George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me pleasure to speak on this bill, the Online Safety Bill, which is about establishing a set of basic online safety expectations for the online industry. It's about keeping kids safe online and regulating content that's harmful, illegal and abusive and that leads to a world of pain for both children and adults.

This bill addresses cyberbullying, not just of children but also of adults—we could talk about that as online harassment rather than as cyberbullying. It'll give greater powers to the eSafety Commissioner to issue removal notices of harmful content that's on platforms. It'll require big tech to step up to the plate and do more about getting defamatory and harmful material off their platforms—rather than censoring political debate, which seems to be the space that they want to play in. When the Googles, Facebooks and Twitters of the world don't take responsibility for the harmful, unlawful and defamatory content that is on their platforms, that's when we intervene. That's when we have the eSafety Commissioner empowered to act immediately to block images and videos of violent and distressing events. It's when we have the eSafety Commissioner intervening to ensure that defamatory, harmful and other unlawful content is removed. And that is what's going to happen as part of this Online Safety Bill.

I'll just say that I met an outfit by the name of Family Zone, a company that has developed some technology here in Australia which is all about helping parents better manage social media and online usage for their children and for their families. They put some stats together which show why this bill is so important. These are stats that are going to shock some people. They are certainly going to shock some parents. Sixty-nine per cent of boys and 23 per cent of girls have viewed X-rated material on the internet by the age of 13. Sixty-four per cent of teenagers in this country access X-rated material at least once a week. Children's first exposure to this X-rated material is between the ages of eight and 10—eight and 10! We had protests happening in the streets yesterday—and I won't get into that argument—but let me just point out this little nugget of truth: 88 per cent of this explicit content that these kids are being subjected to contains violence against women. Forty-two per cent of teenagers report being bullied on a platform like Instagram, which Facebook runs. The rates of online bullying have actually doubled in a decade.

Children are being exposed to graphic and disturbing content online, and that has serious consequences for the future. It deforms children when it comes to developing relationships and understanding self-worth. Self-worth is important, because suicide is the leading cause of death of young people in Australia. And online bullying is just getting worse. The bullying doesn't stop now when the kids leave school; it's 24/7. Kids use social media for some form of peer validation. They seek approval from their friends, from their fellow students, because, sadly, what matters to most teenagers is what their friends think about them, and, when you've got almost half of all teenagers being bullied on some platform like Instagram, which is quite popular amongst young people, I can tell you: it's not a place, then, for validation; it's not a place for approval. These negative comments and scathing remarks—some of them illegal—about people's appearance, their personality or their sex life, or allegations of it, can have huge impacts on their self-confidence. They can completely alter the trajectory of a person's life. And, in the worst cases, they can lead to suicide.

Big tech companies need to take more responsibility to prevent this kind of online bullying and to support parents in choosing what their children are exposed to. I talked to Mr Tim Levy from this Australian company, Family Zone. He's got some insight into the anticompetitive behaviour that actually stops parents from being able to exercise control over social media with their children. He's got some views and some information on Google, Apple and Microsoft and how they respond as to online safety. Apple deliberately undermined parental control software that they'd developed, removing them from their App Store in 2018. Apple removed them! Why? Google's policy is to allow children, from the age of 13, to remove parental consent! That is just so wrong! These big tech companies, Google, Apple and Microsoft, do provide better safety measures for businesses—that's true.

But what about parents? What about families? They leave them high and dry. Business app developers on Apple devices can access high-performing network extensions for content filtering. Here are just some examples of what business app developers can do with Apple devices that parental control apps cannot do because that's how they've designed it. Businesses can stop users from accessing inappropriate apps like dating apps. They can stop users from installing browsers that access the dark web on a business platform. They can hide access to social media apps during, for instance, school hours—schools, actually, are allowed to do that. Businesses and schools can restrict the use of the camera or screen capture. Businesses can block X-rated iTunes content. Businesses can disable messaging apps. Try to do that as a parent, and you can't.

The technology is actually there. Australian companies are developing it to offer protections to families, but the big tech giants—the tech tyrants—are actually stopping families accessing those apps, and stopping those apps providing that service to parents. These are big multinational profit-driven tech companies, conglomerates, big corporations. They're not really focused on what's good for the community. They're not focused on what's good for children. What they're focused on is their bottom line. Their goal is to drive as much engagement into their platforms as possible, to get the eyeballs on the screen regardless of the consequences. As a result, you've got children being exposed to the very real dangers of the online world, and parents unable to protect them. Imagine being the parent of a child who's taken their own life because of abuse that they received through an online platform which had done nothing to stop that abuse, even though they could have. Imagine being powerless to protect your child, knowing that a tech company could have taken responsibility—or allowed you to take the responsibility, but didn't—to protect your child. As much as anything, this is about taking responsibility. This bill means that if tech companies won't, or don't, take responsibility then the eSafety Commissioner can, and can force them to take action.

