opposed the bill in the Senate where the government refused to accept our very reasoned and reasonable amendments in this matter. I am sure the honourable member for Perth, in his capacity as the shadow minister for communications, will set out much more clearly than I can the opposition's response to the government's political motives in this bill. However, when one looks at the timing and the urgency with which the government has pursued this matter, one would, as I say, be entitled to be quite cynical about the way in which it has done so.

This is an issue which the government discovered very suddenly—just at that crucial moment when it sought additional votes in the Senate for other legislation, for example, in relation to the sale of Telstra. One would be entitled to assume that there was some link between these items and that it was not entirely coincidental that the government was keen to rush through legislation to impose a censorship regime on the Internet at the very moment it wanted the vote of a certain Tasmanian senator.

Far be it from me to be that cynical. The reality is that there is a reasonable proposition behind this legislation. It is not unreasonable to say—the opposition does not say it is unreasonable—that we should place some roadblocks in the way of children accessing unacceptable content on the Internet. It is a perfectly reasonable objective. To complain about the way that the government has handled itself in relation to this bill is not to suggest that we want to see children accessing unacceptable material on the Internet. That is not the case. It would be wrong to characterise perfectly reasonable opposition to some of this bill's terms and provisions, the cynical way in which the government has promoted it and the timing of this legislation as anything other than just that.

The opposition is certainly aware of the need to review content on the Internet. It is aware of the need to ensure that illegal and unacceptable content by community standards is not too readily placed in the sight of children in this community. We all understand the need for that. The government has no monopoly on concern for young people. Indeed, it is quite improper of it to suggest that that is the case or to characterise opposition to this legislation as in any way condoning child pornography or pornography generally or, indeed, promoting such adverse community standards.

However, it is quite wrong of the government to suggest that in some way this legislation will seek to address those kinds of concerns. The government comes in here and admits at the conclusion of the parliamentary secretary's speech that this is only an effort on its part and that it is only trying to do something. In fact, one could paraphrase what he said as, `The government is keen to be seen to be trying.'

Mr McGauran —No. You are putting words in our mouths.

Mr MARTYN EVANS —I said that one could paraphrase his remarks. I did not say that they were his actual words.

Mr McGauran —And they're not accurate.

Mr MARTYN EVANS —They are very accurate. In the concluding remarks of the parliamentary secretary's introductory speech, he quite clearly says, `The government says that just because it is almost impossible to achieve our objectives does not mean we should not try.' In other words, he was saying, `We want to be seen to be doing something about this not only in the community but also in the Senate'. This was particularly so a few weeks ago, when it really mattered. For that purpose, the government rushed this legislation in. It was hastily drafted. It was forced through a Senate committee process with unseemly haste. It was equally forced through the Senate with unseemly haste because the government knows that on 1 July, in all probability, the numbers in relation to this matter will change somewhat. Indeed, the government itself will probably be a lot less interested in this legislation after 1 July than it was before 30 June.

The reality is that the Internet is a very new technology. One should look at new technology to see what concerns there are about it, what areas of criminal activity might exist on it and what things governments might necessarily have to do to regulate that content. It is not something we want to do. Naturally, information is out there. Members of the public are entitled to participate in what is perhaps the world's greatest library in history and to do so freely and as they choose.

But sometimes regulation is necessary. It is not inappropriate that the government should have reviewed the position to see what is occurring on the Internet. As I say, it is very new technology, but it is technology that is expanding at an unprecedented rate. It is worth reviewing the extent to which technology has penetrated the community in some of the earlier important technologies, such as radio and television.

It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users. It took 13 years for television to reach 50 million users, 10 years for cable television and only five years for the Internet. In that time, the population has grown, but not by that much. You can see by comparison that radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users while the Internet took five years to reach 50 million users. Obviously, there is an unprecedented growth in that technology and an unprecedented explosion in both the content available and the number of users.

Indeed, Internet traffic is doubling roughly every 100 days, which means that the growth rate is something like 700 per cent in annual terms. We had well over 100 million users of the Internet in 1997, which had grown from three million in 1993. Indeed, I personally remember the days before the World Wide Web browser came into effect, when one was forced to use the Internet just as an email communication tool. That was not so many years ago. Some eight or nine years ago, the whole graphical user interface of the Internet did not exist. It has exploded in the last decade in a way which the government, I suspect, is only now starting to come to grips with.

The reality is that Internet commerce—that other very vital and growing part of the Internet—is projected by the OECD to reach something like a trillion dollars in revenue by the early part of the next century. That is very massive growth indeed, and Australia is very much part of it. The three countries with the very highest number of Internet users per 1,000 people are Finway, Norway and Iceland. One might suspect that it has something to do with the climate or the fact that they want something to do on long, dark winter nights. They have in the order of 240 users per 1,000 people.

