Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens oppose the legislation, the Online Safety Bill 2021 and the Online Safety (Transitional Provisions and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2021, as it has been put before the Senate today, and I would like to outline for the Senate and for those following at home exactly why. In doing so, I would first like to thank my colleague Senator McKim, for his outstanding and detailed work on this legislation, and also his office, led by Andrew Perry in the policy area. I would also like to thank Noelle Martin of Western Australia, who has, for a very long time, been a great source of information and advice to me in relation to these often complex and deeply important issues.

Let's start from a place where I think everybody should be able to agree—that every person should be able to live their lives free of violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect. When we are talking about the need to safeguard this right and this expectation in relation to abuse that somebody might experience in the digital space, we often talk about a broad terminology called cyberbullying, or online abuse. What is often lost in that terminology is some of the deep complexities and different forms that abuse takes when an online environment is also involved. I'm somebody who has been aware of these issues in a personal capacity, and I have experienced some of them myself.

As a newly-elected senator, one of the first inquiries I was part of explored some of these very complicated issues. I think it's useful to break them down broadly into three categories. We have the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, then we have what we might call bullying that takes place in a cyberrealm as well as in personal interaction between individuals, and then, finally, we have online facilitated abuse. These are very distinct forms of abuse that have distinct characteristics, all of which require, funnily enough, a bespoke policy response from legislators at both the state and federal level.

The non-consensual sharing of intimate images is a disgusting and disgraceful phenomenon in our society today. Its roots are deeply set in the disrespectful and dehumanising ways in which women, people of colour and people who are queer are treated, and what standards of behaviour are accepted and expected. To deal with those issues, we need policy responses that deal with both the outcome and the root cause.

In relation to cyberbullying, it is often denoted by different social contexts and relationships between those that are the subject of the form of abuse or bullying and those that are the perpetrators. It was put very clearly to me during one of these inquiry processes that what is critical to understand when analysing cyberbullying that it is the social phenomenon of bullying moving into a digital realm. Those who are victims and perpetrators of it often know each other, and there's a high likelihood that the victim of a cyberbullying incident may well also be the perpetrator of a subsequent incident and vice versa. Often, cyberbullying takes place in a close-knit social environment, like a school, and will involve somebody below the age of 18. So, again, the policy response required is specific, bespoke and balancing the reality that we may well be legislating in an area where people below the age of 18 are involved and where there's a need, ultimately, to solve these problems both at the end and at the root cause—often by involving an entire school, entire community approach to solve that problem.

And all the while we must recognise that the vast majority of kids and children at school do not engage in cyberbullying behaviour. The best estimate is that around 40 per cent of kids experience or perpetrate these types of abuses. While that's a large percentage, we shouldn't build a picture of an entire generation behaving in this way. And we should also ground it in the reality that before there was a digital space for this to occur it just happened interpersonally. It's been a factor in school life and adolescence for a very long time.

The third and final category, online facilitated abuse, is denoted and often marked out by the absence of a relationship between the perpetrator and the victim—the perpetrator is not known to the victim and vice versa. The victim is selected at random and is often part of a broader cohort which the perpetrator is targeting, and they're often above the age of 18. Again, they utilise multiple platforms, multiple identities and therefore require—you guessed it!—bespoke, nuanced and well-thought-through legislative responses that address this and hold people to account for their actions while also dealing with the deep-rooted causes for why people behave in this way, particularly to groups such as women, queer folk or people of colour. These are the groups which overwhelmingly experience this online facilitated abuse.

People who work in this area understand these social complexities and the bespoke policy responses needed. If you speak to them, they're really willing to give you this information. I have learnt so much from working in this area over this period of time. There are folk who are absolutely committed and who deeply and genuinely want to see action in all three of these areas to make sure that people are not subjected to violence, abuse or exploitation in any context or setting. Those people and their genuinely held beliefs are often driven by a lived experience with this type of phenomenon, and they should be honoured, respected and appropriately engaged with. We—well, I say 'we', but the major parties as the parties of power in this place—should do them the honour and respect always of engaging thoroughly and in detail with them.

This is not what has occurred in relation to the creation of these bills. The government have cited a response to a piece of evidence that was given to them as the result of an inquiry report in 2018, and there have been many years intervening since then. The reality of this legislation before this chamber right now is that it's totally and utterly undercooked; it has been rammed through in the smallest possible time. First, the government published an exposure draft of the legislation, and they allowed merely a number of weeks for submitters to give their evidence in relation to what the final piece of legislation should look like. Then the government introduced the legislation and attempted to pass it through during a section of this chamber's time when it would be open to no amendment nor to a vote of opposition. When they figured out they couldn't do that—

Debate interrupted.