Australia has a bunch of exciting new laws!
Forget the AFL rights, television networks should have been scrambling to air the Albanese government’s epic attempt to cram some 76 bills through parliament during one sitting week.
Like all sporting matches worth their salt, this one was a real nail-biter with an epic finish: a remarkable 32 bills were passed in the final day – and in prime time, too. This scoring feat was something a gleeful Albanese boasted about on Friday morning, as he seemingly took on his new ‘man of action’ guise overnight.
He didn’t get them all through though: environmental protections were put off until the Earth gets really, really bad, while Labor failed to get a limit to the millions of dollars political donors can contribute to a party, meaning we’ll continue to be treated to Clive Palmer’s garish, golden, Trump-esque electioneering for some time yet.
But all in all, the Labor Government passed 45 bills in the final seating week of 2024, neatly painting Albanese as a man of action, who turns “promises into progress” as he neatly puts it – or, if you listen to his many detractors, as someone who fumbled a bunch of laws into motion without allowing the proper discussion or debate.
Votes on the bills started at 6.30pm on Thursday evening, and ended just before midnight, when the social media age limit was passed as a final encore. Albanese has seen enough Midnight Oil gigs to know to keep the best song until last, and studied enough Springsteen to know that an epic gig can go down as legend.
In fact, the PM was so preoccupied with this six-hour bill-passing blitz that he couldn’t even pose on social media in a band tee in support of Aus Music T-shirt Day. This grave oversight may have cost him the vital Newtown Town Hall Hotel vote. But, I digress.
If Albanese calls an early election – comments about “fully expecting” parliament to return in February suggest he may not – this will have been his final showboating opportunity before getting down to the grubby fun of electioneering.
So, how will the bills he managed to pass endear him to the voting public? Did he pick the correct things to focus on, Oils tee blunder aside?
“We started the year by delivering a tax cut for every single Australian taxpayer, and we’re entering it by delivering more help for households,” Albanese told the press on Friday morning, with the glee of a grand final winner interviewed post-match.
“My message is we have your back this week, we continue to deliver our agenda, working hard to make Australians lives better, holding supermarkets to account to get fairer prices at the checkout.”
Albanese then listed off his wins: 80,000 new homes for renters, age care reform, cheap childcare fees, new clean energy jobs, Reserve Bank reforms, better wages for child care workers, and of course, the social media age limits.
Now, the act of rushing 32 bills through in one day without allowing the correct level of discourse wasn’t without its detractors. Jacqui Lambie rightly called it “dangerous to shove bills down our throats,” and hilariously pointed out the irony of forcing the Senate into overtime after passing “right to disconnect” laws.
Peter Dutton likened it to a “going out of business sale” on Today, saying “it was like everything discounted and whatever it takes to clear the shelves.”
In Albanese’s defence, one of the bills passed was to change the references to Queen Elizabeth II in a bunch of documents, a less-than-hasty amendment, considering her 2022 death.
Of the bills passed, the most relevant to the media and marketing industry – aside from the social media reforms – will be the Regional Broadcasting Continuity Bill, which ensures free-to-air TV services in regional areas if commercial operators pull out of the market; and the wide-ranging suite of privacy measures introduced in the Privacy Amendment Bill 2024.
My favourite of the bills that passed is one to retrospectively make legal the warrants used by the Federal Police when gaining information used to seize 104 firearms and $45 million in cash in an international sting named Operation Ironside. Oops!
Another whoops that should have really been studied more is the Commonwealth Entities (Payment Surcharges) Bill 2024, which will deal with millions of illegal credit card surcharges the Commonwealth Government had been slugging people with for more than two decades!
This bill “retrospectively applies the legislative authority to charge and collect payment surcharges to payments made on or after 1 January 2003″ meaning that millions of dollars that Australian citizens paid in illegal fees will magically evaporate. The past is a different country.
Why aren’t the people up in arms? Because this bill was successfully snuck through with 30 other friends. So the government can probably keep this two-decade mishap quiet – for now.
Albanese certainly won’t be keeping quiet about the Fairer for Families and Farmers Bill 2024, which will enforce a code of conduct on the supermarkets – the sector that received the most white hot anger from the Australian public in 2024.
This year, Coles and Woolies have moved from being two of Australia’s most trusted brands to being among the least-trusted, due to their duplicity involving pricing – cheating farmers is one thing and the public is still mildly annoyed at this entire industry for daylight savings – but when the supermarkets were accused of inventing phony discounts during a cost-of-living crisis, it was open season. And Labor were smart to rush this bill in mid-week – the most ‘last minute’ bill in a week of ‘last minute’ bills.
Not surprisingly, considering all the ‘last-minuting’, there were a few dubious bills passed.
