TOPICS: Abortion Access; Digital Duty of Care Bill; Federal Court Decision; Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence.
LAURA JAYES: Live now to the Social Services Minister, Tanya Plibersek. Question without notice, first of all, Tanya, apologies, but I just wanted to ask you about this issue. Basically, Victorian Labor is warning about a genuine threat about abortion, its availability of it. And you have to see this in the context of One Nation being a genuine threat there at election time as well, don't we?
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Well, yes. One Nation's made it clear that they support winding back access to safe and medically available abortion. And I'm not surprised that the Victorian government is seeking to make it clear that it's only the Labor Party in Victoria that is committed to making sure that if a woman has to make that incredibly difficult decision, that she can do so in a way that is safe and available. We know that particularly for women in regional communities, access to pregnancy care or abortion can be much more difficult than if they're living in cities. When I was the Health Minister, we managed to make a medical termination more easily available that dealt with part of the problem for women in regional communities. But certainly there's still real restrictions on the cost of getting a surgical termination in many parts of Australia.
JAYES: Does this risk becoming an election issue like it does in the United States, though? Because there will be some. I can, I can hear them on their keyboards already saying, this just makes abortion easier. And some women might do this when it's unnecessary and does not protect the rights of an unborn child.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, abortion's not easy and I don't think, Laura, that anyone who has had an abortion would say that it was easy. I think the only people who think it's easy are people who've never had to make that difficult decision. And guess what? A lot of them are blokes who never will have to. It's a hard decision to make. The typical woman who is deciding to have an abortion is a middle aged woman who already has a number of children and she's making that decision because of an unplanned pregnancy that she feels that she can't afford to go through with. The idea that you force someone to have a baby when they feel that they're unable to cope with, thats not a recipe for a happy mother or a happy baby in the future.
JAYES: Let's talk about the digital duty of care bill we introduced today with the Ministerial power to define harm has been removed. So, who defines it now?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, it's defined in the legislation. And if there's any change that needs to happen as new threats potentially emerge, then the legislation will have to reflect that. The legislation will have to be changed by the Parliament. The Minister has said to, in order to secure passage of this legislation through the Parliament, she's prepared to give up that element of the legislation. And there's also stronger protections in there, just to clarify protections for journalists and media. But let's go back to the basics here. What is this legislation about? It's about keeping our kids safe online. It's about protecting adults from illegal content, like child sexual abuse material. And it's about giving adults the choice about the sort of feed that they get. At the moment tech bros decide what turns up in your social media stream. This is saying you can just follow who you want to follow, you can follow the individuals or the businesses that you like instead of decisions being made for you by some tech bro in California.
JAYES: So, to play devil's advocate here as well, and there are still holes in the legislation. What would stop a platform from removing lawful political speech because it's safer than risking a fine under your duty of care?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Laura, I really do think it's like saying what would stop a platform showing fairies. There's all sorts of misinformation being peddled out there by people who just don't want this legislation to happen. This is all sorts of claims about this being about censorship. It's simply not, at the moment your feed is decided by the tech bros.
JAYES: But the Minister has given up her right to define what harm is. You know, there were a lot of concerns that that power would have meant censorship. Yeah, meant censorship. So, there has been an admission along the way that. That it would have gone too far.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: The harm is defined in the legislation. You can have a look at that for yourself. Anybody who's voting on this will be able to look at it. And honestly, Laura, who wants to see child sexual abuse on the Internet? Who wants to see. No, exactly. But right now there are more safety rules around the hamburger you buy. We've got good food safety standards in Australia. We've got Standards about the safe cars that you drive on the street. You can't put a new medicine on the market without it going through extensive testing to make sure it's safe. The only industry that thinks that it shouldn't have even basic safety standards attached to it is the Internet industry. And why is that? Because the value of their industry depends on keeping your eyeballs glued to the screen. They sell advertising based on how many eyeballs they've got glued to the screen. They don't care if that's eight year old kids awake through the night on a continuous feed being fed stuff about eating disorders and suicide. They don't care about that because it adds to their business model.
