Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Cyber Security and Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the shadow assistant minister for cyber security and defence, I welcome the opportunity to speak on cybersafety and cyberbullying. I thank the member for Forrest for raising this important topic through this motion. As we know, the member for Forrest has been a staunch advocate of the ThinkUKnow program for quite some time and a major proponent in raising awareness about cyberbullying and cybersafety and the impacts it has particularly on young Australians.

As more and more of our daily interactions move online, people are looking for assurance that those interactions are safe. ThinkUKnow is one strategy deployed by the police forces in each state and territory to teach young people, parents and carers how to engage safely when they're online. It is vitally important that it's not just the young people who are targeted here but also the parents, grandparents and carers. I can't tell you how many U3A classes I go to where grandparents are really keen to hear about cybersecurity, cybersafety and the strategies to help their grandchildren and their children stay safe online.

Last year we passed the Criminal Code Amendment (Protecting Minors Online) Act 2017, but there is another battleground we need to turn our policy minds towards—that is, the scourges of cyberbullying and cyberhate. Just months ago, over the Christmas break, tragically, 14-year-old Amy 'Dolly' Everett took her own life after becoming the victim of relentless online bullying. We all bore witness to the pain and suffering caused to Dolly's friends and family as the backdrop to our Christmas holidays. We all felt the same anger that she was put in a position where taking her own life seemed the only option. We all felt the same guilt, believing that the death of a 14-year-old child to be preventable.

I've heard of a similar case, tragically, here in my own community in Canberra of a young person taking their own life as a means of escaping cyberbullying—I heard this news just last week, and it's heartbreaking. Here we have these beautiful young Australians with so much potential, taking their own lives as a result of the scourge that is cyberbullying and cyberhate. How did we let it get this far? Just how prevalent is it? According to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner's 2016 research, of the 2,278 children who took part in the survey, who were aged between eight and 17, eight per cent of those children and 19 per cent of the teens had been cyberbullied. This is in contrast to five per cent of children and nine per cent of teens who were contacted by strangers while online, another insidious scourge. The impact of cyberbullying is significant: 42 per cent of children and teens were adversely affected after experiencing a negative incident online. Sadly, less than half of these children and teens took action after experiencing a cyberbullying incident online. Of the actions that they did take, most told their parents or their friends and less than a quarter blocked the person bullying them.

Journalist Ginger Gorman—a friend of mine, who used to be the producer for my husband when he was on local radio here—is fast becoming an expert on cyberhate. There are real questions about what can be done about the nastiness and the bile that is cyberhate. In one of her articles, Ginger asks whether victims of cyberhate and trolls should mute, block or resort to 'digilantism'. Clementine Ford is one of Australia's high-profile women on social media and makes a point of naming and shaming her trolls. She said:

There's no way to 'fight back' that is considered acceptable by everyone. …

… … …

The reason I name and shame is to show men what other men do and also to show women they don't need to quietly tolerate it. It has so far proved an effective means of fighting back.

Tracey Spicer's view is different, however. She said:

I never troll back, as I don't believe in lowering myself to their level. If I'm feeling confident, I use humour. It's the most marvellous device to disarm someone. If it's obviously a serial misogynist, I ignore, mute or block.

Awareness is a great start, as we are seeing with ThinkUKnow, but we need to be ever vigilant on this issue. As legislators, we need to be thinking about options to address cyberhate and cyberbullying.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Protecting children online from predators who are planning to cause harm or to engage in sexual activity with a child is vital. The Criminal Code Amendment (Protecting Minors Online) Act 2017 was a critical step forward. It updated the law to take account of our changing digital world and allowed law enforcement to take action against online predators sooner, hopefully preventing many more harmful crimes from taking place. However, we can and we must do more.

This morning, we've learned more about an excellent example of the vital role that police in Australia play in protecting children online both domestically and overseas. The Queensland Police Service, QPS, leads a task force called Task Force Argos. It has a worldwide reputation for excellence in this area. Following the arrest of Canadian website founder Benjamin Faulkner in 2016, Task Force Argos began operating one of the internet's most popular child abuse websites, called Childs Play. Using the founder's login details, they maintained the site for over a year. They gathered evidence on the identities of some of the more than 3,000 active users and their victims. Unbelievably, the site had attracted more than one million worldwide user registrations. In total, Argos identified around 100 active offenders who produced child abuse material for the site, and resulting arrests are already underway in countries all over the world. The offenders unfortunately included a healthcare professional, who worked with children; lawyers; and even military personnel. Critically, more than 100 victims were identified and have been rescued from their abusers as a result of the investigation.

