STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator NAMPIJINPA PRICE (Northern Territory) (13:57): We are suffocating under Labor's economic mismanagement, and now Big Brother has a bill that starves the 2.6 million Australian businesses that rely on digital platforms for sales, marketing and hiring. The 'Big Brother bill' is a sweeping guillotine on the digital services our modern economy is built on.

Overnight, platforms will be forced to ask Australians one question: algorithm on, algorithm off? In one click, 2.6 million small businesses could be shut off from the digital economy—tradies, florists, coffee shops, bakeries, hairdressers. Your side hustle, your career, your passion suffocated because Labor has failed to even consider the economic fallout of its 'Big Brother bill'.

But why is that not surprising? My algorithm is filled with scrolls of success. I've watched small enterprises hustle, sweat and strike gold by reaching the exact people who want their service.

It's these exact entrepreneurs and the enterprises who lifted us out of cold baths and into warm showers, from pickled meat to refrigeration. We are living in a digital renaissance that Labor is about to switch off because the algorithms don't work for them. It's a free market of ideas and the best ideas win, not Labor's.

So I ask Big Brother directly: how many Australians will turn the algorithm off? Has Treasury modelled a single dollar of what it will do to small business? Has the Minister for Small Business, who is MIA, asked the question or has she just fallen into Labor's socialist agenda?

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