Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On 1 May 2024 the Albanese Labor government made a public commitment to introduce a suite of measures to tackle online harms, particularly addressing the harms done to women and girls. Delivering on that promise, we are creating new criminal offences to ban the non-consensual sharing of deepfake pornography. We already know that digitally created and altered sexually explicit material is a damaging form of abuse against women and girls that can inflict deep harm on the victims, but I also want to take this opportunity to highlight the broader issues that we are facing as a society in this respect.

The purpose of this parliament is, yes, to make the laws of the land, but we are also required to show leadership, to lead reform on the pressing social issues of the time. And while the current reforms are about making it crystal clear that those who share sexually explicit material without consent using artificial intelligence, AI, will be subject to the most serious criminal penalties, it is also important to continue the national conversation we are having around the safety of women and girls in our society. That is our role here in parliament, and that is what we want to do today in this debate.

As a nation, we have been horrified at the young man at a private school who recently distributed graphic deepfake images of 50 girls in Victoria. This young man did this by taking their likenesses from social media and using an AI app to create sexually explicit deepfakes. He then shared them on social media—obviously without the girls' consent. This was a despicable act of degrading and dehumanising his peers, young women he was supposed to have respected. And it's attitudes like these that, if not rooted out at the earliest opportunity, will go on to perpetuate the stereotypes about women that should have no place in our society because they drive that gender based violence that we abhor in the adult lives of these young men.

At the immediate point when these images were shared without consent, they had already damaged, possibly irrevocably, the lives of those victims. This was not just a breach of privacy; it is much more than that. It is really difficult to imagine the feelings of shame, embarrassment, anger and pain that these young women face when these images are shared with others or posted online, and so we want to be extremely clear, in this government, that there is no place for such behaviours. That's why the suite of reforms in these laws are so important.

The bill amends the Criminal Code to modernise and strengthen offences targeting the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit material online, especially material produced with the assistance of AI. This includes material that has been created or altered using technology such as deepfakes. Aggravated offences will build on this new underlying offence where the person was responsible for the creation or alteration of the sexual material transmitted.

The gap in the Criminal Code currently criminalises the sharing of private sexual material online; however, the definition of 'private sexual material' may not cover artificially generated material. This bill eliminates any doubt that artificially generated material is absolutely without a shadow of a doubt covered by these changes. Section 473.1, which contains this definition, will be replaced or repealed. The new offence applies where a person transmits material using a carriage service and where the material depicts a person who is or appears to be 18 years of age or older.

Those opposite think there is no need for these laws. The Manager of Opposition Business thinks we are 'repealing existing offences and replacing them with offences that appear to do the same thing'. That's a quote. With great respect, what we are doing is moving to a consent model where an essential part of the determination is whether these images were created and shared without consent. We are doing this by introducing new offences in the new section 474, where the key question relates equally to both types of sexual material, both artificial and real.

Did the opposition not learn their lesson when it came to social media? Famously, governments around the world, including former coalition governments, took a laissez-faire approach to not regulating giant social media companies. Only now we are paying the price; we're seeing that play out, decades on. Nine years in government and suddenly they have now realised that they didn't do enough to regulate emerging social media companies. This is the realisation of the opposition, all of a sudden. I ask the opposition: why don't you come out and tell us exactly why you didn't do this when you had the chance?

We unequivocally disagree that these amendments to the Criminal Code are not needed. We are mitigating and we must mitigate the unintended harms of AI, and we will do this. We must do this early. We're not going to wait another 10 years. And we're going to do it in a pragmatic way that recognises the productivity benefits of these tools, but approach much more cautiously than the coalition ever did with social media companies when they had the chance. There is a need for regulation, there is a need for a legislative framework to deal with the rapidly expanding technologies we're seeing, like AI.

We are behind the eight ball. We need to start taking the necessary legislative and regulatory action to mitigate the worst effects of these technologies. And there are negative effects—clearly—as I have described already with the AI deepfake sexual material.

We cannot go down the same path that we did in the past with the social media companies with respect to AI. In many respects, people are arguing that it's already too late for our kids who are addicted to doomscrolling and spend hours and hours on screens, exposed to content that disrupts their mental health and self-esteem, either through social media or through just being online for hours and hours as well.

There is a real epidemic within our communities. Parents are waking up to it, clearly. Parents are disturbed by it. There are a lack of legislative or regulatory frameworks to address or mitigate the worst impacts of these technologies. That has to stop. I'm not saying we're going to get it right 100 per cent of the time, but we do need to do this and we need to start the work today. The opposition needs to actually understand that this is in the national interest.