This was the second investigation of this type successfully carried out by Task Force Argos. In 2014, Argos took over another website called The Love Zone and similarly gathered evidence which led to the arrest of serious serial offenders in Australia and Britain. Once again, 85 victims and more than 100 offenders were identified through this investigation.

The Turnbull government is acting to help and go further to identify and rescue more than 200 victims each and every year. We're setting up an office called the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, the ACCCE, to drive a national effort to disrupt, prevent and investigate child abuse. The government will allocate $68.6 million in the coming budget to the ACCCE. It will draw resources and expertise from the AFP, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC, the office of the cyber coordinator, Australian Border Force and the Australian Institute of Criminology. The agency will work with non-government and third-sector organisations with expertise in child exploitation. It will also link Australian efforts even more closely with international law enforcement and national agencies overseas like the US National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children.

I'm pleased to say that, building on the excellent work of Task Force Argos and because of our region's reputation as a cyberhub, the new agency will be based in South-East Queensland. This law enforcement action is vital, and Task Force Argos, the Australian Federal Police and the government should be commended for their commitment to rescuing children and prosecuting offenders. However, to protect children and to prevent more of these crimes from taking place, we have to educate children, parents and grandparents about these online threats and how to avoid them. Like I've said often in this space, you wouldn't drop your 11-year-old off at the Valley on a Friday night and say, 'I'll see you in two hours.' As parents, we've got an obligation to ensure that we know what they're doing online just as we know what they're doing in the real space. Programs like the AFP's ThinkUKnow as well as the excellent resources provided by the eSafety Commissioner and organisations like the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, based on the Sunshine Coast, are critical in turning around this growing threat by helping kids to understand how to avoid becoming a statistic of sexual crime on the internet. I've been engaged in this space for about 12 months. I'm working with the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General on ways that we can improve cybersecurity for our young people. I'll have more to say about that shortly.

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

I rise, first of all, to support and acknowledge this very important motion and to pay heed to the member for Forrest for bringing forward this motion. As my colleague mentioned earlier, the member for Forrest is very well regarded and very well respected for the work that she does with the ThinkUKnow program. Previous members who have spoken before me have talked about cyberbullying as well as predatory crimes online, and I can't stress enough just how important it is to have evidence-based programs for helping young people navigate the challenges, as well as the opportunities, of the online world.

I believe it was the director of Microsoft who once described young people as 'AORTAs'—Always Online and Real-Time Available. They live in and have grown up in a world where the online space becomes not just their social world but also a world where they find information and interact with others. And, yes, there are lots of opportunities, but we also know that there are a lot of dangers. I've often thought that we just haven't been doing enough to help our young people navigate this new world and to make sense of all the information that they're consistently bombarded with. The ThinkUKnow program certainly contributes to education in that regard.

But I'd like to speak on a different point around online safety. I would like to see our efforts in online safety, particularly for young children, and our education on online safety for young children extended to other forms of online challenges and predatory behaviour. A couple of years ago, before I became a politician, I did a research program with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the UK. We tracked the online behaviours of young people who were becoming engaged with violent extremism and terrorist propaganda online. What we found in tracking those behaviours is that they start with what we call 'seeking behaviour' and that what we loosely term 'online radicalisation' often begins with seeking behaviour.

The fact is that young people go online for a whole range of reasons. They certainly go online for social connection, which might then put them at risk of predatory behaviour in terms of sexual exploitation. They might go online for personal connections, which may then put them at risk of being exposed to forms of online bullying. But they also go online for information—to find the answers to the big questions that they have. It may be that their teachers, their parents, their educators or the people in their world aren't able to offer the answers that they're looking for. So they go online and will start this seeking behaviour around some existential questions about personal identity and belonging.

For some of them, that puts them at risk of several things. First of all, it puts them at risk of confronting terrorist and violent extremist propaganda, with no capability to analyse that information critically and navigate the barrage of information and propaganda that is being put out by terrorist organisations or violent extremists or, indeed, online predators who are seeking to recruit them to violent extremist causes. This is a different form of predatory behaviour but, to be honest, I think it is one that we still struggle with. I've given a lot of presentations about how this online behaviour begins with seeking but can then lead some young people into a spiral of violent extremism to the point where they may engage with negative propaganda and become operative.

In summary, these evidence based programs, particularly the ThinkUKnow program, are hugely critical for younger generations of Australians but also, as the member for Canberra stated, for older generations who haven't really got their heads around how this online world works. I commend the ThinkUKnow program and I commend the AFP for this program.

Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Cowan for her contribution. There being no further speakers, the debate is adjourned. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.