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

I rise today to speak on the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Amendment Bill 2017. I acknowledge my colleague from the Nick Xenophon Team who spoke earlier and will refer also to the other bill that she spoke of.

I want to start by saying that it was only two years ago in 2015 that this government created the Office of the Children's eSafety Commissioner. Under this bill it is now seeking to expand the remit of the commissioner to include all Australians just two years after it was first established. Of course, this is a very welcome move. Labor has always supported better measures for online safety for everyone. But it also highlights the fact that, like much of what we have seen from the other side, particularly when it comes to online safety and cybersecurity, the legislation was ill conceived, not thought out and lacked understanding of the issues and the practical implementation of the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Act.

We hear a lot about governments needing to be agile and not just responsive but also proactive when it comes to online safety. So it is rather disappointing that two years after establishing the Office of the Children's eSafety Commissioner we are now looking at that again and realising that e-safety is for everyone, not just children.

The Turnbull government created the Office of the Children's eSafety Commissioner, thereby transferring responsibility for online safety away from the ACMA and now leading to this necessary change as the government has finally realised that online safety, as I said earlier, is for all Australians, not just children—although protecting our children is of course always at the front of our minds. This also highlights the government's unwillingness to do anything about criminalising revenge porn—because the amendments proposed only go so far as to amend the title of the act and the title of the statutory office. There is no expansion of the role or existing functions of the commissioner in relation to persons at risk of family violence; victims of non-consensual sharing of intimate images, otherwise known as revenge porn; or the safe use of the internet by older Australians. We know that many older Australians are getting duped by online romance scams, for example. We need to have something in place for them as well. But there is nothing in that regard either.

The amendments, though welcomed, do not go far enough in terms of creating any new offences or civil offences or providing any new regulatory powers. In government, Labor was committed to cybersafety. We delivered $125.8 million towards a Cyber Safety Plan to combat online risks to children and help parents and educators protect children. I have spoken previously in the Federation Chamber on the fact that, in 2010, I presented a paper at the International Cyber Resilience Conference following the release of the Labor government's 2009 Cyber Security Strategy. The paper that I presented at that conference was entitled 'Building resilient cyber communities'. In that paper, I spoke about the need to raise awareness and educate people about the importance of maintaining strong and robust cybersafety habits ranging from ensuring our passwords are safe to logging off when leaving the office and being aware of suspicious messages. That may seem small, but the impact of not having a resilient cyberculture can actually be quite devastating.

Again, Labor has taken the lead on this issue. We first introduced a bill to criminalise the non-consensual sharing of intimate images in 2015. This then led to a Senate inquiry and the expression of concerns that there were limitations within existing legislation to adequately deal with revenge porn or image-based abuse. And yet this government refuses to support Labor's bill. As with everything else they have offered to the Australian people, this government likes to tinker at the fringes, put a bit of lipstick on it, wrap it up in a whole lot of nothing, in bright baubles and ribbon, and roll it out. But they have of course leave out the very heart of what is needed here. They do not give thought to the effectiveness or impact of any of their measures—whether it is cybersafety, housing affordability, needs-based education or banking reform. This is a government that has, time and time and time again, proven its incapacity to think things through. Often I have thought to myself that this is a government that is way out of its depth.

It can sometimes be difficult for those of my generation—I stand here proudly as a member of the generation officially known as 'old codgers'—to understand just how hardwired the lives of young Australians are. I remember when my son was 15 he came running down the steps of our house yelling, 'I've got 100 friends!' I looked around and said, 'Where are these friends? I do not see any friends here.' He was of course talking about Facebook friends. Our generation tends to separate the offline and online worlds. Our social reality is offline—the people we go out for dinner with, the people we have over to our house, the people we have barbies with and those kinds of things. We tend to separate that from the online world, the things we use the internet for—our uses and gratifications, to use a technical academic term. But my sons' generation do not make that separation. For them the online world is a social reality, whereas we define our social reality as tangible things, things around us, things we can touch, so it can be quite difficult for us to understand just how hardwired they are, but understand it we must.

