Senator COONEY (1:43 PM) —Senator Tierney has said that there ought to be a system whereby the law is enforced—and nobody can deny that. He has suggested, I think, that parents should be able to see what their children are looking at, particularly young children, and to help them as they will. I do not think this is really a debate about censorship in that sense; it is a debate about what control people should have over their children. It is a debate too about how we use the Internet. People more learned than I will be talking about that later on in this debate. As Senator Bishop quite clearly demonstrated, this is a debate about process, as is many a debate in this chamber.

As Senator Bishop has said, the real concern the opposition has about this legislation is the process that is to be used. As you look at the legislation, it appears more and more that this is legislation brought forward not so much to satisfy the need that it proposes in its terms to meet, but rather, as Senator Bishop has said, to satisfy other needs. That is a bad way of going around making legislation. To put forward legislation to meet a particular problem when it is not the problem that you have primarily in mind but other matters is a bad way to legislate. Senator Tierney has talked about the horrible material that is put over the Internet. No doubt that is there and must be met. The police at the present time are already surveilling the Internet and seeing what can be done about it.

I will give an example of what I mean by saying that this is an issue of process and that the legislation falls down in meeting that. I refer to section 27 of schedule 1 of the bill, which talks about protection from civil proceedings. It reads:

Civil proceedings do not lie against a person in respect of loss, damage or injury of any kind suffered by another person because of any of the following acts done in good faith:

(a) the making of a complaint under division 1;

(b) the making of a statement to, or the giving of a document or information to, the ABA—

that is, the Australian Broadcasting Authority—

in connection with an investigation under this Division.

What that proposes is simply this: that anybody can make a complaint about a matter that he or she notes on the screen, and then a process is put into operation. It does not matter whether that is a vexatious complaint or a far-fetched complaint or what have you. Anybody that is damaged by that is unable to sue for what he or she may suffer as a result of being reported to the Australian Broadcasting Authority, no matter how slender the material on which the complaint is based. If this legislation was confident that it was fulfilling a real need in a proper way, I would not have thought you would need a particular section which protects people from being sued by people who suffer unjustly by the complaints that are made. It is very easy to make a complaint but oftentimes very hard to answer it.

Just as people who run a program on the Internet have a responsibility, so do those who make complaints about it and who may cause a lot of cost, a lot of anxiety and a lot of trouble to people who are going about their legitimate business and ultimately are found to have been going about their legitimate business. I see from reading the legislation that what happens is that people make a complaint and the ABA must investigate it. True enough, it can decline to investigate the complaint if it thinks it is frivolous or vexatious or not made in good faith or if the ABA has reason to believe that the complaint was made for the purpose or for purposes that include frustrating or undermining the effective administration of schedule 1.

The ABA does have a range of powers which enable it to go about its task in a responsible way. But why is that responsibility not brought in at the first stage of the process, that is, at the complaint stage? This is an invitation for people to make all sorts of complaints, which the legislation itself recognises may be frivolous or vexatious or not made in good faith. If somebody is faced with that sort of accusation and the ABA comes to investigate, that is a real problem for that person and it cultivates a culture of informing, unless it is very carefully watched.

As has been said by the two speakers so far and as will no doubt be said by the speakers after me, no-one wants to encourage the sort of material that has been described as coming over the Internet and everybody wants to equip families with the ability to stop that coming through. But there is another side of that which must always be remembered, that is, we do not want to create a regime where there is oppression by a group of people who go around informing on others on a basis that is not justified. This legislation, as I look at it, is inclined to do that. It is legislation that can be better brought into line by simply making those who make complaints bear more responsibility than this legislation presently does.

If you go on further into the act, clause 37 of schedule 1 of the act talks about the obligation of the ABA to notify an Australian police force—not the Federal Police, but any Australian police force—if it considers that it is sufficiently serious to warrant referral to that force. Again, there is a whole system of informing to get at a vice that could be better got at by other means.

It does seem as if the problems we are going through are not going to be answered in any event by the process that we are going to put into place pursuant to this legislation. The actual process of trying to stop this material coming onto the Internet is going to be very difficult. If, as I do, you believe those who say legislation as broad as this allows a range of complaints to come in such an undisciplined way, that is going to impact on the very lifeblood of the Internet system. There is so much good material that we want to come across on the Internet. What we have to watch in the present debate is that, in trying to put down a particular vice, we do not let loose all sorts of other problems that will not be cured unless we rescind this legislation, if it is put through, and go back and try to do what we are trying to do in a better way.

Senator Tierney has talked about a range of ways to answer these problems. He has talked about family life, and that is perhaps central to the way we ought to try to cure this problem. The problem that a lot of people in families these days have to tolerate, where both parents in the family have to work all sorts of hours just to make a reasonable living, itself impacts upon the ability of families to see what their children are doing. To resort to this legislation without at the same time trying to do something about the way the labour market is now conducted seems to me to be quite an outrage. In other words, we as legislators come up with this sort of legislation, which has all sorts of problems with it, and at the same time run a labour market which compels parents to be out at all times so that they are unable to devote the time and attention to their children that they should be able to.

I think both mother and father can work. I am not suggesting for one minute that they should not, but they should not have to work the long and intense hours that they do under the present system. When the second tier of workplace legislation comes past this chamber, we will be talking about how, more and more, the work force has been driven to contractual arrangements for people to earn a fairly sparse living in terms of normal hours. In other words, to earn a decent amount, people have to work long hours. That takes away not only from the ability of the parents to see what their children are watching but also from the parents' ability to give them the sort of culture and approach to life that overcomes the difficulties that are raised by this legislation.

When you look at it, this is legislation which is going to cause all sorts of problems. It will cause problems in the way it is policed and problems in the way that the Internet is going to be curbed, if it can be curbed. It will cause problems because of what that does not only to the industry that the Internet brings forth but also to the culture that it brings forth. It clearly needs another look. I think you will see, as you examine this, that the legislation is a tortured way and a wrong way of going about trying to get to a very fine object, the very fine object being that parents should be able to prevent the children from seeing the sort of thing that children are not allowed to see or that the parents do not want them to see. Indeed, it goes beyond children. When you think about it, there is some fearful material that nobody should properly look at. In any event, that is another issue. At the moment, the real issue in all this legislation is that it is premature. It is a wrong answer to a problem that has not been properly assessed. The answer has certainly gone nowhere near being the proper answer needed for the problems that are faced.