ADJOURNMENT
Senator CICCONE (Victoria) (20:09): I want to raise a matter in the Senate tonight that's been sitting quite uneasy with me for some time and did come to light last Friday in the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee inquiry into the Defence Estate. In her opening statement, Celia Perkins, a defence official, told the committee that she and her colleagues did not consent to footage of their evidence being used as content on social media platforms.
To be clear, the committee was right to decline that request. Evidence given to a Senate committee is public evidence. It is not for a witness to decide which part of a public record can be filmed or shared, but this does not mean that we should ignore why she made that request.
Watching yourself and other witnesses have their evidence clipped, stripped of context and turned into social media grabs designed to provoke rather than inform is why I want to bring this to the attention of the Senate tonight. We have seen senators accuse witnesses of not telling the truth, shifting the focus from what was said to what plays very well in a feed that rewards outrage over accuracy.
As we heard last week, department secretaries have now written to the Joint Select Committee on Parliamentary Standards about this. There is an irony here. Every hearing opens with the chair of a committee reading a preamble about treating witnesses with respect.
Some of those quickest to accuse this official on Friday of trying to silence scrutiny are the very people whose use of clip footage online gave rise to her concerns. The person raising a legitimate concern now gets branded as the one doing the silencing, while the conduct that incites outrage online goes unexamined. Some colleagues have in the past week also spoken about the role of algorithms associated with social media platforms.
Minister Plibersek, for instance, has warned that these systems are designed to maximise engagement by feeding users the most extreme material available. She was speaking about the violent, misogynistic content that is pushed at young people within minutes of setting up an account. Platforms don't amplify our most careful contributions; they amplify the most inflammatory ones.
A thoughtful question gets a few hundred views, whereas a gotcha moment gets picked up straightaway by an algorithm regardless of whether the claim is factual. There's an old instinct in this country to cut down anyone seen as getting above themselves, and political content now packages that instinct as accountability. It used to carry a social cost.
People who made a habit of it were seen as bullies. Now it carries a reward. An algorithm doesn't care about whether we're holding someone to account or tearing them down for clicks.
It rewards both, provided they generate outrage. That goes to the heart of what this official was trying to say. I'll also note something that I've seen online since Friday—the suggestion that this female Defence official has no standing to object because she is a senior public official, a public servant on a substantial salary.
That reasoning should trouble all of us. A public servant's pay is a matter of public record, but it is not a licence to treat her with contempt. If earning public money means forfeiting any expectation of basic decency, it will make it very hard for us to attract good people in the Public Service.
The Director-General of Security, Mike Burgess, has warned that leaders in public life need to be mindful of the language they use. The Prime Minister echoed that earlier this year following the Bondi attack, calling for the temperature of public debate to come down. Perhaps this parliament should look at how evidence given to committees is used and whether MPs need our own standards for how we describe witness evidence online.
The request went further than the committee should allow, and it was right to say no, but the official was not being precious in raising it. She named something a lot of witnesses now feel and few say out loud. This parliament owes her and those who come after her a serious answer.
It's called respect. Senate adjourned at 20 : 14