Next in line at No. 4 is the United States, with 203 users per 1,000 persons. Australia comes in next. It is No. 5 in the world, with 178 users per 1,000 people. That was roughly one-fifth of the community in 1999. When looking at the exponential growth rate of the Internet, that number will obviously expand very quickly. One can see that early in the next century a majority of families will have some connection with the Internet. Certainly they do at school now. Many people now do in the office or at work. Increasingly, our homes are wired for the Internet.

Obviously, in that context, we need to look very closely at the kinds of issues taking place on the Internet that might need regulation. Pornography is only one of them. Online gambling is a very serious issue. Recent reports in the United States have indicated that that community is seeking to take steps to regulate online gambling. Australia is at the forefront of online gambling. With revenue reaching a trillion dollars in e-commerce early in the next century, obviously fraud over the Internet is going to be a very serious issue.

The government has rushed into this parliament legislation relating to pornography and the classification of material on the Internet. However, where is the equally important legislation—in fact, it is far more important—on electronic commerce? The government can see fit to rush through legislation on the issue of classification on the Internet and what pictures people can see on the Internet. However, where is the legislation in relation to commerce and consumer protection from fraud? Where is this government's consideration of gambling on the Internet? They are very substantial issues which the government has not yet found time to grapple with in any serious way.

The government is acting contrary to some means that would protect consumers on the Internet. Its reluctance to allow the public to use strong encryption, for example, prevents the accessibility of digital signatures, the verification of identity, the protection of privacy and the protection of commercial data and financial transactions on the Internet. This government does not encourage the use of encryption. Indeed, I think many of its legislative decisions have been against it. The government has looked to see what it can regulate on the Internet, and it has been driven entirely by its need to placate the interests of some senators before 30 June. It has not taken a rational view about what the important issues on the Internet are, what needs to be regulated, what it should do first and how it should address community priorities in that respect.

This technology is very much global technology. As the parliamentary secretary admitted, very much of the content on the Internet, including the objectionable content, is indeed not in Australia. As we look at the tens of millions of host sites on the Internet—and early in the next century there will obviously be hundreds of millions of sites—I will defy the Australian Broadcasting Authority to sit down and comb through those sites. Unless individuals are going to sit there and do nothing but search for objectionable material on the Internet—in other words, look for the very things they think ought not to be there—no-one is even going to have any practical proposition of addressing that content. The number of sites on the Internet, the ability with which they can be moved from country to country, the ability with which the address of sites can be changed, the ability to change the Internet host merely with the click of the `Enter' button on your keyboard are such that it is absurd to realistically imagine that you are going to be able to police this content.

Much of the highly objectionable content is, of course, already very much illegal and strongly sanctioned in our communities. There are very strong laws against the exploitation of children for sexual purposes. Those laws should be rigorously enforced and the strongest possible criminal sanctions imposed against those who would seek to use children in such a fashion. For example, the community will demand that the government protect their standards in that respect but, of course, if that material is on the Internet, it can be hidden in many ways. It can be hidden in news groups, for example.

There are something like 25,000 to 30,000 news groups which are continually broadcast around the world. They last on the Internet for 24 to 48 hours, depending on the host, although some sites archive them for a much longer period. The reality is that they move from computer to computer. They are very transitory in nature, and thousands of such messages are exchanged every day. Indeed, on a given Internet archive for news groups, you might find half a million to a million messages archived after only a few weeks of continuous operation. No-one is going to be able to filter that kind of content. It is utterly impractical.

If you find an objectionable site and someone reports it to the ABA, by the time the ABA actually looks at it and finds that site, the host could well have been changed. When someone finds that that host site is taken down, it is a trivial matter to move that to a free Internet server in the United States, where First Amendment rights protect the content of that site; yet it is just as easily accessed from Australia. No-one would even know where that content is residing in the world. Because the United States offers so much Internet content and so many resources in this regard, because the United States has that First Amendment freedom, naturally that will become the prevailing global standard, no matter how much we might try to pretend otherwise.

Where does this leave the government's bill? Obviously in chaos. The government is seeking to make a point and to do nothing more than that. This is not a realistic or a real attempt to actually address the evil which the government refers to. The reality is that, if we wanted to do that, we would have to explore a number of other options. The fact that the government pretends to the community and to the parents of Australia that it has actually done something about this content is the real crime in this bill. Parents who are not properly informed about this issue may well now think that there will be legislation in place to make the Internet safe for 10-year-olds. That is not going to be the case because almost all of this content is inaccessible to the government's regulation and, indeed, inaccessible to almost anyone's regulation.

