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

In the time I have left to speak on the Criminal Code Amendment (Protecting Minors Online) Bill, in continuation, I would like to reiterate some of the points I made when I first spoke. The first point is that Labor are committed to ensuring that children are safe online and elsewhere, but we also recognise the hard work of the Xenophon Team in bringing this bill to the House and progressing it. We also recognise the work of Sonya Ryan and the Carly Ryan Foundation for their tireless campaign over a decade to bring in this legislation.

This Criminal Code amendment—or Carly's law, as it is termed—will introduce an offence to criminalise acts done using a carriage service to prepare or plan to cause harm, procure, or engage in sexual activity with a person under the age of 16. This expressly includes a person misrepresenting their age online as part of a plan to cause harm to another person under 16 years of age. We believe that the police should be allowed to intervene earlier in suspected grooming cases by broadening the range of preparatory conduct that is covered by offences in the Criminal Code. Law enforcement agencies can only be most effective if they are given the power to apply for a warrant to intercept communications to support their investigations—and I think we are in agreement on that. We are also becoming tougher on adults who use carriage services by introducing this as a new offence. The maximum penalty will now be increased to 10 years, and these harsher penalties are, sadly, required to reduce the 11,000 alarming child exploitation referrals received by the Australian Federal Police in 2015.

I came across some very disturbing and frightening statistics, and those statistics are that there are around 750,000 child sex predators online at any one time. That is absolutely frightening to any parent, and indeed any decent Australian citizen. One study found that 24 per cent of minors who agreed to meet with someone who they thought was a child actually turned out to be an adult. These are scary statistics. As I mentioned previously in the debate, it is difficult for those of our generation—I say 'our generation' fondly—to really understand the online world and just how hard-wired young people are. In fact, it was a Microsoft executive who referred to young people as AORTAs—always online and real-time available. That encapsulates just how hard-wired young people are and how important the online world is for them. But it also underscores the need for us to grow and develop our understanding of the online world and of human interaction with the online world, and particularly of young people's interaction with the online world in order to keep our laws up to date and in order to ensure that we are not just reactionary but proactive in ensuring that we protect minors online. That it is actually what Carly's law does.

As I mentioned before, it is difficult if not impossible to regulate the internet. For that reason I argued that we need to turn our attention to regulating behaviour, because that is what we can control—we cannot control what goes on the internet. We can play an endless came of a whack-a-mole, where we can call on internet and social media companies to remove offending material online as soon as it occurs, we can put in filters and do all sorts of things, but we simply cannot, with the depth and breadth of the internet and whatever goes on it, including on the dark web, regulate that. We need to turn our attention to regulating human behaviour at that online interface as much as we can, not just for predators who are there for the purposes of child sex abuse but predators who are there for a range of abusive behaviours, including preying on young vulnerable people to radicalise them into violent extremism.

I come back to the point of education and what we are doing to educate our young people about how to protect themselves online. It is all very well to talk to parents and have resources for parents, but there is a lot of work to be done in preparing young children for the online world that they will inevitably come face-to-face with. I watch the young child of one of my dear friends. Little Anastacia is almost two, but she can get onto an iPad, she can find Peppa Pig and she can watch Peppa Pig on that iPad. I watch young children and their hand-eye coordination skills. The way they can flick through an iPad and the way they can manipulate media technologies is quite startling to me, as somebody of our generation, Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholtz.

We can legislate as much as possible, and legislate we must. It is absolutely necessary that we have laws in place that adequately punish and serve as a deterrent to the people who would seek to do our children harm and who would seek to sexually exploit our children online. That is absolutely necessary. But it is only one part of the puzzle. The other part of the parcel is the responsibility that we all have as parents, members of the community, and educators—that we pass on to our children behaviours that also keep them safe online. We need to ensure that our children are protected, not just from those who would seek to do them harm but also so that they have, inbuilt within them, resilience and protective behaviours when online as much as they have protective behaviours when offline. I remember a time when there used to be something called 'stranger danger'. Remember when we used to say to our kids, 'Stranger danger' and there were ads on television about stranger danger? We used to tell young people, 'Don't take lollies from strangers,' and 'Don't talk to strangers,' and 'If a stranger does this, run to the nearest safe adult you can find.' Perhaps we need to start thinking about stranger danger online and really educate our young people, particularly in the vulnerable teenage years, about stranger danger online. It is just way too easy for people with malicious intent to hide behind a screen and lie online about their intentions. I welcome Carly's Law as one way of addressing that.

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