Minister Plibersek and Minister Car doorstop interview

E&OE TRANSCRIPT PRUE CAR, ACTING PREMIER OF NEW SOUTH WALES: Well, good morning, everyone. We're about to walk into a really important conversation. A conversation that has been brought together to talk to a range of advocates, experts, leaders in this community, leaders in all three school sectors, as well as ministers from both the state and the Commonwealth governments, and I'm really proud that we're able to be joined here this morning by Minister Plibersek, who has been a leading voice in this space for some time.

Today's conversation will focus on what we can all do as a community to combat sexual violence and misogyny, and so a lot of that conversation is how we can encourage our young boys to listen to advice about healthy relationships. Relationships based on empathy and respect, and treating each other with kindness and being a good human being. That is a responsibility of everyone in the community, as well as schools.

We do so much in schools to teach our girls and boys about respect for each other, but there's only so much that can be done where there's so much other influence, particularly directed at our young boys. This is a conversation that Minister Harrison and I, and Minister Ryan Park will be very pleased to be having with our Commonwealth counterparts, as well as Dr.

Hannah Tonkin, who will be facilitating the day. We hope that this is the beginning of a conversation together with those with lived experience, I would say as well, and that's a really powerful contribution, I know that we'll be hearing. This will be an important first step, and from this, we hope to be working together with the Commonwealth and with experts and community advocates from around New South Wales and hopefully from around the country to do everything possible to keep our young girls and our young women safe.

TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: I want to thank the acting premier for inviting me today because this is a really important area of cooperation between the Commonwealth government and the states. We've had a really disturbing few weeks here in New South Wales and around the country. We continue to hear of too many girls and women who lose their lives, who are killed, raped, assaulted.

We need to change those figures. What we've seen in recent years are some improvements in some areas of family domestic, family and domestic violence, but at the same time, we've seen an explosion of sexual assault, particularly in that under 18 age group. Under 18 victims, under 18 perpetrators, we see that more than 80% of those victims are female, and more than half, or around half, are under the age of 18.

That's a really disturbing trend to be confronted with. Growing rates of sexual violence, where both the perpetrator and the victim are under the age of 18, we need to do something different. The national cabinet recently met and agreed some really important directions.

We know that we've got our Second Action Plan on family domestic and sexual violence underway right now, and two of the areas that we agree need additional effort are sexual violence and the online world. There is no doubt that online harms are spilling into the real world and doing real world harms right now, particularly to our young people. We know that boys are seeing pornography before they've had their first kiss.

On average, more than three years before they have their first real world sexual encounter, and the scripts that they're learning from online pornography are treating women roughly, demeaning them, hurting them, strangling them. Those things are becoming normalised in a way that is profoundly harmful to young people. We have to change that.

As a Commonwealth government, we are prepared to act. We've already seen that. We've got our under-16 social media delay, we’ve got age verification for online pornography, we've banned deepfake nudes, we've banned nudify apps.

There's a whole range of areas where we're acting. The question now is, what more should we do? What comes next?

And that's one of the things that we'll be discussing today. We've also been working very closely with the states and territories on consent and respectful relationships education. In fact, we've invested almost $80 million in consent and respectful relationships education, and that is in addition to the $7.5 million dollars we've invested in Teach Us Consent, and $100 million dollars we've invested in primary prevention.

A range of other measures. We really need to get consent and respectful relationships education right. There’s a couple of things that give me real hope, and the first is that boys will tell you that the biggest influence in their lives is still their father or father figure.

About 60% of boys will say that's the first person they turn to for advice or support. That gives me real hope. We know that men who report having a close and loving relationship with a father or father figure are 48% less likely to use violence later in life.

That gives me real hope. So, as well as talking about what we're doing in the online world, I think we have a really important opportunity today to talk about what we do in the real world to make sure that girls and boys are growing up safe. They're growing up in ways that prioritise consent and respect as they develop their first romantic relationships.

JOURNALIST: [inaudible] ACTING PREMIER CAR: Well, today is an important conversation about what may need to come next. We can't hope to know what that is really until we talk to people who are working with young people, people with lived experience, and the experts in the field, so we're very pleased that this is the beginning of a conversation, and we need to keep having this.