JAYES: An eight year old shouldn't be on social media under our legislation.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: No, exactly. And we know that companies have been failing to enforce even the basic rules that we have. That's why we've had to double the penalties as well. Because the big media companies, they just see that as the cost of doing business if the fines are too small. They are not interested in providing a safe environment online for our kids or for adults. We're putting in the most basic safety. You can't buy a washing machine in Australia that doesn't meet Australian safety standards. And yet the Internet, the people who profit from the Internet think it should be like the Wild west with absolutely no rules where they can do what they like and feed people all sorts of harmful content. We've spoken about this before, Laura. It takes an average of 23 minutes for an account mimicking a teenage boy to be fed misogynistic content online. We've seen a 70% increase in sexual assault. Strangulation has become commonplace in teenage and young adult sexual relationships with 60% of young people saying that they've been strangled in a sexual encounter. This causes death and brain damage. This is related to the lack of safety around the Internet. At the moment, the only people in this country who provide a service and make a huge profit, who think there should be no rules around how they do it are the tech bros based in California who don't care about our kids.
JAYES: I want to ask you something else about that particular issue in a moment, but I want to ask you first about the federal court ruling about McPhillamy’s and your protection order being invalid when you were the Environment Minister. Do you accept that you got the process wrong?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, of course I respect the decision of the court and there is, and they've decided that there is A process issue here to examine. I don't want to comment too much on that because there may be processes that come from that decision. What I would say is this was never about the mine itself. It was about the location of a tailings dam. And since I made that decision a few years ago, the share price of the company has increased by more than 400%. So, it's obvious that the market also believes that this project has a future if the site of the tailings dam can be resolved.
JAYES: Right. So. But I guess, I mean, we've got our reporter in the town. The town really wants it. We've had an Aboriginal elder on this morning.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Hang on a minute, Laura. There's very different views in the town. My decision was not based on those views. It was based on heritage an a validly made application. The former Minister for the Environment made a very similar decision about a project very close by, just a few kilometres away. There's a long history to this and there's quite different views about it.
JAYES: Yes, but was, in hindsight, was there too much weight given to a cultural group that others in the town say do not have that, those cultural ties to the area?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, Laura, I don't think I should get too much into the details of the history and decision making around this. I'd say that there's very different views in the town and it is one of the reasons that we think as a government that cultural heritage laws should be updated to clarify some of these issues.
JAYES: Right. So, does this come to. If you say the heritage laws should be updated, is there a general view, again, in hindsight, that perhaps heritage is put too far above economic prosperity?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: No. And I really don't want to go into the merits of this case in case there are further legal processes down the track. So, I'm not going to give a running commentary on it. I think it's worth saying, though, that the court decision, it doesn't in any way reflect on the decision around cultural heritage here. It was a process decision.
JAYES: Ok. Without commenting on the allegations against Sam Wood, the law protects the alleged victim, as it should, so coverage can end up being dominated by the accused career and reputation. How do we avoid that imbalance and preserve those protections?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, as you say, it's very difficult to make comment before something goes to court, before there are legal proceedings. So, I'm not going to comment on that individual case. What I would say is that we know that domestic violence and sexual assault are under reported. They are massively underreported. And of course, I think court processes and police processes need to be allowed to run their course. But the best thing that we can do is stop the violence happening in the first place. And that's what our focus will be in the next phase of our national plan to end violence against women and children. What we've seen is some steady progress in areas like intimate partner homicide. We are slowly seeing those numbers trend down on a population base. Not fast enough for my liking. Obviously not fast enough. But we are seeing an explosion in sexual assault. And we need to really work to reduce the incidence of these crimes in the first place. And that's always going to be my focus.
JAYES: Tanya Plibersek, thank you for your time. Appreciate it.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Always a pleasure to talk to you.