Julian Simmonds (Ryan, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great pleasure to rise today and speak on this bill, the Online Safety Bill 2021, and to support it very enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. This is obviously a passion of mine. I'm a young dad and, like a lot of families in my electorate of Ryan, I'm passionate about making sure that our kids are not only safe when they're online but also supported in the real world from the harmful effects that can come from negative behaviour online.

Before I go on, I really wanted to pay tribute to the member for Forrest, who is in here watching—the wonderful Nola—because I'm a recent addition to this place and it has been a great honour of mine to come into this place and be able to take up this issue of online harm. The member for Forrest is one who I know—and there are others—has been taking up this particular fight for some time. I think that, long before the full negative effects of it were fully appreciated, the member for Forrest appreciated them and not only took them up in a virtue-signalling way but also took them up in a very practical way by working with her schools and taking it upon herself to actually educate young people about what is safe behaviour online. So, Member for Forrest, you should be congratulated for that.

Our kids are continuously spending more and more time online, and there are some very harmful environments online. I have to say technology continues to evolve faster than we are evolving in our understanding of it. Sitting on the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs and looking at those recommendations into online gambling and access to online porn, it struck me that it's not just about messaging apps or Facebook or Instagram, which we all understand relatively well—me not as much as I should, because I'm not a tech-head. There are things like loot boxes in games. There are things like chat functions, which kids can use to chat to people. Kids can be playing these games, in front of their parents, in full view. A parent can think they're doing the right thing by watching over their kid, but they don't know who is on the other end of the earpiece or what they're speaking about. It's a very dangerous space for parents. I'm struck by the fact that it's a space in which parents can be incredibly diligent and feel like they're doing everything right but still get it wrong. That is a really dangerous space. They'll get it wrong because (1) it's a struggle for parents of any generation to keep up with the technology of a younger generation and (2) these predators are incredibly sophisticated and determined in the horrible things that they are trying to do. The point I'm trying to make, and where I'm going with this little monologue, is that this bill is important because it gives parents the tools to help their kids in a way that they couldn't before. As we have seen, the eSafety Commissioner has had significant success with younger people. It also gives parents and adults the opportunity to push back against some of the trolls and the abhorrent online behaviour that we see through social media and other technologies.

To understand the prevalence of the issue, I want to give this House a little bit of an understanding of what we're up against when we're talking about vulnerable people in our society and the harm that can come from technological abuse. Recently, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, known as the ACCCE—it's a tremendous facility hosted in my home town of Brisbane, and I'm incredibly supportive of it—completed a study into understanding community awareness, perceptions, attitudes and preventive behaviours. They found some remarkable things. Four out of five children aged four are using the internet, and 30 per cent of those children have access to their own device. Incredible! Again, this isn't about lax parenting, although, from my own experience with my child, I know I'd be very careful about providing a four-year-old with a device. Some parents think they are doing the right thing by giving their child an internet enabled device, opening up all sorts of educational and learning opportunities for that child. But with that opportunity comes an incredible responsibility and an incredible potential for harm. One in two children under the age of 12 have their own device. Despite this, only 52 per cent of parents talk to their children about online safety. By the age of 11, most children are using the internet unsupervised. This is incredibly concerning. At the age of 11, the cognitive abilities of these kids are limited. Their ability to make sensible, rational decisions and to understand the full scope of the decisions they're making when they enter into conversations that could be harmful to them is limited. They don't fully understand. That's alright. That's an opportunity for parents and our entire society. The saying is: 'It takes a village to raise a child.' We all have to throw our arms around these parents and kids to make sure that everybody understands the harm that can come from online technological abuse, whether it be to kids or to parents.

I take the point of the previous Labor speaker. It is a difficult issue. But, with due respect, when he says, 'It's hard to find the balance,' I'm not so sure it is. I think the balance is quite clear. We expect the same rules, laws and norms in the online world as we expect in the real world. Up until now, we have been willing to forego those protections in the online world because we felt that, to get the benefits of all this increased connectivity between people in a globalised world, we had to give up the protections that we have in the real world. That's just not the case. I don't think that Australians are willing to accept it anymore. I don't think that they will cop it anymore. What the government has shown, by moving against the technology companies when it comes to having them paying for news content, demonstrates our desire to make sure that the same rules apply in the online world as they do in the real world. Frankly, I think these technology companies should be held accountable as the publishers that they are. It's not acceptable to have anonymous content on these platforms. If these platforms do allow anonymous content then they have to take responsibility for what is said in that anonymous content.

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