Topics: Labor’s failing social media ban, AI and intellectual property of creatives
Stephen Cenatiempo: Shadow Minister for Communications, Senator Sarah Henderson, is with us. G’day, Sarah.
Senator Henderson: Good morning.
Stephen Cenatiempo: I want to talk firstly about the social media ban which you and I have discussed on a number of occasions, hasn’t worked. The government’s now doubling down on a bad policy.
Senator Henderson: The social media ban is not working, and we’ve just seen a major study in the British Medical Journal last week that showed 85 per cent of under 16 are still accessing social media, and that the ban is unlikely to improve adolescent mental health in the short term. There was also a compliance update showing seven out of 10 teenagers are still on social media, and this is because this is a policy that was poorly designed. It was rushed and badly implemented, and we’ve now seen the proof of that with the government rushing in amendments to the social media ban to give the eSafety Commissioner additional powers to compel the production of documents, and there’s an increase in fines as well.
But it is a fiasco, and it just goes to show yet again, this is a government which is scrambling, which is not transparent and honest with Australians, particularly Australian parents, in this case. And what I’m also really concerned about Stephen – parents and their children are being badly let down because there’s a whole lot of things the government should be doing to improve online safety, and they are ignoring things like making sure that parents can access safety tools on mobile devices, combating the dreadful algorithms which are fuelling addictive doom scrolling, and the blocking of live streaming to prevent the horrors of child sexual abuse. The government is not acting on these critical issues. It’s putting all of its eggs in the one basket. It can’t even get this policy right, and as I say, it’s now scrambling to fix it.
Stephen Cenatiempo: The extraordinary thing, and I know you’ve spoken to them, the Australian company, Qoria, that work with 40 different US states on this kind of stuff, and they’ve said we need to give parents access at a device level to the same protections that you know you as a parliamentarian have for instance. There’s somebody in that building up there that stops you from downloading TikTok onto your phone. Parents can have that same functionality with just a change to ACCC regulation, but we’ve now got the International Justice Mission out there saying the same thing, that we need to put these device-level blocks in. Not only to protect children, but to stop paedophiles and child abuse material being transferred between each other on these devices. I mean, the technology’s there, the experts know it’s there, but the government just won’t listen.
Senator Henderson: That’s exactly right. We want to stop the harm before it even reaches the phone, and there’s a whole range of things that should be done in relation to protecting the actual device, the operating system embedded within the device. The government is just really out of its depth, of course. We’ve got Anika Wells running around the world, spruiking – it was initially, of course, Coalition policy – the social media ban. She should have stayed at home, done the hard work to implement this policy properly. And, of course, it is Australian parents and their children which are paying the ultimate price.
Stephen Cenatiempo:It’s extraordinary. Now, something else that you’ve flagged, and Senator David Pocock has been talking about this too, is the, I guess, intellectual property rights against artificial intelligence. Effectively, our artists, music artists predominantly, but right across the creative field, are at risk of having their material effectively stolen.
Senator Henderson: This all emerged in the Senate inquiry last year when we learnt that the government was slinking around the corridors of Parliament with large AI companies, looking to sell off the intellectual property rights of Australian creatives.
Now they’re our wonderful musicians and artists and writers and journalists and designers, creatives who work very hard to create their own intellectual property. Now, there was a lot of work to undermine our Copyright Act to provide a text and data mining exemption to the Copyright Act. And we, the Coalition, spoke out very strongly, of course – putting Australians first against these big multinational giants, but we are not convinced.
We believe that some sort of sleazy deal has been done. There are very hot rumours that some announcement is going to be made, and this is a shocking development if that’s the case, because we need to protect our creatives. Yes, of course, we do want to celebrate and nurture innovation but not sell off the rights of our creatives and leave them high and dry. We have a very strong licensing system in this country. Most people have industry associations where they can licence their content and be paid for it, but the notion that a creative in this country will effectively have their material stolen, legalised theft by the Albanese government, is abhorrent. And I can tell you it will not be happening under Angus Taylor and the Coalition.
Stephen Cenatiempo: It’s one of those things and look I know in defence of the government, to a certain extent, AI is moving so fast that it’s very, very difficult to put the right policies in place, but when it’s obvious like this, this is where we should start, I would have thought.
Senator Henderson: It is moving fast, but the government needs to keep up. I mean, the government is trying to do – and this is Andrew Charlton in particular, he’s the Assistant Minister for Science, Tech, and Digital Economy – he’s been running around the world trying to do these deals, saying, “come to Australia, invest in our country, and we’ll sell off all our rights”. Now, that is completely unacceptable. Big tech have every opportunity to pay for these rights on a commercial basis. The idea that they can ingest copyright into their AI models without permission, attribution, or compensation is a complete disgrace. Our creative industries, Stephen, employ hundreds of thousands of Australians. They generate major economic and cultural value, and if there’s any suggestion that any sleazy deal is going to be done by the Prime Minister and this government, they have got another thing coming.
Stephen Cenatiempo: Now can I get a commitment from you? If you do become Communications Minister at the next election, can we ban all politicians from social media?
Senator Henderson: You know, I’m a straight shooter, and my commitment is – I cannot give you that commitment!
Stephen Cenatiempo: Because if I’ve got to put up with Kara Cook dancing through the permanently closed doors again, the ones that have been shut since 1996 at the front of Parliament House, I think I’ll have to get off social media myself.
Senator Henderson: Stephen, I am doing my very best to be sensible and serious on social media, and I have refrained – with one exception at a childcare centre a number of years ago – from dancing, and I think that’s a very good thing.
Stephen Cenatiempo: Yeah, look I don’t know if you’re a good dancer or not, but I mean, I’m certainly not so I don’t dance on social media. Sarah, good to talk to you. We’ll catch up again next week.
Senator Henderson: Thanks Stephen.