Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Hansard source

I stand to support the Criminal Code Amendment (Misrepresentation of Age to a Minor) Bill 2016. Sadly, the grooming of minors for child sexual abuse purposes is nothing new. A June 2000 report on Project Axis by the Queensland Crime Commission and the Queensland Police Service contained detailed accounts of the offline grooming of minors for sexual contact. Of course, we have now had the explosion of the internet. We have WhatsApp, Snapchat, Skype and chat rooms. As Senator Macdonald said, teenagers spend more than 30 hours online every week. The basic technique adopted by online predators, who disguise their ages and identities, is to just hang around in those public internet chat rooms and look out for children who seem to be vulnerable, easily exploited and often ignorant. In the case of Carly Ryan, her online boyfriend was not actually a 20-year-old American musician; he was a 47-year-old scumbag from Victoria. It is easy for these online groomers to mask their real identities to hide who they are, hide their gender and hide their age. They can get in there and do and say whatever they like. They can become any persona they would like to be.

I want to quote Rachel O'Connor from the Cyberspace Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire. She says that basically the picture now emerging is one where the online predator forms a relationship with the minor, a process that typically involves deception. She says the level of duplicity engaged in by the adult means it is very difficult for a child to detect that, firstly, they—the child—are not actually talking to another child, having a conversation with another child. The online predator will throw in questions to assess the likelihood of his activities being detected by the child's parents or older siblings. That, of course, is hard. When the use of computers started to blossom and the internet started to get so prevalent, one of my pieces of advice to talkback callers on radio was always to leave their kids' bedroom door unlocked or, better still, put their computer out in the lounge room—put it out where the parents could see what their children were watching online, see who they were dialling up, see who they were talking to. But it is not that easy any more, because with all the phone apps that kids have access to—that everybody has access to—you cannot always tell what your child is doing. And you do not always know, mentally and physically and electronically, where your child is.

Years ago in the United States, there used to be a public television station which, every night, showed somebody with a very authoritative voice who would come on and would say: 'It is 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?' Now, with the peripatetic world that we live in and kids having the freedoms that they have, a lot of times you do not know where your children are at 10 o'clock. And even if they are in your home: if they are in their bedroom and they are supposedly asleep—they are not. They are in there, behind closed doors, they have their phone or their computer, and they are online. And they are talking to people around the world.

They are talking to people who include adult males—perverts—who browse like sharks through the chat rooms. These men enter private chat rooms, and they look for kids who may be genuinely talking to other children. But then they pose as a child and they lure those children in. And suddenly, you see them convince a child that, 'look, I am 17, you are 14, send me a picture'. And then they send their picture—like in the case of Newman and the pictures he sent: he was not a 20-year-old musician, he was a 47-year-old sleazebag. So they send a picture, they take another picture from somewhere on Google and they say: 'This is me, send me a picture of you.' And the vulnerable, innocent children—they do. They send those pictures off. And the sleazebag starts to build a platform; they start to build a relationship. And they can do it easily, because they become very clever. Like any paedophile, stealth and secrecy are their secret weapons: 'Don't tell your parents, this is just between you and me.' And then they get the identity—they go into other areas, they look at the child's Facebook page, they look at who the child is friends with, they see the comments the child is making to other people on public pages—and kids do not realise that what you put out there now is out there forever. And so they find out that, 'oh, you are vulnerable, you like kittens'. So they invent a kitten. 'Oh, I have got a cat too; I have got a kitten as well.' And they talk about that. And usually—and in this case here, that is what made it even harder for criminal action to be taken—they do not reveal the sexual content. They do not reveal what is really on their mind—until they get the meeting. That is the bingo shot. You talk the kids along, you push them along, until you finally say: 'Hey let's meet for a coffee or a soft drink; let's go to McDonald's.' And that is them in.