It is not enough to tell young people about the dangers of posting personal information or explicit photos online. It is not enough to tell them of the dangers of putting up things that are far from photos of what they had for breakfast, their smashed avocado on toast: personal details about where they live, where they are staying or why they are home alone—or even explicit photos, as I mentioned. The leaking of explicit photos involving Perth schoolgirls underscores the urgent need for a comprehensive strategy to deal with the risks involved in posting private and intimate information online, particularly in an age where the so-called 'selfie culture' has infiltrated traditional boundaries of privacy and confidentiality. Perhaps it is time we have a discussion about what privacy and confidentiality mean. I know that in academic circles, at least, those discussions are happening, looking at the separation between privacy and confidentiality and what that means in a digital age, where those boundaries seem to be a lot less rigid and much more fluid.

That is what Labor did by introducing a bill to criminalise revenge porn. We hoped that those opposite would support it, but of course they refused to. Instead, those opposite decided to fund research and develop resources to shift attitudes and behaviours around pornography. This shows a complete lack of understanding of image based abuse, because image based abuse is about sharing of images without consent. 'Without consent' is the key there. It is not about young people willingly partaking in the sharing of intimate images but about the sharing of them without consent, with malicious intent. That malicious intent is a form of abuse and a form of violence.

It is difficult to have control over the internet space—I would even venture to say it is impossible to regulate the internet—but it is possible to raise awareness, to equip people with the tools to protect themselves and their children, and to legislate against harmful behaviour that involves the use of the internet. As a society we are still to come to grips with this. Technology has advanced so fast, particularly information and communications technologies, and it seems like we are unable to keep pace, because very little consideration is given to the interface between human behaviour and the internet. Since it is very difficult for us to fully regulate internet content, particularly as nation-state boundaries do not exist on the internet and different countries have different rules around what they allow—different rules around freedom of speech, for example—we need to shift our attention to understanding what those online behaviours are and how we can regulate them.

Part of that is through legislation, but we cannot discount the value of education. Children and young people these days are exposed to an online world with unregulated hate, abuse, racism, harassment and bullying. What are we doing to prepare them for this? It is a serious question that the old codger generation might need to ask ourselves. How are we equipping young people of the ages of 11 of 12, who are about to get onto Facebook or Instagram for the first time, for that internet world that is so unregulated, where people can sit behind a keyboard, say whatever and pretend to be whoever they want, and quite a sizeable proportion of them mean to harm our young people?

What can we do to equip our young people for that onslaught? The Office of the Children's eSafety Commissioner has had 370 reports of image based abuse alone. These include images that are shared without consent and images that are shared through phone hacking. They have had a 60 per cent increase in reports of cyberbullying—60 per cent is pretty huge. They are dealing with 8,200 child exploitation cases and 37,000 images and videos. They are quite startling statistics. This is an absolute tsunami of reports and it is likely to increase with the expansion of the commissioner's remit implicit in this bill. In that regard we also need to give thought to how we can better resource this office in order to enable it to carry out the extent of work it has been charged with and in order to equip it to be both proactive as well as reactive, when necessary.

I now come back to where I started: the necessity of ensuring that the Office of the eSafety Commissioner is not just about children, though children are always at the forefront of our minds because they are so vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation, whether that is sexual exploitation or exploitation for other purposes, including radicalisation. There is a need to ensure that the Office of the eSafety Commissioner is well equipped to undertake the expanded role that is included in this bill. It is not enough just change the name of the bill or to change the name of the e-safety commissioner, expanding its remit from children's e-safety commissioner to e-safety commissioner all round. We also need to recognise that e-safety is the responsibility of every single person, because it affects every single person, regardless of whether you are a child or an elderly person who may be vulnerable to romance scams online.

In closing, I reiterate my support and Labor's support for this change but also ask those opposite to consider what else we are doing. How much further do we need to go in order to be those things that we talk about: in order to be agile; in order to be proactive; and in order to ensure that our children grow up safe from predators online, safe from the sharing of images without consent, and understand that the online world is a world where privacy and confidentiality are just as important as they are offline.

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