Most troubling of these is a change to migration laws that gives the Australian Government, according to the Refugee Council of Australia, “the power to pay undisclosed third countries to take non-citizens, including recognised refugees with Australian citizen family members; to imprison people who will not return to countries where they fear for their lives; to create travel bans on citizens trying to visit Australia for study, business, tourism or to see family; to reverse refugees’ protection findings in order to remove them from Australia; and to seize mobile phones and conduct unwarranted searches on people in immigration detention.”
This warrants further discourse – and urgent action. Unfortunately, Australia has always treated refugees poorly, and this is unlikely to move the needle, vote-wise. Besides, the Coalition will be credited for forcing these laws through, and are in fact, already claiming the victory as their own ‘win’, with shadow home affairs and immigration minister Dan Tehan boasting they are “basically running the immigration system for the government because they have failed to do it themselves”.
One bill with the potential to get slippery in the not-so-distant future is the Responsible Buy Now Pay Later Bill 2024, which extends the credit code to the likes of Afterpay and Zip.
If these glorified lay-by companies fall under the same strict lending regulations as the banks, they will most likely use this increased status to raise their lending limits, interest rates, and penalties, and cause a whole new generation into a dangerous debt spiral. But that national crisis won’t present until well after the election, so that’s fine for now.
I pointed to the potential flaws in the social media age limit a few weeks ago, and even spoke to an actual factual teenager who made the point that kids will simply work out a way around it.
But most won’t bother if it’s even remotely difficult to circumvent, and therefore the ban will probably work in reducing bullying on those particular platforms – if only because it will empty them of the social circles that make them attractive, and to hack into a social media platform none of your friends use anymore is like breaking into a closed nightclub – it probably doesn’t have the vibe you’re after.
This will, sadly, also remove the positive sense of community that social media offers kids with niche interests, or those who live in remote areas – and it will have also have the negative impact of removing the option of social media as passive entertainment – a place to follow celebrity accounts, to watch videos of animals of different species being friends, to read video game reviews.
How the ban will work, in actuality, is yet to be stepped out. But what it will do, in the short term, is win Albanese major parent points in the lead in to the election.
Hanson-Young called the bill a mere “fig leaf”, saying it’s just to appease parents who can now tell their kids over the holidays “it’s illegal to be on your phone”.
Albanese made no secret of this being this major motivation, saying: “I want parents to be able to say, ‘sorry, mate, it’s against the law.’”
Of course, those same parents may be longing for the extremely effective babysitter that is social media to return once summer 2025 rolls around and their houses are filled with bored teenagers asking to be driven places IRL. Our national test case will soon figure out that the medium is not the message, and social media isn’t the issue, just as television wasn’t the issue, and rap music wasn’t the issue, the issue here being that kids bully kids and will do so in whatever forum exists – behind the dunnies or via Facebook Messenger (which, incidentally, is exempt from the legislation, and therefore may have been handed a government-sanctioned monopoly as the under 16s bullying funnel of choice).
But Albanese doesn’t want a quick fix, despite what the haste suggests. He wants this to be a talking point. He said as much on Friday morning.
“This is something that tomorrow on the sidelines of sporting events, whether it be netball or cricket season at the moment, or tennis or whatever, little athletics, mums and dads will be talking about this and they’ll be talking about it when they pick up their young ones from school this afternoon and hopefully this morning dropping them off as well.
“This has been an issue that is raised with me more, or at least as much as any other issue by people when I’m out and about – and what we’ve done is world leading. We’ll work to make sure that it’s got right. But the legislation is very clear. We don’t argue that its implementation will be perfect, just like the alcohol ban for under 18s doesn’t mean that someone under 18 never has access. But we know that it’s the right thing to do.”
Let’s set aide the clumsiness of Albanese listing off four different sports, and two different car-trips. He is correct: this will continue to be the most-discussed of the 45 bills passed, and it’s one that has the PM fathering the nation, protecting our kids, siding with our parents, and taking on the big scary tech giants invading our borders. As long as we keep blaming overseas companies for our societal ills, we can rest secure that we’ve done our role.
Of course, this is all politics. Passing 32 bills in a single day is a political stunt, and there’s an election on the horizon. It’s also the biggest sales weekend on the calendar.
Remember: It’s the time of year where we buy now, and pay later.
Enjoy your weekend.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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topics
Anthony Albanese
federal election
legislation
Privacy Amendment Bill
Regional Broadcasting Continuity Bill
It’s a joke pushing through all these bills in 1 day.
But why isn’t the media making more of the pollies going on holiday on 29-Nov – what’s wrong with sitting for another 3 weeks like most workers?
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Albo is a dud, even rusted on Labor voters hate him now
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Brilliantly written but with Aussie politics, it almost writes itself? “environmental protections were put off until the Earth gets really, really bad” 🙁
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Brilliant read – enjoyed every bit.
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