Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Bill 2014. I am particularly pleased because the students of Sacred Heart Primary School, Newport, in my electorate, are in the public galleries as I speak. I acknowledge them, in a debate that has a direct impact on their childhood experience—although maybe they saw all they wanted from the member for Lindsay.

While this bill has its merits, and it is supported by the Labor Party, it must be discussed in the context of this government's commitment to reduce the burden of excessive regulation and red tape on business. Regulation of the kind embodied in the bill before the House today is but one way that government and parliament can respond to the issue of children's online safety, a very important issue. But regulation is the way that the government has chosen in this context. This government talks a good game on red tape, and the member for Kooyong, in particular, in his previous role developed a very flash website to spruik the government's wares on the removal of unnecessary regulation. It is true that the member for Pearce, the new person taking on the member for Kooyong's former role, has not been quite as active in the promotion of this issue, or himself, but there are probably few in this chamber who could keep pace with the member for Kooyong in the self-promotion stakes, so I will not hold that against the member for Pearce! He has some time to come on. I digress, however.

You can look for yourself at the government's claimed record on red-tape reduction and regulation, at www.cuttingredtape.gov.au. The purpose of this website was to document the government's progress in cutting red tape. Under the member for Kooyong, there was even a bar on this website titled 'Track our progress' that gave updates on the 'deregulatory savings over the year to date' and the government's progress in the realisation of its stated target of cutting $1 billion in red tape or regulatory burden every year. The government currently claims to have achieved $2.1 billion in 'deregulatory savings' on this website.

Unfortunately, these savings are shakier than the Prime Minister's leadership. The vast bulk of the regulation removed through the government's 'repeal day' stunts has been trivial in the extreme. The statute law revision bills that we previously debated in this chamber made vital changes like changing the word 'facsimile' to 'fax' and 'e-mail' to 'email' in all Commonwealth legislation. No doubt this unleashed a productivity boom throughout the Australian business community. For too long have unnecessary hyphens existed in our legislation! The removal of these unnecessary hyphens was no doubt a particularly relief to small business. Small business owners in my electorate only want to know why the government did not wade into the controversy of the Oxford comma! And why has the government squibbed the important deregulatory reform challenge of the use of semicolons, colons and ellipses? This is to say nothing of the bonfire of inanities that is the Amending Acts 1901 to 1969 Repeal Bill. The bill makes the vital step of repealing 1,000 acts that were used to repeal other acts but no longer have a substantive effect. These are the kinds of reforms that comprise the 'deregulatory savings' claimed by the government.

That brings us to the bill before the House today. Significantly, the government seems to take no account of the regulation that it is adding when it is calculating the benefits of regulation that it has removed. Unfortunately the bar on the former member for Kooyong's website only seems to go in one direction. I have been keeping an eye on this bar. It is a niche area of interest, but it is an area of interest to me, as in previous lives I have spent far too much of my time dealing with regulatory burdens and page counts of regulation introduced by regulators and parliaments in this country.

So, if you will indulge my niche interest, I can say that the member for Kooyong's deregulation taskbar kicked off in March of last year by claiming $350 million of deregulatory savings. That surged to $700 million of regulatory savings upon the announcement of the repeal of the Future of Financial Advice reform package. The needle did not move after this effort to abolish FOFA fell over and the figure today stands at $2.1 billion in claimed deregulatory savings.

I have been watching this bar for some time and I have not seen it move forward in response to the bills that the government has managed to get through this parliament. But I will pay close attention and I will ask the member for Pearce in the future whether he is netting out the savings from the removal of hyphens from legislation against more substantive bills of this kind. Indeed, the needle only seems to move in one direction. While the government has been talking about its 'bonfire of regulation' in front of the cameras, out the back it has been busy stockpiling more kindling for future bonfires of this kind.

Despite its claims, this government has a 'regulate first, think later' attitude. The Howard government was a government that the member for Kooyong is very familiar with, given his employment at that time. While he was working for the previous Prime Minister, they initiated an inquiry called the Banks review. The Banks review was led by Gary Banks, a former Chair of the Productivity Commission, and it looked at the regulatory burden of red tape across every sector of the Australian economy. The finding that came from this review was that Australia suffered from what Gary Banks termed 'Alan Jones syndrome'. This may have dated the report somewhat, considering Mr Jones's influence at the time, but that is the name he gave to it. What he meant by Alan Jones syndrome is the tendency in this society for governments of both political persuasions to respond to issues, crises and problems in our society with a 'regulate first' attitude. The government must do something; regulation is something. Therefore it must do that.