And it is a whole of society challenge that we all need to confront together. JOURNALIST: In terms of consent education, how much are you are you looking now to incorporate education about algorithms, porn, online porn, violent porn, into what's the conversation that happens between teachers and students. ACTING PREMIER CAR: Yeah, I mean, and that that relationship between a teacher and a student in a classroom is so important on so many levels to a child's development, we know that they're one of their most trusted adults.

Consent education is actually embedded in the curriculum. All three school sectors in New South Wales are teaching consent education, as they are required to do based on the curriculum from kindergarten in an age-appropriate manner, right through to where they graduate in year 12. We have been aided by significant support from the Commonwealth government on this.

But I just want to be really clear: schools can only do so much when this is a challenge that the community faces, that society faces. That when kids go home and they grab their phone that we're not supposed to have at school, or they get onto their laptop, that there are other influences coming at them really thick and fast, and actually those algorithms are designed to get them into that vortex.

The answer to this whole of community challenge is not to add more things to the curriculum. That is not going to fix this. Teachers and schools will be part of the solution, as they are to every challenge that faces society time and time again.

Teachers and schools are at the very forefront of this challenge, as they are with every other challenge that faces society. But the answer is not going to be adding more to the curriculum. It's about working together as a whole of society.

JOURNALIST: Is it possible to force social media companies to change their algorithms [inaudible] ACTING PREMIER CAR: Yeah, obviously this is a conversation that the Commonwealth is having, and we are having with the Commonwealth, and we want to be able to see this progress. I don't think anyone is saying this is easy, and it's very delicate, but we owe it to our young people to actually seriously look at how this can happen.

JOURNALIST: Dr. Tonkin, has mandatory consent education been effective? Do you think?

DR HANNAH TONKIN, NEW SOUTH WALES WOMEN'S SAFETY COMMISIONER: We need urgent action to address the devastating impacts of sexual violence on young women and girls, and to address the rise in misogyny amongst young people more generally, and today's roundtable is a really critical step to bring everyone together to talk about solutions. One of the key things we're talking about is the role of schools, the role of respectful relationships education in schools, and the role of consent education.

So we'll be looking at how that can be improved, what's working, and what are some of the challenges. A key part of the discussion today and of the next steps that will follow will be centring the voices of young women and girls, because their leadership and their experiences are absolutely critical to help us find effective solutions. JOURNALIST: And just in that, sorry, because we've just spoken about how you know schools adding more to the curriculum is a challenge.

So, how much of this is about parents, and maybe not parents, but other guardians or or role models being able to step up and have those consent education conversations with their children or with their son? MINISTER PLIBERSEK: As I said a moment ago, we know that the influence of the online world is bleeding into the real world, and that's having some really bad effects on our young people.

It's normalising strangulation. Almost 60% or around 60% of young people say they have experienced sexual strangulation. That blows my mind, right?

There is no safe way of strangling someone. That is the influence of pornography on our young people. So absolutely, we need to deal with what young people are being fed online.

We see the really pernicious influence of some of these manosphere influences monetizing the insecurity of young men. They used to do it to girls with you know diet and makeup stuff. They're now doing it to young boys to generate big dollars.

There is a profit motive in exploiting the loneliness and insecurity and feeling of rejection that many young people experience as teenagers. So we absolutely have to equip young people to push back against those influences, and we have to deal with the companies that are monetizing those influences. However, the most powerful relationships that young people have are still with their adults around them.

In this case, we're often talking about dads, the role that dads play or father figures in the lives of young men and boys. The real world influences that they show, the respectful way they talk to a boys mother, the respectful way they deal day to day with the women in their lives-that is an incredibly powerful influence on boys and young men as well. So we need to do both.

This is not a question of either or do we legislate? Do we make sure that our social relationships are supportive? We need to do both.

JOURNALIST: Is there more to do in the space of programs to educate dads to educate their kids? You know, like how do we help support the dads? MINISTER PLIBERSEK: This is a long and detailed conversation, but there's a lot of work going on in this area because we know that dads, particularly at the time around the birth of a baby that can be a very dangerous period for domestic violence to start.

So by supporting dads, people who are men who are becoming dads for the first time in particular to be those warm, loving, dependable, strong men that we want in our lives, we're actually we're actually protecting babies from the time they are born, and women and whole families. We're building a strong foundation. There's a lot of work going on in that area.

