Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, , 1:58:05 to 2:02:07
Officials provide details on the public consultation process for the digital duty of care exposure draft, including the volume of substantive submissions and campaign emails received.
Topics: Online safety, Law reform
Speakers: Senator The Hon Sarah Henderson, Mr Andrew Howell, Ms Sarah Vandenbroek, Mr Jim Betts, Unknown Speaker
The E-Safety Commissioner is the right person to ask about the views of the E-Safety Commissioner.
Mr. Betts, I'm asking about documents in the possession of the Department. So and the advice that you have received, and that's appropriate.
Sure. But your question began with what were the views and concerns of the E-Safety Commissioner? And I don't want to put my witnesses in a position where they're asking to speak on behalf of an independent regulator.
No, no, I appreciate the point you're making, but what I'm asking is what advice is or other correspondence was received by the department in relation to these concerns. And so I ask you to address that as well as have you received any document correspondence advice from the e-Safety Commissioner in relation to the exposure draft at all?
We have received comments from the Safety Commissioner against the exposure draft. It didn't go specifically to the codes and standards, so I asked Mr. Hyles.
So that uh Andrew Howell's Assistant Secretary of Digital Platform Policy Branch. Um as Ms. Van Brooke mentioned, we've had various interactions and engagements with eSafety over the course of this, they've been intimately involved in kind of helping to guide the development of this process. They have provided advice about their assessment about the bill versus the current codes. Um that advice essentially says, you know, overall broader, the the digital duty of care is a kind of a broader systems-based duty than the codes. Um the coverage is broader. Um, the enforceability creates a direct statutory kind of duty which doesn't exist in the codes. Um there's broader transparency requirement. So I think their assessment and they can talk to this directly themselves, but their assessment is that they think this is a stronger legislative framework.
So that with the comments that you received on the on both the exposure. Your draft and the bill. Do you have a copy of those comments or advice with you?
Not that's not scrawled all over. It's got lots of notes and things on it, unfortunately.
I'm happy for you to get out the question.
We can probably look at the question.
If you could provide a copy to the committee of the comments that you have received and the any draft comments that you've received from the safety commissioner on both the exposure draft and the bill, and there might be various iterations if you could provide each iterations. I'm also asking for each submission that was made in relation to the digital duty of care exposure draft. There was a very limited period of time where the department asked for submissions. Do you have those submissions to hand at all?
No, we have published a summary of what we heard during consultation on the department's website. We haven't published all of the submissions. We need to go through a process of checking whether people are comfortable with having their submissions publicly released or not.
As you know, the fact that something is confidential doesn't mean that it should not be provided to the committee. So I would ask on notice and I would ask in a timely way because we are trying to obviously do our work on the bill. If you could please provide every submission that you have received, except if it's a there might have been some campaign.
We received 5,0101 emails altogether, but only 225 of those were treating as substantive submissions. The rest were a negative campaign that was run against the.
Right. So if we just could get a copy of the of the negative campaign as well as each of the substantive submissions. No, no. One of those. One copy.
One copy. Sorry. And then the 2250s.
One copy of the campaign, just so we can see the campaign. And then the 225. Do you if we could get the 225 submissions, please? That would be we would be most grateful.