As I say, despite its claims, this government is a 'regulate first, think later' government. Just in the telecommunications space, the space dealt with by this bill, the Minister for Communications and the Attorney-General have already announced plans to introduce regulation to force internet service providers to block websites involved in copyright infringement—a significant intervention in the technical nature of the running of these businesses. They have announced plans to introduce regulation to force internet service providers to police claims of copyright infringement made by rights holders against the customers of these ISPs. This is more regulation interfering in the way that these businesses work. They have announced plans to force internet service providers to retain their customers' metadata for a two-year period—a substantial regulatory and cost impost that the government to date has not even been able to fully scope out. We are well advanced into a parliamentary inquiry into the bill and the government has still been unable to tell members of that committee and members of the broader public what that regulation will cost to implement.

And then we have the bill before us today. As I say, Labor supports this bill. We are committed to doing all that we can to support the government in combating online child bullying. As our children's online activity continues to grow in size and scope, cyberbullying will become a more and more prevalent issue if nothing is done. It is clear that cyberbullying is already a monumental issue. We have heard contributions from members in this chamber before about the extraordinarily serious impacts that it can have on children who are subjected to it. The fact that it can result in suicide really brings home the gravity of this issue for all of us here.

Indeed, cyberbullying must be considered to be as important as face-to-face bullying. Probably most members of this chamber are advanced enough in age to have avoided the social media age during their schooling or even their younger lives. But, talking to the principals and teachers in my electorate, I can certainly see it in my schools and the really extraordinary impact that it can have within school communities. According to research done by the University of New South Wales Social Policy Research Centre, one in five young Australians aged between eight and 17 have experienced cyberbullying. There is also an average of 22 cyberbullying complaints per high school made per year. It is not only a serious issue but a widespread one.

In this context, in 2010 the then Labor government established the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety, underlining that government's commitment to evaluating better ways in which we could improve cybersecurity measures. In 2011 the committee released the High-wire act: cyber-safety and the young report. The report contained 32 recommendations that focused on a multifaceted approach that put education of children at its core. Labor endorsed and responded to those recommendations.

A government that was serious about red tape, however, would be asking itself whether regulation of the kind before the House today is necessary to achieve our shared goal of protecting children from the harmful effects of online bullying. In this context, take the submission on a cybersafety bill from the Institute of Public Affairs. They believe that the existence of a children's e-safety commissioner will not prevent or protect children from bullying. They argue that, instead of introducing additional regulation in this space, we should focus on the effective enforcement of our current laws. Speaking on the submission, Chris Berg, a fellow of the IPA, said:

There are a large number of existing laws which already cover any conduct which could be considered cyberbullying.

The Commonwealth Criminal Code already prohibits menacing, offensive, and insulting conduct on the internet. On top of that there are defamation laws, anti-stalking and harassment laws, and laws which protect against threats of harm.

A government that was serious about red tape reduction might consider in this context whether there was regulatory overlap and duplication in this space and seek to tailor this bill to minimise this impact.

Given the plethora of social media sites that are used by children these days and the seeming propensity of these sites to pop up like whack-a-moles, it may be that education and an approach focused on children instead of the service providers would be a more efficient response to this problem and that we should focus on preventative measures within schools to curb this online bullying in the first instance.

Another approach we may have taken is to spend more time influencing the social media sites and the platforms themselves to take an enlightened view of their commercial self-interest and to start acting on these issues of their own volition. In this respect I note the comments of the CEO of Twitter, a very large social media website, just last week in an email sent to his executive team. I will read from it at length because it does demonstrate the kind of enlightened self-interest we could leverage in this space. The CEO, Dick Costolo, wrote:

We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.

I'm frankly ashamed of how poorly we've dealt with this issue during my tenure as CEO … There's no excuse for it. I take full responsibility for not being … aggressive on this front …

We're going to start kicking these people off right and left and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them.

Everybody on the leadership team knows this is vital.

So some social media sites, after some time, are waking up to the need to address this issue themselves without government intervention.

I also draw the House's attention to the recent digital licence program established by The Alannah and Madeline Foundation, with the support of Google—another large digital technology platform. This eSmart Digital Licence program will be made available to every grade 6 student in Australia this year—almost 300,000 children—thanks to a grant of $1.2 million from Google. As part of this digital licence program, children who undertake it will use quizzes, videos and games to teach them how to be smart, safe and responsible digital citizens—again, targeting intervention at the children rather than from above through regulation.

While I support the bill before the House and share the government's objective of reducing the harmful impacts of cyberbullying against children, I do believe that more MPs should be asking whether more regulation and new regulators, as established by this bill—and it is not only new regulation; it is a new regulatory body—is the most efficient response to problems of this kind. I do believe that more MPs should be asking whether the government is really serious about its anti-red tape agenda when it continues to marching a suite of new regulatory interventions into this chamber. In this respect, the review mechanism being proposed to test the efficacy of this legislation in future years is important in this respect, and I do look forward to revisiting the impact this legislation in the future.

There is much work that can be done on the issue of cybersafety. However, genuine reductions in the burden of regulation require vigilance in the face of new proposals for regulatory intervention. To date there is little evidence that the government is interested in this task. However, I intend to speak out on these issues further in the future.

See this speech in context