Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I'll repeat what I said, because, clearly, the minister was not listening before. The proposal that this government has for an anticorruption commission is in fact a proposal to establish a cover-up commission. It is a protection racket that would allow corruption in government to go unchecked, which is just how this government likes it. I hope the minister was listening this time and will not be making the false accusation that he did before.

What do we have here now? We have yet another inquiry. Unfortunately, the Morrison government has run late on everything, from legislating a new online safety act, to reforming online privacy law, to improving digital media literacy in the community, and now to initiating this inquiry into online harms. This Prime Minister is always late. Labor was disappointed that it took the Morrison government so long to introduce legislation for a new online safety bill in 2021, a good 2½ years after the Briggs review recommended it, back in 2018. It's also disappointing that the government is running so late on privacy law reform and the introduction of a new online privacy code for digital platforms, which was recommended by the ACCC back in 2019.

At Senate estimates earlier this year, the communications department admitted that it had completely dropped the ball on digital media literacy. The minister for communications is also sitting on a report from the ACMA, delivered in June 2021, on the adequacy of the voluntary disinformation code, and he hasn't yet given the ACMA formal regulatory powers or additional funding to tackle misinformation. Sadly, this government and the minister for communications have not acted to deal with domain name system access. I've written twice to this minister for communications, and I'm very sorry that he's left the chamber as we are debating his own inquiry. The minister has not even given me the courtesy of a response to this urgent set of reforms that are needed to the Copyright Act, but that is symptomatic of a do-nothing government that doesn't actually want to do anything and wants to run away from the task of government. They have been found out.

Question agreed to.

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