Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor supports the Enhancing Online Safety (Non-consensual Sharing of Intimate Images) Bill 2018. In starting, I will just note that in the schools galleries we've got young children in one gallery and older teenagers in another. If there's any bill before this House that impacts young people, it's this bill. This bill introduces both civil and criminal penalties to combat the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. Labor believed criminal penalties should apply from the get-go, and I am very pleased to see the government has taken our concerns on board and agreed to amend its own bill in order to now provide criminal penalties. This is a great example of this parliament working at its best.

What is known colloquially as 'revenge porn' is a particularly insidious feature of the internet and smartphone age. The act of recording someone doing something private and intimate and then disseminating, without that person's consent, a recording in order to cause them harm is, unfortunately, widespread. It is foul. We are not here to judge how those images came to be taken. It's possible they were taken between consenting adults for private use or recorded for a laugh between consenting friends. What is clear is that the recording of such events should not be shared without the consent of all parties concerned. Too often, we have seen instances of spurned or jealous lovers using the existence of such recordings as blackmail or currency in campaigns to hurt and humiliate. I am particularly concerned by the potential to cause harm to young people and, as the father of a 19-year-old daughter, especially the harm that can be caused to young women.

Once an image or a video has been uploaded to the internet, it is there forever. I know that we are seeking orders from the eSafety Commissioner to have these things taken down, but that takes down the original recording. If somebody caches that image or sends it on, it can be almost impossible sometimes to track that back and have it taken down. I do echo the sentiments of the member for Forrest in this. Think carefully before you undertake these activities. You may be having a laugh in that moment or sharing an intimate moment, but you never know where relationships end up. It may have been a jealous or immature impulse that causes a perpetrator to hit send, but feeling sorrow or regret after the fact does not make the harm go away. Perpetrators must understand that sharing intimate images without consent is a crime and that they are criminals.

This parliament has been debating this issue for some time—for too long, in fact. In October 2015, Labor introduced a private member's bill to criminalise revenge porn. In April 2016, the COAG Advisory Panel on Reducing Violence against Women and their Children released a report recommending:

To clarify the serious and criminal nature of the distribution of intimate material without consent, legislation should be developed that includes strong penalties for adults who do so.

Labor went to the 2016 federal election promising Commonwealth legislation to criminalise revenge porn within the first 100 days of being elected. In October 2016, Labor reintroduced its private member's bill in the current parliament, but this was removed from the Notice Paper on 23 May 2017 because the government refused to call it on for debate for eight consecutive sitting Mondays. Finally, in November 2017, the government undertook to consult on a proposed civil penalty regime targeted at perpetrators, social media services and website content hosts that share images without consent.

The government's bill has been informed by a public consultation process with a cross-section of stakeholders including the Australian Federal Police, women's safety organisations, mental health experts, school and education departments, victims and the government's Online Safety Consultative Working Group. During the public consultation process, there was broad consensus amongst stakeholders that the primary concern of victims is, indeed, the rapid removal of offending images. I say 'rapid removal' because the longer those things are on the net, the longer they'll stay and the more they are distributed. It is virtually impossible to get rid of them if they're there for any more than—well, I don't know how long, but it doesn't take long for them to spread. In June 2017, Labor moved a second reading amendment in the House calling on the Turnbull government to criminalise the sharing of intimate images without consent. In December 2017, the government introduced this bill following the public consultation.

It is worth noting that, in January of this year, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk called for a national conversation on the related issue of cyberbullying in the wake of the death of Amy 'Dolly' Everett earlier this year. The Premier said she would host a round table to discuss strategies that could be taken to the COAG meeting in February. The right to protection from exploitation, violence and abuse is primarily contained in article 20.2 of the ICCPR, which requires Australia to take measures to protect persons from exploitation, violence and abuse. As the Australian Information Commissioner stated in a submission to the department's consultation on the bill:

The non-consensual sharing of these images is a serious invasion of privacy, which has the potential to cause severe harm, distress and humiliation to the victim. Further, the harm that can be caused through the sharing of such images is exacerbated by rapidly increasing technological capacity for capturing images and making recordings, and the ability to distribute digital material on a vast scale.

