Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement, I present the committee's report, incorporating a dissenting report, entitled Law enforcement capabilities in relation to child exploitation.

Report made a parliamentary paper in accordance with standing order 39(e).

by leave—It's my privilege to rise today to speak on this report. This is a report from the joint law enforcement committee into child exploitation, and it's a comprehensive report. It's a report that I would recommend all parents and all concerned citizens read. This is a scourge that has afflicted our societies throughout the world, and the report addresses many of the ways that we deal with it and makes recommendations on what we need to do to enhance the framework on how we address this serious problem.

I want to commend the secretariat for their outstanding work in facilitating the hearings, the logistics associated with visits to places that were relevant to the inquiry and, as always, their advice throughout these inquiries, which is vital for us to come up with a final product to the standard that this one has. I also commend Senator Helen Polley, the chair, for her conduct in chairing the inquiry.

The nature of this problem is extensive. In terms of its evolution, we've always had evil individuals who would seek to in some way gratify themselves or profit from the exploitation and harm of kids. It's a horrible thing to even consider. But whilst the proliferation of the internet over the past 25 years has given society a lot of positives in terms of connectivity, access to information and many great things to do with industry, it has also come at a cost, and child exploitation—the sharing of this material and people profiting from this material—is one of the serious downsides to the internet.

It ranges. We heard evidence in this committee of horrible, horrible practices. People are taking advantage of young, innocent human beings, from extorting money or other things from them by way of getting images that they don't want people to see and using those, right through to evil people paying to see the live raping of children and little kids. That's what we're dealing with here. It truly is the worst of humanity. It's a complex problem to address. The internet has many facets. Whether it be the dark web—the organised groups who conduct these terrible atrocities are sometimes in countries that are very hard to police—we are doing our best as a nation here in Australia, and there are also many non-government organisations who are doing some extraordinary work. I thank everyone who gave evidence to the committee in relation to this, particularly those people who, with the passion that they have, have chosen to take this on as something that needs to be stopped, and for good reason. We heard from a couple of local, home-grown NGOs—Project Paradigm, Destiny Rescue and Project Karma—who are all doing amazing work in this space. They are saving children. That's what they're doing: saving children.

The coalition's got a good record when it comes to the elimination of child exploitation. I don't think, at this point in time, there's anyone in this House that's done more to rid society of these evil individuals than Peter Dutton, the leader of the coalition. He was at the forefront. Under his leadership the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation was established. In 2020 it opened its doors. That will see these offences detected and children saved and helped out of horrible conditions. Also, we've implemented the Online Safety Act and the eSafety Commissioner, the regulatory body who enforces that.

There is good work being done. Only recently it came very much to everyone's mind when Operation Tenterfield was in the media. That was a horrible case where a man who was working in childcare centres was charged with 1,623 child abuse offences against 91 kids. That's in our country. That's an individual who was operating using these internet, dark web and technology tools to abuse children. I think that brought home to all of us that this is not just something that happens in Third World countries where people go to exploit poverty and find opportunities to take part in this horrible stuff. It happens right here amongst us, and we need to be forever vigilant. I commend the AFP for their investigation. The Australian Federal Police, along with the state bodies, are doing as much as they can with the resources they have. But we must look to every possible avenue to try and help them.

This report ran over two parliaments. I acknowledge the former member for Ryan, Julian Simmonds, and the great work that he did. He was the chair of the committee at the commencement of this inquiry, and he did some great work there too, establishing the Parliamentary Friends of Combating Child Exploitation in Australia and the ACCCE, and I commend him for his work.

During the hearings, we heard from a number of government departments. We heard about end-to-end encryption, which is going to make the task of detecting these horrible acts even harder, and about the major platforms embracing end-to-end encryption, which, as I say, will make the job of law enforcement harder. Unless we have a way that we can address this, more children will be the victims of child exploitation.

There were 15 recommendations that came from the report. They related to the monitoring of existing criminal offence frameworks and called on governments to monitor those to ensure their effectiveness. There were also recommendations in relation to the effectiveness of sentencing and the sentences that are handed down to these offenders once they are detected and captured by the justice system. There are recommendations in relation to the addition of community impact statements, where victims have the opportunity to speak and be a part of the process and the justice system and to help in their recovery.

I need to speak briefly about the dissenting report, because it is important. There were two elements to the report that coalition members felt were absent or not addressed in an adequate way. The first one lies at the very heart of the terms of reference, and that's our capability. This inquiry was all about the capabilities that we have to prevent, detect and prosecute in relation to child exploitation. Age verification is a tool that we have already. We certainly need to develop it more. We have the ability to trial age verification technology with sites such as pornographic sites that are able to be accessed by adults but obviously should not be accessed by kids, but at the moment there is virtually nothing stopping a child from accessing one of these sites. It's not just a case of the terrible circumstance where they're going to see some of the hideous things that are on these sites, but, once they get on there, they're going to be exposed to other individuals. There's the potential of them being in chatrooms and in contact with offenders that can groom them, and they will potentially end up as victims of child exploitation. We need a way to prevent them getting in there.

One of the recommendations from a report, Protecting the age of innocence, of the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, chaired by the member for Fisher, was that the eSafety Commissioner create a road map for age verification, and they did that. This year it handed down its recommendations. This is the body that this place charges with keeping an eye on the online situation and enforcing the act that we created. Their recommendation was that we trial technologies that already exist around age verification. Recommendation 10 of the report that I'm tabling today says that government should consider this. Children are being exploited now. The technology is here now. I cannot impress too greatly upon this parliament the seriousness of this. We have had inquiry after inquiry. We need to do this now and it's with that urgency that this is a dissenting recommendation, and we call on the government to take the advice of the experts and the eSafety Commissioner and commence that trial.

The other recommendation of the dissenting report is in relation to aspects of the Australian sex offender register being public. This is another matter that the inquiry and the report examined, but the recommendation was absent from the committee report. There was nothing about this, and this is an important tool not only for law enforcement, where coordination of information relating to these evil perpetrators is consolidated, but also for good citizens who need to be protected. Parents should be able to access certain information to know whether their children are safe. That is the other recommendation from the dissenting report, and it was made because the committee report did not mention it.

Finally, I want to pay tribute to and thank those who work on the front line of this terrible set of circumstances: those officers who have to view things like those I spoke of earlier—children being raped and kids in the most distressing situations. I pay tribute to those people. As a former police officer, I know I couldn't do it. When it came to children in distress, that was my weakness, and I couldn't do that. It takes a very courageous and strong individual to be able to do that, and I conclude by thanking them for what they do.