Australia's Top Bureaucrats Want to Stop Politicians Sharing Parliament Clips on Social Media
Australia's most senior public servants want to ban the editing and sharing of parliamentary hearing footage on social media, arguing that politicians and parties using such clips expose government officials to "ridicule, hostility and abuse" (The Guardian).
The proposal was put forward by the Secretaries Board, which is made up of all departmental secretaries (the top public servant in each government department) and the Australian Public Service commissioner, and is chaired by the PM&C secretary, Steven Kennedy. The board's submission, published on 7 September 2026, says public servants who give evidence at parliamentary hearings have not agreed to their image being used by politicians or parties for political purposes.
The board's preferred option is a full ban on sharing hearing footage. If that does not get up, it has proposed fallback rules: no editing of videos, no added captions, and no politicians sharing content that targets individual officials for ridicule or harassment. The board also wants full hearing footage and transcripts made available instead of short clips, and comments disabled on any official postings.
The trigger for all this is fairly clear. Last week, Defence department deputy secretary Celia Perkins told a parliamentary hearing that public servants giving evidence had not consented to footage being shared on social media. The Senate foreign affairs, defence and trade committee rejected that request on the advice of the Senate clerk — the parliament's most senior procedural officer. That exchange now appears to have galvanised the broader push from the bureaucracy.
The board's submission also made a point that will sting a few MPs: it suggested parliamentarians may not properly understand the difference between the role of a public servant and that of a government minister, and called for clearer explanation, especially for newer MPs.
Greens senator Steph Hodgins-May has pushed back, arguing that bureaucrats should not get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, and that restricting what politicians can post from public proceedings is not the answer.
There is some institutional background worth knowing. The Secretaries Board has been looking at social media issues through a subcommittee focused on what it calls the "weaponisation" of hearing footage. During a Senate estimates hearing on 12 February 2026, PM&C official Mr Lye referred to that subcommittee, and Senator Liddle raised the government's social media ban. By 27 May 2026, Senator Henderson told another estimates hearing that the social media ban was not working and referred to the Secretaries Board. PM&C's annual reports also record the department's involvement in social media-related inquiries going back several years, including attendance at a 2021 parliamentary inquiry into foreign interference through social media and earlier support for the Prime Minister to initiate action to stop social media platforms being used by terrorists and extremists.
The broader context here is that what the board is proposing cuts against how parliamentary accountability actually works now. Senate estimates and committee hearings have always been adversarial. What has changed is the distribution channel. A ten-second clip of an official struggling to answer a question, uploaded with a sharp caption, reaches more people in an hour than the full transcript reaches in a year. Politicians on all sides have weaponised this, and the board's concern about targeted harassment of named officials is not manufactured — there have been genuine cases where individual public servants have been dragged into partisan fights they have no way to respond to.
The problem is the remedy. Parliamentary proceedings are public, conducted on behalf of the public. The Senate clerk's advice to the committee that rejected Perkins' request reflects a longstanding principle: parliament determines its own procedures, and the executive branch of government does not get to set conditions on how its accountability mechanisms operate. A ban on sharing clips of public proceedings would be an extraordinary restriction, and it is hard to see how it could work without running into parliamentary privilege and freedom of communication issues.
The fallback proposals are more interesting than the ban itself. Prohibiting edits and captions goes after the worst behaviour: the decontextualised gotcha clip. Requiring full footage and transcripts to be available alongside any shared content, and disabling comments, are measures that tackle the mechanics of pile-on harassment without restricting what was actually said. The call for better education of MPs about the Westminster distinction between ministers and public servants is also more substantive than it sounds; the quality of questioning at estimates has declined as newer senators treat departmental secretaries as though they were ministers who set policy themselves.
In my view, Hodgins-May's objection gets to the core of the tension. The board is an executive body. Parliament is a separate branch of government. Public servants cannot dictate terms to parliament about how it uses the material it generates — that is not a controversial proposition, it is constitutional architecture. The board's submission would carry more weight if it framed the issue as one for parliament to resolve, rather than presenting a set of conditions the executive is asking the legislature to adopt.
The Albanese government has not yet indicated whether it will take up the proposal. What it does next will tell you whether the government sees this as a genuine workplace-safety issue for public servants or as a convenient way to reduce the supply of embarrassing clips ahead of the next election. Both readings are available, and neither has been ruled out.
