Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to make a contribution today on the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Bill 2014. It absolutely goes without saying that one of the chief roles for members of parliament in Australia is to protect young people who live in our country. This bill is not perfect. It is not going to solve all of our problems, but it makes an important step towards establishing a safe online community for Australian young people, and for that reason Labor will be supporting the bill.

Any parent of a school-aged child, or indeed anyone who knows a young person today well, will understand that cyberbullying is one of the most common, the most widespread and the most disturbing trends for young people today. I say this not because of the consequences, because we know that bullying has always existed—although I must note that there have been some very severe consequences, which I will come to later. I say it because of the unbelievable prevalence that online bullying has developed amongst young Australians. The internet for Australian young people is a constant part of life, and the bullying that takes place is an intolerable part of life.

I think it is hard for many of us in this chamber to really appreciate how much of a big deal this is for young people in Australia. I am one of the younger members in this House, but, when I was the age of the young people who are most affected by this problem today, I did not even have an email address, nor did most people my age in Australia. Photo text messages were a number of years away. Facebook was 10 years away, and Snapchat, Messenger and the other apps that young people use in a day-to-day sense now were a few years beyond that.

But now what we see is that all of those things, so new to us as Australians, are part of everyday life for most Australian children. Parents frequently raise the issue of cyberbullying with me as a member of parliament, and, when I talk to young people who are in this kind of target demographic of around grade 3 or 4 up until year 8 or 9, it is often the first issue that is raised with me about the things that are affecting their quality of life. I make those points just to say that there is no doubt that cyberbullying for young people is an issue that this parliament should be taking incredibly seriously, and thus I am pleased to be making these comments on this bill.

For those who are watching at home and may not have young children, or even for those in the chamber who are not aware of the kind of day-to-day significance of this problem, I just want to explain a little bit about the character that I understand cyberbullying is taking on for young people. We know that young people in Australia are amongst the biggest internet users. Lots of young people I know who are lucky enough to have a mobile phone will take it to bed with them, if they are allowed to, and lie awake at night texting their friends until the early hours. But, even for those who are using family computers, the internet is just a part of everyday life.

We also know that it is a very unregulated part of life. What we see is that bullying that used to take place in the schoolyard has been moved onto this online environment and, because of some of the features of these online programs, some of the barriers that used to stand in the path of bullying have been really stripped back. One of the critical things that we see is young people making fake profiles on Facebook or other types of social media and using those profiles to avoid what we would normally see as the consequence of bullying that occurred in the schoolyard.

We also know that social media has given the opportunity for young people who want to engage in bullying behaviour to say really mean and humiliating and hurtful things in front of hundreds and thousands of people, effectively—something that they probably would not be able to do in a face-to-face context. We also know—all of us—from our life experience that sometimes, when you are online and using a computer, you say things that you might not say to someone straight to their face, again just because of the consequences.

And there are so many other factors. We can keep digital photos now. People might send them in one context and then, when the situation changes, those embarrassing photos are shared with others, even sent to whole-school communities, which is something that I am sure anyone who can remember their time at school will just shudder to think of.

One other critical element is that the internet has allowed people to speak with each other at any time of the day or night. When you talk to young people about the effect that cyberbullying has on them, a lot of them just explain that it has taken away a place of safety for them. They feel that no matter what time of day or night it is, at the weekend, at any moment, they could be the target of an attack. That is a very stressful feeling, I know, for a lot of young people who are the victims of cyberbullying. I have heard a lot of young people talking about situations where young people gang up on one young person and bully and tease them online, again in front of many, many people.

The final thing is that, when we look at the options for young people about what they can do in the face of cyberbullying, there is no silver bullet. Yes, you can block someone from being online, but it is a bit like saying that bullying does not matter in a schoolyard context because you can leave the room, even when someone might continue to say humiliating things about you after you leave. The conduct and pain still occur, even if you are not there to see it.

We know that young people can be mean sometimes; of course, adults can also be mean. But you can just imagine, with the impacts that I have described, how the internet very unfortunately has opened up this new world of bullying for young people. Bullying has become a lot easier. Small actions are now capable of creating a lot more pain and hurt and, again, many of the consequences that might have stopped people from bullying in the schoolyard have now gone.

A lot of studies show that, on the whole, the internet is quite constructive for young people. It is important to note that a lot of young people talk about the really strong feelings of affirmation they get when going through a difficult period in their life. A lot of young people talk about the support they get from online communities. But it does have this darker element, and that is what the bill that we are discussing today is really targeting.

How are young people reacting to and being affected by these problems? We know that cyberbullying, like all bullying, tends to leave the victims feeling very depressed and upset. It can go from having a few bad days and low self-esteem to the point where we know that young people have actually gone to self-harm and suicide because of online bullying incidents, sad as that may sound. We hear young people talk about the fact that there is no safe place for them anymore. Although this is not a new problem, it is the ease, the damage and the ability to escape consequences.