JOURNALIST: Minister, what power does the federal government have to force social media companies to take down certain content? I guess like they do with terrorism, strangulation, for instance, and and what powers does it have to force social media companies to allow people to opt in or out of algorithms? MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, that's something that we'll be discussing and working on over the next few weeks because we don't have the power to regulate algorithms, and we have some powers around depiction of illegal content on social media, and we've got a fantastic centre against child exploitation that hunts down people who are posting online child sex abuse material, hunts down the people who are posting that and creating it, and finds the children who are being exploited and protects them, doing amazing work.

It's their eighth anniversary this week. We've got the eSafety Commissioner who can take down material, but we need to look at what additional ways we need to strengthen both our regulation potential for algorithms. People should be able to opt out of getting violent and degrading stuff online.

We know that an account set up by a teenage boy takes an average of 23 minutes to be fed misogynistic content online. That is a deliberate decision of big tech to do that, they are making money out of harming our children. We need to look at what additional powers we need to deal with that.

And you've mentioned strangulation pornography. The UK is legislating in this area at the moment. We're looking very closely at what they're doing.

JOURNALIST: So, would you be seeking to force websites to take down content that depicts [inaudible] and stuff like that, like you know, for instance, child abuse material is taken down. MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We're looking at our options on that right now. JOURNALIST: Do you think the social media companies will be receptive to that, or have they been in the conversation already had?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I think the social media companies will be very cross with us, just as they were when we delayed young people getting on to addictive social media feeds before the age of 16. I don't think people who make billions of dollars out of monetizing the insecurity and unhappiness of teenagers want to deal with those issues. They want to keep making billions of dollars, but we've got a responsibility as parents and as legislators to take that on.

JOURNALIST: Can I just ask you about comments Matt Canavan made? He says he's pointing to classrooms rather than online algorithms as being responsible for pushing boys towards the manosphere. What do you make of those comments, and what do you see as being more of a problem?

ACTING PREMIER CAR: Yeah. Look, where do I start with Matt Canavan's comments? The fact that he thinks it is the feminisation of the curriculum just shows how out of touch he is with the actual challenge that parents are wrestling with right now.

Teaching young people to be respectful of one another is not feminisation. That's helping young people be good human beings. So I would really like to see male politicians like, Matt Canavan, using their voice for good and actually showing young boys how to respect young women, as opposed to using this very serious challenge we face in keeping our young women and girls safe to make political points.

I think that's disgusting, actually, and I think that attacking teachers who are actually at the front line of challenging some of this thinking in classrooms, and often those safe, trusted adults in front of those children, attacking teachers is absolutely abhorrent behaviour. And I know that both governments represented here today would completely reject what Matt Canavan has said, and would urge support of our teachers as they actually deal with this challenge in their classrooms and support parents as we are dealing with this in our families.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I'll just add a couple of words to that. Consent is not weak and it's not woke. It's common decency, and our teachers, as the acting premier has said, our teachers are at the front line of this battle to help our young people grow up to be mutually respectful to one another.

The idea that you've got young boys, boys as young as six, using manosphere language in the classroom disturbs me. The fact that teachers are reporting that they have sexist language and even sexual aggression against them in the classroom. They have experienced it themselves.

They see it aimed at female students. That disturbs me as well. You've got young boys saying to female teachers, ignoring instruction, and saying to female teachers, get me a sandwich.

That is the influence of the manosphere on our boys. The idea that any member of parliament would say that the problem is with the teachers, rather than the problem is with big tech and what they're ramming down the throats of our kids, I find extraordinary, unbelievable, in fact. I would have thought that teaching young men and women about consent and respectful relationships is something that is beyond politics that any leader could get behind.

JOURNALIST: Dr. Tonkin. Do you see that boys attitudes towards women perhaps worsening in recent years?

DR TONKIN: We have seen recent research at the University of Melbourne that shows a concerning shift in the attitudes of young men compared to older men in Australia. This research suggested that almost a third of young men think equality for women and equal opportunity have gone too far, and almost a quarter of young men think that feminism should be resisted by violence if necessary.

This is very concerning research, and that's why discussions like we're having today are so critical and so urgent. JOURNALIST: Sorry, just one more. New South Wales updated its definitions of consent several years ago now.

Has that made any difference to some of the levels of sexual violence? ACTING PREMIER CAR: I think the truth is that not one thing is going to fix this challenge that we face as a society, and we have to be doing everything all at once, and everything that is recommended to us by people that live it and are experts and advocating in the field, and that's what we're going to do today.