FERGUSON: Anika Wells, welcome to 7:30. 

MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS ANIKA WELLS: Good to be with you. 

FERGUSON: Australia’s first moves in online safety had strong bipartisan support, including passing the social media ban for under-16s. The Coalition, however, is strongly opposed to this bill. What went wrong? 

WELLS: What we wrong in the Coalition internals I think is that there are so many people in there that are very worried about the threat that One Nation poses and they are lurching them to the far right. This, like you say, was a point of bipartisanship under Peter Dutton. You would think that keeping children safe online is something that is above politics. I’ve said we’ll work in good faith. There are some green shoots today – the Opposition shadow reached out after I introduced the bill and I saw that Angus Taylor, the Leader, said that he would take a look at the bill. So I haven’t given up hope. And, like I said, we remain open to considering amendments that improve the bill.

FERGUSON: Now, there are already regulations against harmful content for young people online. If those restrictions aren’t working, why will this bill succeed?

WELLS: Because those 17 codes and standards were drafted by big tech for big tech – they’re marking their own homework at the moment. We’re putting 17 codes and standards into the law and we’re trying to modernise them so that this is more of a future-facing law that allows us to capture all of the tech that you and I can’t even imagine today. But perhaps in a year or two’s time will be completely dominant within our children’s lives.

FERGUSON: It sounds abstract. How would the restrictions work? How do you filter material for young people and not for adults? How would it work?

WELLS: So the onus is on an online service, so a social media platform, to identify the risks on their platform and to take steps to mitigate against those risks. They’ll have to provide that risk assessment to eSafety every 12 months, and eSafety needs to mark that homework and be satisfied that those mitigations are sufficient and are in place.

FERGUSON: Just to go back to that idea of if it doesn’t work now, how’s it going to work in the future? I’ll give you an example. This month, the eSafety Commissioner reported that Roblox, a gaming platform used by children, that it’s automated image moderation tool failed nearly half of the time to detect child exploitation material. That’s the situation now. How would this bill change that?

WELLS: Well, they’ll be subject to significantly higher fines. And having met with the global founder and CEO of Roblox, who travelled to my office in Brisbane to meet with me after I raised concerns about his platform in January, they are worried about their social licence. They know they need social licence to operate on Australian shores. And something like upholding a digital duty of care is an inherent part of the social licence for a game as huge as Roblox, where one game offers a child 44 million different experiences.

FERGUSON: At the same time, we’ve seen the eSafety Commissioner tell tech companies what their platforms are doing and who they’re doing it to. The eSafety Commissioner recently told tech companies that their services were being colonised by criminals, but their responses have been inadequate. You say they want a social licence, but what are the disincentives in this bill that are going to be strong enough to change that behaviour?

WELLS: Because this bill changes the entire onus of responsibility. These examples that you are pointing to are examples of the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff -the harm has to occur and then the eSafety seeks to enforce compliance or arbitrate where harm has occurred, seeks to force penalties where harm has occurred. We don’t want the harm to happen in the first place. And we believe that big tech and online services could do an awful lot more to identify harms on their platforms, just as we expect employers to identify risks in the workplace to mitigate against risks for their workers.

FERGUSON: Now the Greens are offering you a potential path to passing this legislation if you agree to higher penalties as well as an individual’s right to sue. Are you prepared to look at those higher penalties?

WELLS: I’m looking at both of those amendments and I’m working with Senator Hanson-Young, the Greens Communications Spokesperson, just as we worked together to strengthen the social media minimum age laws. I’m happy to look at any amendments that potentially improve the bill. The private right of action is something that a lot of work has been done on, and we’ll keep working that through before - well, now we have the Senate Committee inquiry to go through as well. We proposed the fines that we have because they’re in line with what the ACCC and what consumer protection fines look like in Australia. The Greens are right in that those global revenue percentages are in existence in other jurisdictions, and we’ll have a look at it.

FERGUSON: I just want to come back to the Opposition’s view of this bill, and that is that it curtails free speech. The bill lists as harmful content for young people material that, and I quote, promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality. Does that capture debate around transgender issues? For example, could JK Rowling be caught up in these restrictions?

WELLS: No. A hostile attitude example that I used at the National Press Club today is, material that says to young boys that consent doesn’t matter.

FERGUSON: So that’s an example, but how broad is the definition? How are we going to understand what a hostile attitude towards women or gender equality is? How broad is your definition?

WELLS: So the reason that that provision is in the bill is because we had more than 20 women’s groups and teachers, teachers’ coalitions from across the country ask us to incorporate that because they’ve noticed that young boys coming through the education system have these hostile attitudes. Using the Office of Parliamentary Council, that’s the wording that they have proposed to best capture that intent. Now, the eSafety Commissioner will have to produce and publish regulatory guidance – I was talking to her about how that’s progressing today. And I guess we’ve learned some lessons from the social media minimum age, where the regulatory guidance that was published around what reasonable steps were for the social media minimum age, that’s similarly going to be instructive for how big tech has to assess the risks on its platform against that detail. 

FERGUSON: And just on another matter. There are ongoing questions about your trip to Adelaide last year where you went to a birthday party but also said you were having- were conducting parliamentary business. Don Farrell’s office has not released documents that back up your claim. Did you charge taxpayers to attend a friend’s birthday party?

WELLS: I have provided all of the information for that trip, among 250 work trips that I have undertaken as a minister, to the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority. That’s a good thing. I expect scrutiny as a Parliamentarian. IPEA did a complete audit of that trip and the 250 other trips. All parties on that trip confirmed publicly those engagements, and IPEA made its conclusions and published a report five months ago back in May.

FERGUSON: Did you meet with Don Farrell’s office on that trip?

WELLS: Yes, and that has been confirmed.

FERGUSON: Anika Wells, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

WELLS: Have a good evening.