LYALL, Dr Ben, Private capacity [11:26] CHAIR: Welcome. Do you have something to add about the capacity in which you appear? Dr Lyall : I am a lecturer in digital communication at RMIT University, but I am here representing myself as a researcher rather than that institution. CHAIR: Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, I should advise you that this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and therefore has the same standing as proceedings of the house. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. I now invite you to make a brief opening statement before we proceed to discussion. Dr Lyall : Thank you, Chair and committee, for having me today and for the opportunity to speak. I want to acknowledge that we are gathering on unceded Ngunnawal land and extend that acknowledgment as well to peoples of the Wurundjeri and Bunurong lands around Melbourne, where I have travelled to, to be here today. In discussions petitions today, I want to reflect on examples like the Yirrkala land rights petition, which is in the building here with us, and what these kinds of democratic tools tell us about this country, which is something to reflect on. My submission raises a few modest points, a few queries, about how the standing orders, particularly around 204 and 205, might address contemporary digital communication challenges, based on the style in which people go about communicating currently, and whether these are acceptable. My interests here originally were in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uptick in petitions during that time. Like many others, I also have an interest in the application around standing order 204 (c) regarding moderate language, which has been raised in a number of submissions related to this inquiry. In general, my interest here is in hoping that the system can continue to be a safe space, especially for those who are less experienced or less comfortable with other democratic mechanisms that we have in this country. CHAIR: Thanks, Ben. I have a number of questions. You have been in this room listening to a number of presenters. Based on your research and on what you have heard today, what should the recommendations be for us, as the committee, in trying to improve the petitions space? Dr Lyall : We have definitely heard a lot about transparency measures and those types of things. I gather from what's been said that there are a number of back-end challenges. I am not a technical expert at all, so I wouldn't attempt to comment on how they function. To me, it sounds like the core concern here is managing volume and the type of manual work that's involved in checking incoming petitions—whether they are in order and how they progress. While there is probably something to consider around transparency, personally I value some of the elements of the system as they exist, such as its simplicity. Some of the other approaches that have been advocated for so far and the complexity of some of those different options that we have—whether they are technical, as in systems to manage petitions or whether they are adding to the standing orders—may, in a way, create thresholds and things like that. I wonder whether they might add complication to the space. An aspect of the system where I find value at the moment is that it does work as a fairly good educational tool. There is consistency in the responses that come through and in how they communicate with the public in a fairly even-handed way. I think that is quite valuable for educating the public on how these things work. Mr REBELLO: How do you think we can better promote engagement with the petitions process? Dr Lyall : I think promotion is really important. This is probably less known about than a lot of private petitioning systems that we have. Certainly, in my experience, there has been a lot less research into how these systems are used specifically. I do think there is scope for promotion there. What that looks like is a tricky question to answer. It's probably about a wider kind of education piece. I am sure there are pieces around this within existing civics education, but it's maybe overlooked, compared to other systems around voting and other procedures that we have in place. There's probably scope to expand there a little bit. Mr REBELLO: A big part of your submission was in relation to the moderate language component. As part of your research, have you looked at equivalent provisions in other jurisdictions around the world? Dr Lyall : A little bit. This wasn't in my submission, but I haven't looked much beyond what's included in other submissions that give examples from the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the Scottish Parliament. Mr REBELLO: Are there any of those that you think would be a gold standard, compared to Australia, or something that we should move towards? We are considering whether or not it is appropriate to amend that definition and perhaps be more prescriptive. Dr Lyall : That's possibly a good way to go. I do quite like features of the UK system because I think they move a little closer to what we might call protected attributes—how people might work in a workplace or something like that. I think it's a bit clearer on what's within bounds and what's out of bounds in terms of what you can say about the different audiences for your petition or the people you might be wrapping up in your reasons for the petition. I tend to find that it's not so much the request but the reasons. That's where sometimes people can run on a little bit in the types of things that they describe about others. I am aware that is a two-way street in some ways, which was mentioned in earlier discussions. Sometimes people may reveal things about themselves or their family members and things like that. I realise that there's a juggling act in thinking about how that is said outwardly and also what it says