In calling for laws to address revenge porn Tasmania's Sexual Assault Support Service submitted several incidents to a Senate committee and highlighted others in the media. In 2015 a Tasmanian man was convicted of raping a young woman, having threatened to publish a photo that she had sent him of her breasts. That threat was enough to tell the court that sex had not been consensual. Recently images of high-school students in Canberra were posted to a revenge-porn website where users swapped intimate photos of girls and women without their consent. One thread on the site is marked 'Hobart, Tasmania'. Some participants go as far as requesting images of particular women. Other threads are marked with different locations, individual names, Snapchat screenshots and requests for images of schoolgirls. It is a foul subculture which, I'm sorry to say, is popular with far too many male teenagers. I shudder to think what sort of men they turn into if this is their view of women as young men.

The impact of revenge porn on Tasmanian victims is intensified by our island's relatively small and discrete population. Without seeking to perpetuate an offensive stereotype, it is fair to say that most of us in Tasmania know each other by perhaps one or two degrees of separation. You don't have to go far to bump into somebody who knows somebody. Word gets out fast, especially in the regional towns, and material like this spreads like wildfire through kids' social media networks. Sexual Assault Support Service Tasmania chief Jill Maxwell says her organisation is seeing increasing numbers of young women and girls reporting image based abuse. She reports that many perpetrators appear to be on a power trip, seeking to intimidate their victims. Others want to punish women either as individuals or as a gender. Sometimes it's just because perpetrators, usually younger teens, both male and female, think it's funny and either don't realise or don't care about the consequences to their victims.

Cyberbullying and revenge porn kills kids. We've all heard the evidence of the devastating effects that this stuff has on young people, and, when it's compounded by isolation and teasing, it can be lethal. This parliament's actions today have the support of the Australian public. According to a study:

4 in 5 Australians agree it should be a crime to share sexual or nude images without permission

… (80%) agreed with the statement: 'It should be a crime for someone to share a nude or sexual image of another person without that person's permission'. Females (84%) were slightly more likely than males (77%) to endorse the criminalisation of image-based abuse. Both victims and non-victims of image-based abuse were just as likely to agree that it should be a crime, indicating that there is a broad agreement within the Australian community as to the seriousness of this issue, regardless of whether someone has experienced it personally.

Alarmingly, one in two Australians with a disability and one in two Indigenous Australians report having experienced the non-consensual sharing of intimate images.

Labor welcomes the government's change of heart on the criminalisation of image based abuse online and supports the government's amendments to its bill to introduce aggravated offences for the offensive use of a carriage service where the conduct involves private sexual material. This amendment reflects Labor's clear and longstanding position, and it expands upon the civil prohibition and civil penalty regime in the bill—which is, as the member for Forrest noted, a $105,000 civil penalty, so it's not small bickies; if you engage in this sort of activity, put $105,000 aside because that's what you'll be paying the victims of your conduct—and applies increased criminal penalties to the most serious instances of the sharing of intimate images. It is a pity that the government wasted so much time insisting that Australia did not need a specific criminal offence for image based abuse, but we are pleased it has finally accepted the evidence, changed its tune and followed Labor's lead.

I would like to congratulate all members of this House and the Senate for their work. I know there are a lot of people on our side who have worked very hard to bring this about—in particular, the member for Griffith, the member for Hotham, the member for Gellibrand and the member for Isaacs—and I'm sure there are members on the other side who've worked just as hard. All of us want this issue dealt with. We know how serious it is. It is a modern problem. The internet has delivered great things for us, but this is one of the insidious sides of what the internet age has brought. I think the member for Forrest is right; we are playing catch-up to a degree. Technology and culture overtake laws, and we have to play catch-up, but I can assure all the parents and any victims in the public gallery that we are taking this issue seriously; we are tackling it head-on. We think these issues need to be dealt with, and we are dealing with them. Thank you.

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