MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Senator PAYMAN (Western Australia—Australia's Voice Whip) (16:37): I rise today to speak about a crisis that is unfolding not in the streets or in workplaces but on our screens. It is a crisis that disproportionately targets women, silences voices and corrodes the very fabric of public participation. I'm talking about the rise of AI generated sexual deepfakes and the urgent need to strengthen the powers of our eSafety Commissioner to combat these digital weapons of abuse.
These are not victimless pranks or harmless jokes. This is technology being twisted into a tool of violence—deliberate acts of degradation often aimed at women who dare to speak, to lead or to challenge the status quo. In my home state of WA, the West Australian recently reported a tsunami of cyberabuse.
Women like Caitlin Roper and Lyn Kennedy from Collective Shout were targeted with deepfake pornography, rape threats, death threats and doxxing after their successful campaign removed more than 20,000 pornographic games. For making the internet safer for our kids, they were met with violence disguised as free speech. Caitlin Roper said she was terrified for her life.
That is not the cost of advocacy we should accept in a democracy. And I speak from experience. I've faced waves of cyberabuse—deepfakes, hate comments, even death threats—with bad actors using my image and voice to push their own agendas.
In this age of misinformation, the misuse of my likeness is becoming more common, and it needs to be stopped, not just for me but for every woman who steps forward to serve. Amendments to the Criminal Code in 2024 made it a crime to create or share deepfake sexual material without consent—and that was an important step—but legislation alone cannot erase the images.
Once this content is online, victims are forced to fight an algorithm that never sleeps, an algorithm that never stops evolving. Police processes are slow, prosecutions take months and, while the legal wheels turn, those images circulate. They are reshared, repurposed and replayed again and again.
That is where the eSafety Commissioner plays a vital role. They can order platforms to remove this material, and in 90 per cent of cases the content comes down. But only six per cent of reports even qualify for these notices.
The law requires the abuse to be so severe that an ordinary reasonable person would find it 'seriously harmful'. Tell me, what ordinary person decides what's seriously harmful for a woman seeing her face grafted on to pornographic material or being told she deserves to be assaulted digitally, if not physically? The threshold is too high.
It leaves countless women, from advocates to young people, stranded between a criminal process that's too slow and a regulatory process that's too narrow. Just a fortnight ago, in Senate estimates, I asked a few questions. Why can't eSafety act when entire activist groups are mass targeted online?
Why are victims limited to reporting just 10 URLs and three photos at a time when the abuse comes in hundreds? Why doesn't eSafety have a no-wrong-door policy to redirect complaints? Why can't the commissioner ban accounts or act on abuse that falls short of the serious harm test?
These questions reflect the lived realities these women face. Their voices and reputations are being weaponised, and they feel absolutely powerless to stop it. So today I'm calling for the government to lower the threshold in the Adult Cyber Abuse Scheme, as recommended in the statutory review of the Online Safety Act, from 'seriously harmful' to 'conduct that is menacing, harassing or seriously offensive and intended to cause harm'.
That simple change could let eSafety act earlier, act faster and protect more people. While we're at it, let's give the commissioner stronger account-banning powers, mandate deepfake detection tools and finally implement a real digital duty of care. Regardless of their political affiliation, every woman in this chamber, as well as every daughter, sister, mother, staffer, journalist and advocate, is vulnerable to this technology.
We owe it to them to ensure that the laws are designed to protect Australians and actually keep up with the pace of harm. To the woman who have endured this: I see you, I hear you, and I promise to keep raising your voices.