inwardly. It would be tricky, the more that is added. If you add to what's not permissible, you might start to restrict what the individual can say about themselves, which seems a bit like an overstep. Mr REBELLO: Some of the other rules we have at the moment include the 50-signatures threshold, which we are also reconsidering in light of the increase in volume that we're receiving. Do you think that's appropriate? Do you think there is scope for that to go up? Dr Lyall : I think it's quite low. It's also quite new. Am I correct there? Mr REBELLO: It is. Dr Lyall : It is fairly new. Previously, there was no number. CHAIR: The UK and other parliaments have higher thresholds than we have; that's for sure. Mr REBELLO: You spoke about the rise of information disorder since COVID-19. Could you talk to us a little bit about what you mean. Dr Lyall : I was using that as a catch-all term. The scholar who is writing about this is Claire Wardle. It's a catch-all term to describe misinformation, disinformation and those various terms that are all slightly different. Mr REBELLO: One of the other questions we have is in relation to the use of third-party platforms. I think you were here for part of the discussion on that. What's your view on the parliament working with or engaging with third-party platforms? Do you see any risks with that? Dr Lyall : Yes, I do. As I said, I am not a technical expert in how the systems and the data might be managed in that regard, but I do think that raises a number of risks in terms of how that data gets shared and circulated. In the conversation about some of those services, there's one clear message about it not being for data-sharing services, but an explicit feature and affordance of those services is then emailing and updating people on where the petitions are at. It is built into the system that it adds a bunch of exchanges. Contact information is obviously part of that. I would have some reservations about that and maybe also some of the translation issues that you mentioned. Getting the standing order requirements into a third-party system and back again, and how that is managed, could be quite challenging. Ms COMER: In your submission you highlight the issue of system appropriation. Could you expand on that? Dr Lyall : There were a couple of things that popped up along the way. This is to do with that idea of how people communicate in digital environments in a contemporary way. There are a few things that maybe aren't covered by how the standing orders treat petition text. There are a few things that people do there that I think may expand on the 250-word limit in some way, because they provide pieces of text or communication that exceed that. These are fairly rare, but there are examples of where people have used the hash emoji to indicate a hashtag, and then you have sharing affordances built into the platform for X, Reddit, Facebook and various different services. As soon as you see that symbol, you know that's something you can search for very specifically on those platforms to then find out more about what this petition is. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does communicate a message that is maybe in excess of the 250 words. The same thing goes for emojis, which I found in one petition. I don't actually have an answer to this, but I don't know how we have a shared understanding of what that means when that goes to the public. CHAIR: We have a rule that petitions that use emojis or URLs are deemed out of order. The secretariat communicates to the petitioner that they need to amend their petition in order to meet the standing orders. These are some of the things that are not articulated at the front end of the website. These are the elements that need further consideration, because that creates substantial work that slows down the processing of petitions. Ms COMER: How would the use of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies have an impact on the petitioning process, if any? Dr Lyall : I find that, any time AI is discussed, the discussion becomes about AI and not about the actual process or discussion we were supposed to be interested in. It can be quite a distracting element at times. I don't know if it's because of where it is in its development and hype cycle and all of that stuff, but everything just becomes about it and less about what's going on. As we have heard, people probably prefer to feel like they're engaging with the systems of democracy or engaging with specific members of parliament, or however they see the process working for them. I have hesitations about that. I see that it could be useful for management in some way, on your side of things. There would be safeguards put in place around that, I trust, if that were the case. I don't know if the user side is worth considering so much—doing research to inform a petition or even correcting their grammar or something like that—because people will make their own choices about how they go about creating those things. I don't think there is a practical way to monitor that. CHAIR: Ben, do you have a view on repeat petitions on similar topics? Dr Lyall : I find that a very interesting one. It depends on the level of knowledge that someone is bringing when they use the system. There are examples where people will fairly clearly try to have the same topic directed to a different ministry, when it's essentially the same core issue that they are really interested in. That is one direction. The other one is simply a replication of an issue, which maybe represents that people are really interested in that topic or that one person is particularly interested in that topic. