Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise, first of all, to support and acknowledge this very important motion and to pay heed to the member for Forrest for bringing forward this motion. As my colleague mentioned earlier, the member for Forrest is very well regarded and very well respected for the work that she does with the ThinkUKnow program. Previous members who have spoken before me have talked about cyberbullying as well as predatory crimes online, and I can't stress enough just how important it is to have evidence-based programs for helping young people navigate the challenges, as well as the opportunities, of the online world.

I believe it was the director of Microsoft who once described young people as 'AORTAs'—Always Online and Real-Time Available. They live in and have grown up in a world where the online space becomes not just their social world but also a world where they find information and interact with others. And, yes, there are lots of opportunities, but we also know that there are a lot of dangers. I've often thought that we just haven't been doing enough to help our young people navigate this new world and to make sense of all the information that they're consistently bombarded with. The ThinkUKnow program certainly contributes to education in that regard.

But I'd like to speak on a different point around online safety. I would like to see our efforts in online safety, particularly for young children, and our education on online safety for young children extended to other forms of online challenges and predatory behaviour. A couple of years ago, before I became a politician, I did a research program with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the UK. We tracked the online behaviours of young people who were becoming engaged with violent extremism and terrorist propaganda online. What we found in tracking those behaviours is that they start with what we call 'seeking behaviour' and that what we loosely term 'online radicalisation' often begins with seeking behaviour.

The fact is that young people go online for a whole range of reasons. They certainly go online for social connection, which might then put them at risk of predatory behaviour in terms of sexual exploitation. They might go online for personal connections, which may then put them at risk of being exposed to forms of online bullying. But they also go online for information—to find the answers to the big questions that they have. It may be that their teachers, their parents, their educators or the people in their world aren't able to offer the answers that they're looking for. So they go online and will start this seeking behaviour around some existential questions about personal identity and belonging.

For some of them, that puts them at risk of several things. First of all, it puts them at risk of confronting terrorist and violent extremist propaganda, with no capability to analyse that information critically and navigate the barrage of information and propaganda that is being put out by terrorist organisations or violent extremists or, indeed, online predators who are seeking to recruit them to violent extremist causes. This is a different form of predatory behaviour but, to be honest, I think it is one that we still struggle with. I've given a lot of presentations about how this online behaviour begins with seeking but can then lead some young people into a spiral of violent extremism to the point where they may engage with negative propaganda and become operative.

In summary, these evidence based programs, particularly the ThinkUKnow program, are hugely critical for younger generations of Australians but also, as the member for Canberra stated, for older generations who haven't really got their heads around how this online world works. I commend the ThinkUKnow program and I commend the AFP for this program.

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