Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was speaking, in the previous part of this debate on the Australian Education Bill 2012, about the need to include cybersafety in the national curriculum. With social media—like Facebook and others that we see out there—the user has to assume that anything they post online cannot be deleted and is, in fact, on the internet forever. Speaking on such social media, a quarter of teens surveyed said that they had been the victims of cyberbullying.

Advanced features of social media—we see them all the time—include Bluetooth and geotagging. Geotagging can often be a default setting which poses a significant risk, particularly to young people, who do not understand the implications of taking a photo with the geotagging embedded in there and then uploading it to Facebook. So the reason for cybersafety to be included in the national curriculum is very real. Our children face these issues on a daily basis. It is part of the challenges they face.

I deliver these courses into schools constantly, encouraging young people to be safe and aware online. Certainly it is something that needs to be included in the national curriculum. We need to teach our young people how to be safe and, equally importantly, we need to teach parents how to teach their children to be safe. This should be an Australia-wide activity. The only way to deliver that, in my view, to the next generation and the current one, is to include that type of education in the national curriculum.

As I said in relation to the nine-page, very short bill before the House—the plan to have a plan to have a plan—what we need is legislation that delivers certainty and choice. We need to deliver. Where is the definition of what is a systemic school and a non-systemic school? The government needs to deliver details in this piece of legislation, but no details are in this nine-page bill.

The government needs to deliver the funding well before the next election. Just where is the funding going to come from? We have heard nothing about that. There is no reference to that in this bill, in any way, shape or form—nothing in this legislation. Probably the way to describe this bill—as I did previously—is that it is, at best, an aspirational mission statement. The bill is supposed to be about education but is, in fact, nine pages long and approximately 1,400 words. Here is the financial impact statement; there is nothing on it. This is not legislation; this completely ignores the issues.

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