Topics: Digital duty of care, private health rebate
Peta Credlin: Sarah, that press club address today from the minister, the Freudian slip, the lack of analysis of the detail, interesting to say the least. Let’s have a quick recap.
EXCERPT
Anika Wells: The digital duty of care is not a stepping stone for regulating misinformation and disinformation. If adults listen to manosphere podcasts, or people post their views about the government, or make memes, or want to say the moon landing was fake, they can continue to do so without restriction. We are controlling…we are not controlling free speech. We are not conducting covert surveillance.
Peta Credlin: Sarah Henderson?
Senator Henderson: Well, I think the minister might have let the cat out of the bag with that one because this is all about controlling free speech, Peta. This is dangerous. This is undemocratic and we know that the Prime Minister has this agenda because he said so. He gave the game away in New York when he said that the next stage of this bill would be all about combating misinformation and disinformation, as well as combating polarisation of political views on the left and the right. The other thing that I’ll say, I had a departmental briefing with the minister’s department, and when I asked what does it mean to have material or conduct which is hostile to women or gender equality, the response from the department and the minister’s adviser was, ‘We are very concerned about the manosphere. We want to shut the manosphere down, basically.’ So this minister is not being truthful, and we have seen that again in spades at the press club today.
Peta Credlin: Yeah, they say that about the manosphere, you know, but they’re all about having men in women’s sport, you know, boys in girls’ sport, you know. They bang on about all their quotas for women. They don’t even know what a woman is, and anyone can be a woman. So why do you need a quota? I mean, none of this stuff makes any sort of intellectual sense. They talk about young girls and anorexia videos going out to eight, nine-year-olds, but they’ve already got a ban for children under the age of 16 on social media. I mean, the hypocrisy in all of this, the lack of intellectual rigour, staggers me.
Senator Henderson: Well, that’s exactly right. So there’s a social media ban which has fundamentally failed because Labor got the implementation, Peta, so wrong. But there’s other things about this exposure draft, which are, oh sorry, now that it’s a bill, as compared with the exposure draft, which are really concerning. So these wide-ranging exemptions. So anything in the public interest is exempt. Now, what does that even mean? That’s sort of nonsensical because it’s up to the eSafety Commissioner to determine that. And she’s now got these wide-ranging, unfettered powers to make guidelines about the online harms. So the ministerial discretion, the unfettered powers of the minister, has now shifted to the regulator, to the eSafety Commissioner. But there’s also some nonsense in the exemptions. So the bill recognises that pornography is harmful to children. But would you believe that one of the bits of content that’s exempt from the bill is material that’s classified, including pornography? So this is a complete and utter dog’s breakfast. It makes no sense. The minister got rid of the online mandatory codes and standards which require the platforms to take all sorts of preventative action, including detecting and removing sexual abuse material and terrorism material, and to be replaced by this vague duty of care. And now those codes and standards have gone back in, but they conflict to some degree, with other definitions in the bill, like it is as a piece of legislation, it just goes to show that the minister does not know what she’s doing, and she’s also not being truthful with Australians. We know what Labor’s agenda is, it’s very insidious, and that’s why this bill cannot be supported.
Peta Credlin: Yeah, she’s the same woman who charged taxpayers $4,000 to go down to her girlfriend’s 40th birthday party in Adelaide and tried to fit the husband up, who’s also a Labor minister in South Australia, for a quick and dirty sort of meeting to put in the diary. Only he won’t play ball. He said, ‘I didn’t have a meeting in my diary’, and now her case is coming quickly unravelled. I mean, let’s be honest about that. You had a big win last night in the Senate. You and the Coalition team. You teamed up with the Greens and One Nation. You got rid of this cut to the private health rebate for older Australians. What I don’t understand here, Sarah. Again, this is lack of intellectual rigour. If people can’t afford, with this rebate cut, to keep their private health insurance, and they get sick, which they will, if you’re over the age of 65, it’s more likely you’ll use a hospital than not, you’ll go straight into the public system, so you’ll cost the taxpayer 100 per cent of the fee. Whereas if you’ve got private health insurance, you’ve got an insurance scheme you’ve paid into that’ll take the load from the taxpayer. So it’s not about saving money. This is about hurting people, not helping people.
Senator Henderson: That’s right, and this is a terrible betrayal of older Australians. Some 3 million Australians over the age of 65 who’ve depended on this discount to the private health insurance scheme to make sure that they can continue to pay for their health needs as they get older. And of course we’ve discovered under freedom of information that almost 78,000 people would have been affected by being forced to basically go back to the public system, and that’s almost double what the health minister announced. So we’re really proud to have led the charge to have got rid of this bill altogether. We will not stand for the way this government is betraying older Australians. It’s a shocking attack on them, and we stand with them, and we’re very proud to do so.
Peta Credlin: So you’ll keep fighting when this comes back, as Mark Butler said it would today?
Senator Henderson: We are going to keep fighting tooth and nail to stop this shocking piece of legislation ever being passed.
Peta Credlin: Terrific, I got a lot of feedback from viewers about that. Sarah, thank you very much.