Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very honoured to stand up and speak on the Criminal Code Amendment (Protecting Minors Online) Bill 2017, which I think is a very important one. I am very happy to support the bill, and I want to iterate Labor's commitment to ensuring children are safe online. As the previous speakers and my colleagues have mentioned, this bill is a response to the death of Carly Ryan, a 15-year-old girl who was murdered by an online predator in South Australia in 2007. It seeks to allow police to intervene in suspected grooming cases by broadening the range of preparatory conduct that is covered by offences in the Criminal Code.

I would like to take this opportunity, before I get into the bill, to pay heed to Carly's mother, Sonya, who lost her daughter very tragically. From that, she established the Carly Ryan Foundation and has fought tirelessly to see this bill come to fruition and to ensure the online safety of all children and that other parents do not go through the grief and anguish that she has gone through. It takes a very rare kind of individual to channel such tragedy into something positive. I think that all of us in the House today and all of us in this parliament today can agree that Ms Ryan, Carly's mother, is an individual deserving of praise. We can all agree that we need to pay heed to her efforts in this space. This year is the 10th anniversary of Carly Ryan's murder. As I mentioned, Carly was tragically killed by an older predator, a man who preyed on her through social media, pretending to be a teenage boy. Carly's mother, Sonya, through the Carly Ryan Foundation, has worked tirelessly to campaign for the changes we are seeing here today.

All Australians have the right to feel safe online, and all parents—and I am a parent myself—should be able to feel safe knowing that their children will not meet the same tragic fate as Carly Ryan. I think it is really hard for people of my generation in particular to understand just how hardwired our young people are. I remember the days that my son, at 15, came running down the stairs and said he had a hundred friends. I said, 'Well, where are these friends?' And he said, 'On Facebook, Mum. On Facebook!' We tend to think of the online world as separate to our offline world, but young people do not see it that way. Their online world is indeed a social reality.

It is sometimes difficult for us to come to grips with how that social reality exists for young people and just how easy it could be for young people to fall into the fate of somebody like Carly Ryan unless we put in place the safeguards and protections to ensure they do not meet such tragic circumstances. Young people do live their lives online, and unfortunately that comes with a lot of risks and a lot of risky behaviour that we did not have to face. I certainly did not have to face those kinds of risks when I was a young person. Those risks are really around the protection of their personal information. I often find that young people have a very different view of the value of their personal information and just how much of it they can share online. They do not really see it the way that we do. Whereas I see it as a kind of window into our private lives and a window into our social world, they see it as an opportunity for sharing and for social connections. So I think there is important lesson to be learned here for all of us, which is that we need to connect more. We need to better understand what the online world means to young people and how we, as the old generation, can connect with young people around those concepts, and also how we come together to protect young people. That is really something that this bill does.

Labor, of course, is committed to ensuring that children are safe online. And I would also like to take some time here to recognise the hard work of the Nick Xenophon Team in progressing the bill and acknowledge our parliamentary colleagues on the Nick Xenophon Team, who also have fought tirelessly for this bill. As I mentioned earlier, the bill will ensure that police have the ability to investigate behaviour that could lead to the harm and sexual exploitation of children. Importantly, it also sends a clear message to the community that the use of technology to harm children will not be tolerated. That is something that I think we need to be a bit more focused on. Last week I met with an agency that works in the area of what it terms trafficking. This is basically men who are outside of a country soliciting—paying for—the sexual exploitation of children as young as three months old in another country. These men get online and actually pay, through an online format, to watch young children. The youngest case this organisation has is of a three-month-old child in the Philippines performing sexual acts. It calls this a form of sexual trafficking.

The truth is that we really do not have enough laws in place to protect these young children who predominantly are in countries overseas. If we are going to protect children as a priority, we should be protecting all children, no matter where they reside, whether they are in Australia or whether they are overseas. We should be protecting them from those online predatory behaviours, as does Carly's law. We need to further the laws that we have around online behaviours that prey on children and young people not just through sexual exploitation, not just by preying on their vulnerabilities, but by grooming them for radicalisation as well.

We really need to be looking at this nexus between humans and technology and how we can regulate online behaviours. We need to accept that we can never regulate the internet. That is a big ask. But we can do much more to introduce laws to regulate online behaviours. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

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