Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this afternoon to speak about an important social issue for young people throughout regional and metropolitan Australia. It concerns the evolution of tech­nology and in particular the online environ­ment. It has created numerous opportunities for our businesses and our communities to connect and to grow. We are connected in a way that no other generation could have imagined. The internet has undoubtedly enriched many of our professional, educative and social experiences. To a degree it has also reduced the level of isolation felt by those particularly in rural and remote communities, although there is still much that the federal government could do and should be doing in that space. But I am not going to discuss that today.

Technology has evolved rapidly. Society, parents, individuals, educators, the legal profession and our justice system have struggled to keep up with the pace of this exponential change. Social media have created a new dimension in which we need to exercise our citizenship. We need to construct new ways to manage our identity and our personal reputations. The old rules do apply in this new environment, yet the old constraints do not. Every other week we hear someone's personal and often tragic account of a negative online experience replayed in our local media. Many senators and those in the other place will have been contacted directly by constituents looking for support and direction. You may even have had experiences with your own children and loved ones upon which to reflect. Earlier this year I was deeply saddened to read stories of a Victorian schoolgirl who took her own life a week before her 15th birthday following a barrage of online abuse on a social media website from which she felt she could not escape. Her family and friends set up a memorial page on Facebook, and even this was subject to attack by her bullies. Back in February a very brave Shepparton girl shared her story with the local newspaper, the Shepparton News. So constant was the harassment that she had endured, the 15-year-old dropped out of school. This young woman—and this is why I talk about her bravery—started up a petition in her local area calling for increased powers for police and schools to deal with the problem.

Social media pages are on occasion solely dedicated to humiliating and denigrating people. In central regional Victoria, in Bendigo, police successfully prosecuted the creators of the crudely named Root Rater, and it was a case that received nationwide attention. Similarly, there are issues of the type of technology that is involved as the online environment expands. We have applications on mobile phones now, called 'hot girls near me', that access locator services on smartphones and have led to serious assaults in New South Wales of young women by young men. Such applications raise a number of safety concerns and, particularly, moral concerns. According to the Loddon Mallee cybersafety project, 55 per cent of year 9 and 10 students reported being harassed online in the preceding month. This statistic illustrates the extent of the problem in our communities. Because of the nature of the issue, many of us are unaware, and parents and schools and friends of these young people are unaware, because of the sometimes secretive nature of how these online attacks can occur. Conversely, the very public nature of social media means that the denigration becomes very public worldwide as a result.

Over recent weeks, along with other coalition members, I have travelled across the country with the online safety working group to hear about cybersafety. We have heard from a range of stakeholders. Students, parents, carers, educators, IT experts, youth advocates and legal representatives have all shared their experiences and knowledge as we seek to identify the best way to empower young people to use the internet safely and responsibly. I guess that is the great tension in this conversation in terms of liberty and freedom of access to information and keeping our young people safe. We are hosting a forum in Bendigo next week where we hope to hear exactly how local regional communities such as Bendigo grapple at a local level with the issues around cybersafety. We will be hearing directly from young people themselves and from those involved in education and the justice system. Parents and teachers have told us that they cannot rely on their own experiences because this is a completely new environment and they find it very difficult to identify sound evidence based tools from the plethora that are available. Young people, particularly later adolescents, are a lot more comfortable with the technology but are not always appreciative of the privacy risks and may seem unaware of the possible legal implications of their online activities.

Recently, while on a parliamentary delegation to the European Union, I had an opportunity to discuss the European cybersafety framework with the chair of the EU committee, Christian Ehler. The current European framework is focused on five areas: accessing control mechanisms; raising awareness of the issue in education; how we classify content in the online environment, particularly in a crossjurisdictional area such as Europe, ensuring there is a voluntary code for industry; issues around definitions of child sexual abuse and material, what that looks like and how to actually define it; and addressing issues around illegal content on mobile products or the internet. They have two programs in which to address this: Inhope, which looks at the international aspect, and Insafe, which is around informing people around the issues of cybersafety. Like many—although probably not many have the same complexity—the EU are struggling with definitions and questions such as: what is harmful content to young people? For some young people, it is seeing a dead guinea pig. Is it viewing adult content? Where is that line? Is it videos depicting self-harm, racism, violence? What is the role of government and agencies in this—looking at the balance of resources around identifying, protecting and rescuing victims of unsafe cyberpractices and taking precautionary measures? One of the approaches that we discussed which I found particularly valuable was the idea around education, empowerment and enforcement and looking at those three prongs in quite a holistic way to deal with this problem.

The EU will be proceeding through a revision of their existing framework next year, which will involve consultation. As with any multijurisdictional body, developing definitions of social and cultural issues can be particularly difficult. But, for defence and for social and economic safety, it is key that they get it right in this ever-evolving area. One thing that I found interesting was that, in the EU, while there are the traditional parties that have come from the state jurisdictions and are now Europe wide, the internet and cyber environment have created the first political party to have representation at that cross-jurisdictional body that is not bound by state borders. That is the Pirate Party, which I found quite fascinating, but I will need to do some more research.

The European Union have committed significant funding to cybersafety, as I said earlier. Whilst governments at an international level discuss this issue, local parents, schools and young people in our own states and electorates continue to negotiate this new and exciting environment. From a policy perspective, with the complexity of the issue I favour a holistic approach to address online safety concerns. Following a spate of incidents in Mooroopna, local schools and sporting groups combined to form the 'Mooroopna Cares - No Bullying' group, to tackle the issue as a community. This local action, supported by measures from both industry—and I stress that they are voluntary measures from industry—and government, will contribute to balancing the inherent tension between the freedom and liberty that the internet provides us with, in terms of access to information, participation in our environment and our democracy, and the safety of our citizens, particularly those most vulnerable amongst our community, being young people. I commend this issue to the Senate as a matter of public interest.

Sitting suspended from 13:54 to 14:00