Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Herbert is right—it's the same in Townsville. This is across the state. These kids are being drawn into it. These are vulnerable kids. I have seen them; I have met them out at the PCYC at Oakey, helping them do their boxing classes, which are a way to try to pull them towards the righteous and the good. But these are vulnerable kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, and these glamorous videos show a lifestyle that seems like it might be something better than what they currently have to look forward to. I don't want to see more of these kids in detention. I want to see fewer of them committing these barbaric crimes.

To bring down the posts is very difficult and, apparently, it's a very inefficient process. I have tried myself, and members of the Toowoomba Crime Alerts page have tried. You get an inefficient response. Sometimes I have seen them taken down—that's true, and I admit that. But most of the time, requests to take these down are not responded to at all and certainly not actioned. On this front, Meta is failing its own standards—the standards it puts on its own website to say what it's doing. So this is the time that we need some interaction. That is why this bill is needed.

The Online Safety Amendment (Breaking Online Notoriety) Bill 2023 amends the Online Safety Act 2021 to empower the eSafety Commissioner to explicitly handle online content of criminal activity material in a similar way to how cyberbullying and cyberabuse material is treated.

The previous government created the eSafety Commissioner, and it was right and it was worthy that we focused on the cyberbullying and cyber abuse that we saw prevalent at that time. What we didn't have at that time was the youth crime wave that is crippling Queensland and that is absolutely devastating my home town. That has changed, and with it comes a community expectation that we will act on that. What this does is explicitly include criminal activity material in the eSafety Commissioner's scope.

What are others saying about the bill?

This bill has received very good support.

Courier Mail

I'm very happy to see an effective endorsement of this bill by the Queensland Police Service when they announced 25 new officers specifically to deal with this issue. So since the issue was raised with me and tabling it here today, we're now playing catch-up. What this bill does is bring the eSafety Commissioner in line not just with community expectation but with the powers of the QPS.

I want my city back. I want Toowoomba to be the place that it was, a beautiful place where you could raise a family, that people saw great value in, that had a wonderful community—the sort of place where kids would walk and play down the street without concern, the sort of place where an elderly gentleman could go into the centre of town and do his grocery shopping without having to look over his shoulder. I want my city back. I say this to this to the state premier: you need to do a lot to act, but I'll make sure that we do everything we can in this place to support the people of Queensland.

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