I mentioned earlier the prevalence of online bullying. It is very fascinating looking at the studies which try to estimate how prevalent this problem is. One study says that one in five young Australians has been bullied online. Another study I am aware of shows something much more significant than that: the Australian Covert Bullying Prevalence Study found that, for young people between grade 4 and grade 9, a quarter are bullied every few weeks or more than once term—which is very common, very prevalent. I come back to the point that it is hard for us, as adults in this House, to realise how serious and significant a problem this is and how much it is affecting young people.

We know from some of the studies that it is people around the year 5 to year 8 levels who are most affected. We also know that girls, unfortunately, are a little bit more inclined to bully in these covert ways. One of the things that I found most disturbing, when looking into the material on this, is that some young people report problems with cyberbullying from as young as grade 3, so we are talking about quite young children who are getting into these problems.

Of course this is very important to young people, and because it is important to young people it is also important to their parents. We know that children who are the victims of cyberbullying can take those difficulties and their unhappiness back into their family home. I said that, at its very worst, bullying can lead to incidents of self-harm and suicide, which is incredibly sad.

I reflected, when I was preparing my notes for the discussion earlier, that we see hundreds of young people who are suffering from mental illness and for whom social media plays some role in their ultimate self-harm or suicide. I was reflecting on how this is actually a higher figure than the road toll often is from year to year, and how much emphasis and discussion and how many resources go into reducing the road toll. I wonder how many pieces of legislation, both in this parliament and in state parliaments around the country, are focused on this very important issue of preventing deaths on the road. We must spend billions and billions of dollars every year, as a nation, on this issue. Yet cyberbullying is not very frequently in discussions.

I think that reflects a few things about the political process. We know that this is an issue that prevalently affects young people, in particular young people and children. I wonder if there is less focus on this than we would see if it were adults and voters who were affected by this problem. It is an important reminder to us, as representatives, that although the people who are affected by this problem are not our voters, it is just as important that we listen to them, that we seek them out and that we talk to them about problems that are affecting them—because this problem is leading to more deaths in Australia than the road toll, and I think it should be getting some commensurate level of attention.

The second thing I would note is that, of course, it is a very difficult problem to stop. This is about people's behaviour in an environment where their behaviour is largely unregulated. But it is a problem that goes right to the heart of life in modern Australia. I know there are a lot of people that sit on this Labor side, particularly on our Labor front bench, who are parents of children who might be affected by this problem. Of course, for that reason, we are very pleased to support the legislation.

I want to talk in a little more detail about what this bill proposes to do about this very difficult problem. There are two essential elements to the scheme that is being set up by this bill. The first is the establishment of a children's e-safety commissioner. The role of the e-safety commissioner will be to crack down on online bullying. We know that a child who is the victim of online bullying will now be able to make a complaint, or their parent will be to make a complaint, to the commissioner. The commissioner will have the power to issue notices to social media organisations with which they must comply, and the materials will need to be taken down. A fine is imposed as part of the legislation, which will force social media companies to pay a certain amount of money every day that materials remain online after the commissioner has required that they be taken down.

The bill also sets out some expectations for social media organisations, because I think it is very important that we acknowledge that social media organisations need to do better at preventing this problem. In recent days, in fact, the CEO of Twitter has come out and talked about how that organisation accepts that it has a serious problem to deal with and that it has a responsibility for criminal and bullying content that appears on its site. So, I think we are starting to move towards being clear about what those obligations are, and the bill begins that discussion here. This bill requires a certain set of minimum standards, and the service provider's terms and conditions of use need to reflect that. It requires social media sites to have a complaints scheme—very basic, but very important—and also a dedicated contact person. Those who have tried to deal with some of these problems in the past will know that it is sometimes hard to find a person to talk to when you need to discuss these sorts of things.

These are important steps forward in what is a very difficult issue. I do need to point out, of course, that it does not solve this problem. There are a lot of things about online bullying that will not be prevented by this bill. One of the critical things, of course, is that social media and online bullying are instantaneous. What we are doing here is setting up a commissioner; there will have to be a process of review to look at content. This will have to go back to the social media sites, and there will be some discussion, presumably, there. To the extent that young people are still going to be humiliated by things that happen online, this is not going to stop that conduct—although I accept, of course, that there are additional consequences that are being put in place, and that is a very good thing.

In closing, one of the things we do need to think about and work on in this House is trying to help build resilience in young people—and indeed in adults—who use the internet. The internet is a part of life for us now, and it will just continue to be more and more integrated with the day-to-day activities of living as a human being and a person living in Australia. So I would just say that we can put laws and regulations in place all we want, and we should always take action on an issue that is as important as this one if we can. But I would note that something we all need to be doing is thinking about how we can ensure that young people have the skills they need to cope with what is really a very challenging and very difficult time to be a young person facing problems that those of us in this chamber never had to deal with as young people. So, I commend this bill to the House and thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the chance to make a contribution.

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