MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (16:52): I want to thank Senator Payman for bringing this to the chamber. If only we had a government that was actually looking at the evidence and in this case recommendations that are some 12 months old—they've been sitting there with the government since October last year—and following the evidence to address online risks.

Instead we are rushing ahead, without evidence, with an ill-conceived privacy catastrophe that's called a social media age ban. Let's be clear about what the problem here is. Right now someone's ex-partner is flooding the internet with intimate images without their consent or a woman is being harassed across different platforms for reporting assault.

They're reporting their problems to the platforms where the postings are happening. Too often, they're being told by those platforms that the material's not in breach of their policy. Of course there's no digital ombudsman that they can go to in order to have someone on their side and to put pressure on the platforms.

The Greens have been very clear that we absolutely need a digital ombudsman. Then, when they go to eSafety to report cyberabuse under the current law—it wouldn't matter what eSafety's budget is—they have to prove that the material was posted with the intent to cause harm. Your abuser can destroy your reputation, your mental health and your career, but, unless you can prove what was in their head when they pressed 'send', you're literally on your own.

Recommendation 18 from the review gives us the fix. It says: The adult cyber abuse scheme should be amended by lowering the threshold. The new threshold should require that an ordinary reasonable person would conclude that 'it is likely the material was intended to have an effect on a particular Australian adult', and that an ordinary reasonable person would 'regard the material as being, in all the circumstances, menacing, harassing or seriously offensive.' That would give us the fix.

Would a reasonable person think that this was intended to harm? Would a reasonable person find it menacing, harassing or seriously offensive? That recommendation was given to government 12 months ago.

We could have already passed that, and it goes to show that, when it comes to online platforms and when it comes to regulating in this space, we can't rely upon timetables for legislative reforms that were set in the 1900s. These changes are happening rapidly, and the harm is happening at scale on these online platforms. Last year, there were some 16,000 complaints in Australia about adult cyberabuse.

These overwhelmingly came from women, who were then turned away because the threshold that's been set is too high. And how many gave up in that process? How many weren't believed?

And they weren't believed not because what they were putting forward wasn't credible; they felt disbelieved because the law put structural barriers into getting them fixed and from actually holding the abusers to account. We not only need to speed up the pace at which we do legislative responses to the online world; we should be looking at speeding up the responses to harm in our current systems.

Right now, victims wait 48 hours after complaining to a platform before eSafety can issue a removal notice. That's two whole days in which something that might have only initially been seen by a few people literally spreads like wildfire across parts of the platform, gets screenshotted and is seen by families and seen by workmates. Too often, 48 hours means the damage is effectively permanent, even if there is a take-down order.

The review recommends cutting this to 24 hours, but even that's too long, in my opinion. This needs to be immediate. We need to be acting as though people's lives, their health and their mental health are at stake, because they are.

For too long, the law has not taken women seriously when they've raised issues about harassment and abuse, and it's one of the reasons I was concerned when changes in this place to target deepfakes put all of those changes in the hands of law enforcement and police, who have an established track record of not taking women's complaints seriously and of not progressing them.

So we pass a law, and then we give it all to the police, who we know, historically, have failed. So let's make this change. We also need real enforcement and real penalties for continued posting.

There needs to be a power to make it stop. I call again on the Labor government to listen to the evidence, put in place a digital duty of care and start making the internet safer by design.