The other thing we have seen time and time again is when someone is already known to law enforcement authorities and recognised in the justice system and they offend again. That is why this bill introduces two aggravated offences which apply with increased penalties if the offender has had three or more civil penalty orders made against them for contravening the Online Safety Act 2021—'creation or alteration of the sexual material transmitted'. The new offences will have a maximum penalty of six years imprisonment for transmitting sexual material without consent and seven years imprisonment for aggravated offences, including where the person created the material themselves. These amendments are absolutely necessary and absolutely our priority.

In conclusion, I want to remind the House—and we're all aware of this, as recent events have shown—that young girls in schools are not psychosocially safe, in many respects. When you have these horrific offences being committed against them, like the sharing of sexual deepfakes or the making of lists which rank young women and sexualise them, there is no safety for these girls. It's these events where a society-wide scourge starts to take hold. As I said earlier, we've made the mistake—the previous government and other governments around the world certainly did—of not regulating the social media giants and the impacts of that technology. We cannot make the same mistake when it comes to the use of AI in this context. The young people who are exposed to and partake in these behaviours today will go on to live in a world where women will be harmed by their intimate partners or raped or killed on our streets. The majority of women who are killed are killed in that way—by people that they know or men that they know.

Online abuse, and the element of psychological violence therein, is a part of this cycle of physical violence. It's all interconnected. This is what women are subjected to on a society-wide scale. We've seen the horrible outcomes of this in many examples. In my own electorate, the murder of women and the rape of women has occurred, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Jill Meagher was an infamous case, and there are many, many others. People in my electorate of Wills won't forget that. They won't forget what happened to Jill Meagher while she was walking home in Brunswick in 2012 or, in May 2019, when Courtney Herron, another young woman from our community of Wills, was murdered in Royal Park or, in the same year, when Aiia Maasarwe was murdered in the northern suburbs whilst walking home.

These were just young women—who were walking home after going out or going to work or who were on shift—and that is what happened to them. There was also a woman who, again, in the same year, was running along Merri Creek, which borders my electorate—a spot that many of us in my community in Wills have found sanctuary in. She was attacked, sexually assaulted and raped there. We can't forget their stories. We can't forget what happened to them. We can't forget the deep trauma that has impacted their families and their loved ones. They were part of our community. They were part of the fabric of our community. What they went through in their deaths was senseless and needless. I say again: harm is not just the physical harm. There is also that psychosocial harm that comes from the impacts of having that kind of sexually explicit material shared online without consent. Harm is that which young women go through when targeted by these forms of online abuse and it is a harm that leads them to a deadly and life-threatening cycle that is, as I said, interconnecting all of these behaviours. That is why legislation like this is so important.

Young men should be educated, encouraged to be strong allies and work actively towards reducing violence at its source, where it starts. Educate young boys, teach them respect, empower them to understand that there is a positive sense of being male and what that positive masculinity entails, which is not the violent acts, not the anger. Give them another path where they are empowered to be respectful and strong in a very different way. That is what real manhood is about and that is where early education comes in.

It is not only the responsibility of parents, of teachers and of society to teach kids respect but it is also responsibility of this place, this House, to pass laws to provide the legislative and regulatory framework that make it unacceptable by law to take such actions. It is also our responsibility to show leadership, to take actions and to lead societal reform in this place. I would hope the opposition would understand the importance of that to the national interest.

We won't hesitate, through these laws, to punish those that violate these expectations, these standards that we're setting. That is what we do here in this place. The safety of women across Australia starts in our schools, starts at our sports clubs, starts in the conversations we have at the dinner table about respectful relationships. In the worst-case scenarios, when it has to be addressed, it is addressed by these laws that we pass here. The Criminal Code has to be robust and it has to appropriately criminalise actions. All of this in combination has to be able to break the chain of disrespect towards women that leads to the worst elements of violence down the track.

Legislative change plays an important role in sending a strong message that non-consensual distribution of such horrible images is unacceptable to us as leaders—as political leaders, as community leaders and as citizens and that applies whether it is AI-generated—artificial intelligence—or it is real. This bill starts the first steps towards regulating the worst effects of this technology. Because we cannot wait until something else happens to regulate technologically created harms, until it becomes worse, until the scourge is so widespread that we have lost control of it completely. We cannot wait for things to get worse before we change these laws. That is why I call on the opposition to support this bill, to support the necessary changes that we are making to address these issues, and to begin that journey together. I commend this bill to the House.

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