Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

Labor is committed to protecting children from exposure to inappropriate material over the internet at home, school and other public access points. Labor has a strong track record when it comes to promoting online safety. In government in 2008, Labor delivered $125.8 million towards a cybersafety plan to combat online risks to children and to help parents and educators protect children from inappropriate material and contacts while online. In 2010, Labor established the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety as part of its commitment to investigating and improving cybersafety measures. The committee released a report with 32 recommendations, each of which was endorsed and responded to by the Labor government. More recently, in the November 2016 Senate report Harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the internet, Labor senators contributed additional comments. In that report, Labor acknowledged that the contemporary reach and accessibility of sexually explicit material, including pornography and sex education material via the internet, is unprecedented. For these reasons, I am pleased to rise to speak on this motion.

The potential harms of sexually explicit material include: distress for younger children; habitual or compulsive consumption of pornography; greater engagement in risky sexual behaviour, resulting in adverse sexual and mental health outcomes in many cases; body image and self-esteem issues; and negative impact on the development of healthy and respectful relationships, including the rise of problem sexting and revenge porn, and sexual offending by children, imitating acts they may have seen online. Of course, there is a place and context for sexual education, including information for young people about gender and sexuality, and increased awareness of sexual rights and responsibilities.

It is worth noting that the term 'children' is broad and that the needs, abilities, interests and behaviours of children are related to their stage of development. It is instructive to use more specific categorisations, such as 'young children', being 0 to 12 years of age, and 'adolescents' or 'young people', being 13 to 17 years of age, and to understand that age may affect whether, and the extent to which, children are vulnerable to portrayals of sexual activity.

I note also that the term 'pornography' is used to refer to a vast and diverse range of content, from soft-core imagery to graphically violent material that may in fact be refused classification in Australia, or images exchanged consensually over mobile devices, between people in relationships for example. For a broad range of reasons, including for the purposes of sexual education, the term 'sexually explicit material', or SEM, is preferred by social scientists, and is more useful given that children may produce, seek out or be exposed to a broad range of sexually explicit material on the internet.

Labor supports an evidence based best-practice approach to policy making and regards quality research as a sound basis for effective intervention. We advocate for more-sophisticated and nuanced approaches to inform progress on the important issue of the impact of sexually explicit material on children in Australia. While further targeted research would assist in understanding consumption, and the impact of sexually explicit material on children, it is, meanwhile, incumbent upon all in the community to safeguard children. Labor understands that we live in an era where many children have greater facility with technology than their parents and that, indeed, a multifaceted approach to protecting children from harmful content is an ongoing necessity. This includes measures such as adult supervision, technological access prevention measures, including appropriate and workable internet filtering, and education of children as well as adults.

In Australia, industry codes of practice require Australian internet service providers to make available an accredited internet content filter, a family friendly filter, at or below cost price. It is unfortunate that no control mechanism is 100 per cent failsafe, which is why the iParent web page, maintained by the Office of the Children's eSafety Commissioner, outlines a range of tools that parents may use to safeguard their children online, whether on a computer, tablet, smartphone or gaming console. I look forward to meeting with the eSafety Commissioner when she visits Parliament House next week, and to sharing information with my colleagues and constituents to assist in promoting the iParent web page within our local communities. Labor understands the value in promoting awareness amongst Australians about the varied tools for managing internet use.

Finally, as a mother of two young girls, I acknowledge the important sentiment of this motion and the need for all of us in this place to keep the protection of children paramount in our policy deliberations on this very important topic.

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