I mentioned the Christchurch massacre in this place earlier today. The big tech companies allowed 17 minutes of that horrid, horrid event to be streamed live online. The atrocities were broadcast for the world to see and, as a result, multiple copies of that video were re-uploaded, re-uploaded, re-uploaded and shared on various social media platforms. Imagine being the family of one of those victims, losing your loved one in such a horrific way, and then having to watch, or hear that other people have viewed, the final moments of your loved ones played out online. It would be excruciating. And through this bill, the eSafety Commissioner will have the ability to remove content like this.

What are big tech focused on at the moment rather than this? You know what they're doing? They're censoring political discussion. That's their big thing. They're censoring lawful, law-abiding, completely safe political discussion because they don't like it, it doesn't fit in with their editorial guidelines that they call 'community standards'. That's what they're focused on. These big tech platforms that parade themselves as being the parties for free speech and the new way that we can have free expression all around the world, they go and silence the leader of the free world. If they can do that, they can do it to anyone. And they are doing it to anyone. Australians every day of the week wake up to see the little note on Facebook and other platforms saying, 'Your post has been removed,' 'You have been banned for seven days,' or 'You have been banned for 30 days.' It's ridiculous stuff. It's not for harmful speech; they're not targeting that. They're targeting political discourse that they don't like. It is very, very dangerous because these big tech social media platforms are now the new public square. So they don't take responsibility for the dangers that affect kids and the dangers that affect people in our community; what they do is they actually censor political discussion. It is just so disturbing. This is a danger to our democracy—an absolute and utter danger to our democracy.

In short, Google, Apple and Microsoft are preferring commercial interests and political censorship over the rights of parents and the expectations of the community that children should be safe online—that everyone should be safe online. Parents believe that this government—the Morrison Liberal-National government—has policies in place that are protecting their children. Our current regime allows Google, Apple and Microsoft, as I said, to prefer businesses. These platforms control what their employees can see, but they don't allow that to happen for families. I think there's public expectation that the new Online Safety Act should allow companies to provide Australians with tools that they can use to keep their children safe. As Tim Levy put it to me, big tech has taken away the fundamental right of parents to parent in the digital world, but, with some small changes, which the minister could utilise as a result of this Online Safety Bill, we can fix that. We can ensure that this government is doing everything possible to help parents protect their kids. The government can make it mandatory for tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft to support parental control software providers with the same level of features given to business app developers. Next, tech platforms need to ensure their maturity level structure with parental control providers, so that parents can make choices about what content their children should be exposed to.

I'm advised, as I've alluded to, that this legislation allows the minister, through legislative instrument, to tailor additional expectations for larger, established platforms. Right here and now, I am calling on the minister to do that as soon as this bill is passed for the sake of parents and families across this country. Give families the same right to put in controls over the content that's being broadcast into their homes as you give to businesses. Right now that can't be done. I've got to tell you that, if I hear that this bill doesn't allow that, I will want to see amendments to this bill come before this House so that we can bring that in. But I do believe, from what I've been told, that this bill will give the minister the right to target outfits like Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter to ensure that they are not bringing in anti-competitive conduct and to ensure that the Apples of the world aren't stopping apps which give parents the ability to control what is broadcast through those devices. This is the kind of thing we need. So, on 15 March, I wrote to the Minister for Home Affairs asking him to look into this technology that has been developed in Australia that can help protect children and to ensure that this can be promoted. I'm going to be writing to Minister Fletcher as well to make him aware of this tech and to ensure that anti-competitive conduct is not engaged in to stop parents from accessing this new technology.

Once again, it's a shame that we have to be here putting forward a bill about online safety. These big tech platforms need to get a grip on what they are doing. They need to stop the abuse of young children in particular, they need to stop defamatory and unlawful content being on their platforms and they need to forget about political censorship where they're censoring lawful speech in this country that happens to be on their platforms. They have got such a perverse focus at the moment, and it needs to end. I'm calling big tech to account on this. That's why I support this bill.

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