Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

With customary modesty, the one person that the chair, Senator Wortley, did not thank, which I am now very pleased to stand up and do, is herself for the enormous amount of work that she put into this report. It is quite a fitting tribute. I did not get the opportunity the other night during valedictories to speak about Senator Wortley, but I think this is a really remarkable piece of work and it is a great contribution to a very important debate. I would also like to join with the remarks of the Australian Greens in thanking in particular the young people who made this report what it is. The committee, faced with the enormous range of threats and potential threats in the online environment, chose to confine itself in this report largely to challenges facing young people. We learnt many surprising things, particularly from young people and their advocates in all sectors of society, from parent groups, school groups and so on. I think this report really does reflect the huge amount of work that was put into it and the evidence that we took. I hope it reflects the kinds of views that people wanted to give to us. You will notice the large number of recommendations that reference the issue of education. I think if there was one single thing that the committee found and one simple message, really, that springs from this report it is the importance of education for young people and also, perhaps a little bit surprisingly, for others. In the context of Senator Wortley's comments on digital natives and digital immigrants, we did discover that many young people make no distinction at all between the online world and the offline. Those worlds are fused and it is really only people like us who talk about concepts like cyberbullying because, in fact, the medium itself has become so seamless with people's lived experiences that there is really no formal distinction made by kids in school or young people right up through university about threats in the online and offline worlds.

That was reflected in the sense that people from disadvantaged backgrounds and people who, at the moment, might fall on the wrong side of the digital divide—anybody from homeless people and Aboriginal people in disadvantaged communities to people from non-English-speaking backgrounds—who get online will tend to find that the disadvantage follows them there. Kids are more likely to be cyberbullied if they are already being bullied in the playground. The distinction really only exists in the minds of the MPs who set out to find what this threat of cyberbullying is really all about.

I am profoundly grateful to the people who spelt out in great detail to the digital immigrants who conducted the inquiry how life appears to people who—many of them—have no memory of before the internet became ubiquitous. In a way, the report educated politicians as to the true nature of the things that people grapple with online; people who have been there for their entire lives.

I do not want to overshadow the extra­ordinary opportunities there. This report did focus on the darker side of the internet; as human society has its dark side that is, of course, reflected in the online environment. That was where we went and that was what we sought out. But, obviously, we did not seek to undermine the amazing opportunities for connection and for social bonds that are post geographical, and which transcend the neighbourhoods that we grew up in in many ways. There are huge opportunities for education and cross-cultural contact which are probably new in history, really, given that we are not just communicating with other Australians but with connected communities right around the world.

One of the things that I expected this report to be about was the filter, because we got this inquiry up in the tail end, I suppose, of the debate on the government's proposal for mandatory filtering of the internet. It took two or three hearings before the subject was even raised. I found that really interesting—that for people in the child protection community, people involved and deeply connected with issues of cybersafety, it just was not relevant. It just did not come up in the top 10 set of issues that people were concerned about. So there is very little of it in the report; there is no recommendation. There is a bit of evidence from both sides of the debate that I think probably helped to further the issue a little bit, but basically it has been relegated to the position of irrelevance that it deserves in this report, as it has in the broader debate. I think this is helpful.

It does remind us that when we talk about threats to people online we just tend to think of people trying to steal our identities, credit card fraud and the various other kinds of criminal activity that are conducted. That is a reminder to us that some of the threats to people online come from our own govern­ment, and that we need to be watchful right across the spectrum.

I would also like to add my comments to those of Senator Wortley in thanking the staff, who did an enormous amount of work putting this together. Again, I think it is a real credit to the chair; it is a fitting legacy to leave, and I hope that we can build on the work that has been done.

Question agreed to.