Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I rise as chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement to speak about the committee's report on its visit to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation in Brisbane. The committee's recent visit and the report I present today reflect the committee's continued concern about online child exploitation.

In November last year, the committee presented a substantial report on its inquiry into law enforcement capabilities in relation to child exploitation. The report outlined the staggering scale of online child sexual exploitation and the challenges for law enforcement in this area. The committee made 15 recommendations to improve law enforcement's response to this crime.

In presenting today's report, the committee wishes to highlight the body of evidence and recommendations contained in its earlier report. Today's report also provides details about the committee's visit to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, known as the ACCCE.

The ACCCE is a collaborative hub with a specific focus on online child sexual exploitation. It is led by the Australian Federal Police and brings together expertise from across law enforcement, government agencies such as the Department of Home Affairs and AUSTRAC, as well as the private sector and civil society. During the committee's visit to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, we received a tour of the building and were briefed on several ACCCE work areas, including the Intelligence Fusion Cell, the Victim Identification Unit and the Online Child Safety Team.

The visit gave the committee an opportunity to observe the critically important work of the AFP and its partners. We were also able to speak directly with officers who undertake confronting, yet deeply valuable, work to protect our children in particular. We gained much insight from speaking about forensic analysis by the Victim Identification Unit to identify children so that they may be rescued from perpetrators. The careful design of the building, such as the collab space or separation between the high-risk area upstairs and the low-risk area downstairs, is so crucial to ensuring that officers can do their job in a safe environment and to the best of their ability. Upcoming challenges, though, are quite serious. Our committee's finding from our original report was only reinforced during our visit to this wonderful centre: end-to-end encryption and the real threat of live streaming remain a major concern for law enforcement members and members of our committee

I want to commend the dedicated officers and staff of the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, led by Commander Helen Schneider. These individuals are relentless in their work and their determination to prevent child exploitation and to protect victims from further victimisation. They should be applauded. To give you an example of the sort of work that they do, they can work on a case for a decade, and they work on it continuously. They went through the details of one case with us. After 10 years, they finally got the perpetrator. It has been well reported in the media and is still going through the courts, so I won't go any further into that. Another example is that they had a tip-off from the United Kingdom about a perpetrator and the abuse of a child online. Within 48 hours, they had effected a rescue and charged the perpetrator in outback Western Australia. From a tip-off from law enforcement in the United Kingdom, they were able to arrest an Australian perpetrator in outback Western Australia.

The work that they do is time consuming, and all of those officers have available to them counsellors who are there in the workplace. The AFP are very specific in terms of the design of the building and the way that they are there to support those officers. Some officers we spoke to have been working in this field for a number of years. I think it's really important for the public to understand that there is no requirement that, as an officer of the Australian Federal Police, you must work in this unit.

What they do find, though, is that people make a request to go there. However, if you do transfer into that area and you find that it's not really suitable for you, then you can transfer back out of there. That's because the reality is that the work that they do each and every day is about protecting children. When they finally break a case and a perpetrator is arrested, that's one element of it, but the most important element is to rescue those children. The sad reality is that, while they can—and do—ensure that perpetrators who are perpetrating these despicable crimes on babies and children can be identified in Australia, their focus is on making sure that those children are rescued. So it is very important work that's being done.

I want to place on record not only my appreciation. I know I speak for all committee members who were able to take the opportunity to visit the centre in thanking Deputy Commissioner Lesa Gale, Commander Schneider and all of those officers who took time out of their busy day to talk with us, to discuss the type of work that they are undertaking and also to talk to the social support that is there for them in terms of ensuring their own mental health. Can I just say, the dedication that has been demonstrated by the officers that we have both met with and had evidence from in this inquiry is just amazing. It's not a job for everyone, but unfortunately in this country it's a job that we need to continue to be very diligent with, because it just seems like every other week we're reading or seeing in the media—through social media and written forms of media—about perpetrators being arrested.

Again, I want to commend this report to all the senators in this place and to others who are listening to this broadcast. The work that is undertaken by the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation is essential, critical work. It's about protecting and rescuing Australian children. They work with international partners, because, as we know, there's a big wide world out there, and there is organised crime involved is this exploitation of our children. So our responsibility here is to work with international law enforcement, where we can, to help identify other children in other countries, and, likewise, they work together to help us. As I said, there was a prime example of that from the United Kingdom, in terms of how quickly they were able to act. But there are other cases that they work on for years. You can imagine the amazing relief when they're able to rescue children from this exploitation. That is why we have concerns with social media and end-to-end encryption about how much more difficult that is going to be. My view is that our children deserve to be protected. Their privacy and their safety are more important than end-to-end encryption for people who want to use social media. I commend the report to you, and I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.