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. If you are considering having thresholds in place for when petitions can be referred and so forth, it could be useful if there were a mechanism to group at that stage. I notice that grouping can be done in the responses, which makes sense. When petitions come in, I have seen responses that are labelled to a number of different petitions. Having it at the front end might make a bit more sense as well, for transparency, so people can see that they have joined others. CHAIR: Using it and including it at the front end—what did you mean by that? Dr Lyall : Rather than receiving a response that's addressed to multiple petitions, having something in the process as it comes through to the committee that shows that it has been grouped with a similar type of content and then has been passed along and has been further considered or not. Ms COMER: Do you think the petitions process—not necessarily how it is now but how it could be—could be used as a tool to decrease political apathy within the wider community? Dr Lyall : Yes, I think so. It may have gone in a bit of a circle. In the early days of social media there was a lot of consideration of the term 'slacktivism' and the idea that people simply tick a box and move on to another interest, another issue. The fact that these systems are baked into parliamentary operations is, I think, really important and does have potential, for sure. That is super valuable too, as distinct from systems that are popular overseas, like the 10 Downing Street petitions, for example, or any of the private options. I think that having these systems which are very much baked into the parliamentary system, having those processes before the concerns are passed on to a member of parliament, is very valuable for that purpose. Ms TRISH COOK: I notice that most of your research is about accessibility and transparency in the system. What about the outcome of the system? Have you got any thoughts on what happens once a petition gets to the committee? At the moment, we may refer it to a minister, who may or may not respond. Do you have any thoughts about other processes? We've heard this morning that New Zealand do it differently. They debate. They can further go down into the guts of what the petition is asking for, if you like, whereas our petition committee here is slightly more administrative. Do you have any thoughts on that? Dr Lyall : This is only from hearing the discussion earlier this morning. It sounds like a really interesting process. I also got a sense that maybe that came with a counter, where the committee could also have a bit more to say at the front end of that process and decide that, if it weren't going to fit within a specific area of discussion or it weren't going to go to a certain minister, they would have a little bit more of a say. Maybe that balances out the workload question and how that gets managed. I do like and appreciate some of those systems. It sounds like we have them in some of our state jurisdictions as well. I think it would be good for people to be able to see how these processes can have an impact. We have been characterised as having a minimalist system in that regard, compared to some of our counterparts in Europe. I am talking about that later stage. Once you are up online and going through the response process, after gathering signatures, maybe the visibility of what happens from there drops off a little bit. Mr REBELLO: In your submission you say: … petition language is often used very deliberately to promote beliefs and worldviews, target communities, and otherwise step beyond the realm of what might reasonably be considered 'moderate' language and/or actionable scope for the House. Do you have a view on the interpretation of 'moderate'? Dr Lyall : Again, it's a tricky question. I find it a little hard to define exactly what that would be. I do like the way in which the UK definition phrases these things more specifically, and even the Senate has a few more words around what is considered moderate. I also wonder, too, whether another way to address that issue might be in the information instruction that's given to petitioners around the reason-request piece. As the FAQs and things have changed a little over the last few years, it perhaps reads slightly differently now than when I first encountered it. But there is maybe more of a sense that reasons are a piece that is useful for the community to understand when they come to sign a petition and less about how those relate to the actual request, which might be a good or a bad thing. I think that gap is maybe a slight issue. So you could have reasons that are very much about a world view that is not compatible with our democratic systems, but then you just quickly insert a reason to petition the House on those two very unrelated— Mr REBELLO: As part of your research, have you ever done any surveys or research into the petitioner experience in dealing with the Australian parliament, and, if so, what's been the result of that? Dr Lyall : No, I haven't done that research, but I would be very keen to do that. Mr REBELLO: I think that we would be keen to see the results if you do that. Dr Lyall : As I said, a lot of work has been done around mechanisms of advocacy, storytelling, and these types of things, through places like GetUp! and change.org, but less so in our parliamentary systems. CHAIR: Ben, do you have any other final thoughts, ideas, you would like to share with us? Dr Lyall : I think that covers everything. Thank you. CHAIR: If there is anything else that you would like to add that you think about when you leave this room, we would welcome an email. Thank you for your attendance here today. If you've been asked to provide any additional information, would you please forward it to the secretariat by Monday 25 May 2026. You will be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence and have an opportunity to request corrections, if there are transcription errors. Thank you very much for coming all the way from sunny Melbourne. Proceedings suspended from 11:47 to 12:00 .