That is why this bill, the Criminal Code Amendment (Misrepresentation of Age to a Minor) Bill 2016, is important. It is so you do not have that physical contact. I mean, a 47-year-old man who is chatting online to a 15-year-old girl, who then says, 'Let's catch up for a coffee'—he is not there for a hamburger. And in this case, it ends tragically, with a little girl dying: half beaten to death, her mouth choking on sand, and then drowned. Because a 47-year-old pretended he was a 20 year-old musician, and she fell in love—she did. There is no protection against that. And that is why we need it. What makes it even worse is the speed of the internet. Senator Kakoschke-Moore mentioned Graham Ashton, who was the AFP Assistant Commissioner and is now the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police. Graham Ashton says about online grooming that you would think—not being in that world—that they would be methodical, and that it would take weeks and weeks and months and months to do it. Commissioner Ashton says it can be two weeks. From the first line being thrown into the internet waters, the fish is caught—it can be as soon as two weeks later—and they have a physical meeting.

One of the problems we have is that the courts, the magistrates, the judges and the politicians have not caught up with the real world. They have not caught up with what is really happening out there in the real world of the internet; in the world of online activities and online crime. And I can give you proof of it. I bet that today, somewhere in Australia, there is a magistrate who has before him a male with child pornography found on his computer—they have probably found 30,000 or 40,000 images, plus videos; some of them from kids who have been lured from chat rooms, some of them stuff he has bought—and the magistrate has sat there and listened to a barrister who has said: 'Your Honour, it was only for his personal edification; he did not sell it to anybody.' And he walks—on a suspended sentence or a good behaviour bond. That is because magistrates and judges refuse to come into the real world and understand that, if somebody has foul images of child sexuality on his computer, some child was exploited to get there; for him to get that image some child was mistreated, abused and in some cases even killed. My running mate for the Senate was a Victorian policeman named Stuart Grimley. He was on the sexual offences squad. These police officers end up running the risk of getting post traumatic stress disorder because they have to look at all these images again and again. The bill today is about people like Newman. He was found to have all these foul images in his possession. These are the sorts of people they are trying to stop.

Senator Xenophon and Senator Kakoschke-Moore, you have both worked so hard for so long in the Xenophon office and in your own time to try and get this bill up. There was in the past the disappointment of having a bill that had holes in it. That bill went to a committee. You went away and looked at what was wrong with it and you have come back with a better version, a different version, a version that should be passed here.

Online porn and these crimes are something we have to grasp. We are not across it all. We have to read what the experts have to say. Look at some of the examples that have come up. Listen to kids. Listen to people who have experienced it. Here is one. Rochelle Cooper, from South Australia, says: 'I was groomed by an internet predator. I'm just lucky I didn't end up in the same position. Although I was physically, sexually and mentally abused, I managed to escape. As Carly was, I was 13 years old when I was groomed.' Here is another one, from Madeline Atkinson. She says: 'As a victim of losing one of my sisters this way, I need to see much harsher punishments to get some form of justice and understanding as to how someone could do something to a young, vulnerable child. You can never heal from this.' And Tina Lombardo, from New South Wales, said: 'My daughter was groomed by an online predator for three years. After that, he convinced her to live with him, just after she turned 16. When she realised how he had manipulated her, she attempted suicide. He had done this with two other girls before my daughter—possibly more. The grooming laws need to change.'

In the case of Newman, with his son in tow he lured Carly to that bench, sexually abused her, bashed her to death, drowned her to make sure she was dead and then just left her there. He then returned to his home. When police tracked him down—because they suddenly realised who Brandon and Shane really were—he was on his computer chatting up a 14-year-old girl, who I think was in Perth. So he had murdered one girl and he was now back at the computer doing the same thing. And before Carly there were others—who escaped.

As you know, I am trying to push for a national public register of convicted sex offenders. Sadly, Carly would probably not have been protected by that because, as I understand it, Newman did not have a criminal record. I may be corrected on that; it obviously was not his first crime. For other cases where men have been convicted at least with a public register of convicted sex offenders if parents spot somebody they will be able to go online, look up his photograph and check him out—check his name to see if he has previous convictions. In Western Australia, with their softer version of 'Sarah's law', parents can do that. But I go back to what I said originally. In this day and age, in this incredible world of internet speeds and chat rooms, parents cannot know, and often are ignorant of, what is there. I support you fully, Senator Kakoschke-Moore, and I support this bill. It is always corny to say that somebody did not die in vain, but the Carly Ryan Foundation has worked so hard to get us to this point, to get us so far down the track, that I appeal to the Senate to pass this law not only in the name of Carly Ryan but in the names of other victims of sexual offences against children—offences which are some of the most epidemic, even pandemic, things in existence.