Therefore, we have to look at what makes the Internet different. In the past, we have regulated print content, we have regulated newspapers, we have regulated the cinema, we have regulated magazines and we have regulated print publications such as Playboy and the like with various degrees of success. They are centralised publications; they are controlled centrally. There are very strong barriers to entry into the industry. The parlia ment can regulate the content of the print media and cinemas because those things have very limited points of distribution. They are controlled by large corporations, and it is very easy to regulate the limited number of outlets.

By contrast, the Internet turns this whole distribution paradigm on its head. The Internet allows everyone to be a publisher; the Internet allows everyone to produce their own films; the Internet allows everyone to put photographic content and text content up on the Internet. The freedom of the press used to belong to those who owned the presses. The reality is that we are now all publishers, and that is what the government has failed to recognise in this legislation. The Internet is a totally different paradigm of distributed computing power, of distributed intelligence, of distributed technology. It empowers individuals in a way that no prior publishing technology has. That is the difference which this bill completely fails to comprehend; it is a difference which I suspect this government completely fails to comprehend. It is what makes this bill largely unworkable, and it is why the opposition will be addressing a number of amendments to it.

The real tragedy of this is that the government seeks to pretend to the parents of Australia and to the Australian community that it has actually done something about content on the Internet. What it should have done, of course, is to look at ways of empowering parents, families and schools to use this technology in a sensible and responsible way, educating parents as to the nature of the content that might well be found on the Internet and providing them with software tools—which are indeed now readily available for installation on home, school and office computers—to block access to sites from the impetus of the computer itself. In other words, it should follow the technology of the Internet. The Internet is distributed technology. Therefore, any attempt to block content must be done on a distributed basis. You cannot tackle this in a centralised fashion as we have done with all these previous technologies like the cinema and print.

If you were to attack this from the bottom up, if you were to attack this from the per spective of empowering families, empowering parents and allowing them to regulate content from their computer out rather than the Internet service provider down, you might indeed have some chance of achieving your objective. You would also achieve a community which would be much more educated about the value of the Internet, about the dangers of the Internet, and you would allow parents to make decisions for themselves about what is appropriate in their family situation.

Mr McGauran —We are doing that as well.

Mr MARTYN EVANS —But you are failing in that regard because you are principally focusing on a centralised control regime which I would have thought a government led by market forces would have seen the folly of. The minister is treating this industry as if it were a traditional print or cinema industry. The reality is, Minister, that we have moved on from there, and it is time that you moved—

Mr McGauran —You have no solution.

Mr MARTYN EVANS —The minister has just spent the last five minutes listening to my solution to this. The reality is that his solution does not work at all. He admits that it is merely for effect. It is just a chimera; it is out there to tell people that the government is attempting to do something. The government wants to be seen to be trying. Well, it is very trying, and it is failing.

The problem is that the government is denying empowerment to parents. In its enthusiasm to pass some centralised regulatory control which ultimately will not be effective, the government is missing the opportunity to empower parents and work with the community to address this problem at the household level where some degree of control might well be effective and where the reasonable objectives that the opposition shares with the government and the community in this area could possibly be brought into effect. That is the only way, historically and into the future, we will be able to make this technology more reasonable and accessible to children—and, indeed, safe for them to use as the world's greatest library, as it should be.

With that, I would like formally to move the second reading amendment which has been circulated in the name of the opposition, and I would place on record our intent to contribute even further in this debate. I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "the House:

(1) expresses its concern that:

(a) the legislation is being dealt with in indecent haste and with inadequate consideration;

(b) the Government's claim that the legislation will `solve the problem' of unacceptable content is not supported by the reality that the vast bulk of internet content is generated outside Australia;

(c) the proposals, including the idea of mandatory internet service provider filters, are unworkable and easily by-passed;

(d) the application of the narrowcasting classification regime to the regulation of internet content has not been thoroughly analysed and may well require revisiting in the future, in view of rapidly changing and converging technology; and

(e) the legislation does not include a sunset clause, or provision for review, given the speed of technological change in this area; and

(2) recommends that:

(a) efforts should be made by the Government to pursue international agreements on the regulation of internet content; and

(b) substantially more emphasis should be placed on end-user empowerment through information and education campaigns for parents, schools and guardians about the use of the internet and of end-user filter devices".

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Nehl) —Is the amendment seconded?

Mr Kerr —I second the amendment and reserve my right to speak.