General News
7 February, 2025
Cyber safety is too important to wait
Australia should not be intimidated by cyber bullies.
It is unfortunate that after making its proposed "Digital Duty of Care" legislation such a priority over the course of this parliamentary term the Albanese government appears to have put it on the backburner.
When the Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland, tabled the report of the Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act in Parliament on Tuesday she made it clear there were no plans to legislate before the election.
"The government is continuing to carefully consider all recommendations put forward in the report and will respond in due course," she said in a statement.
While the government had never actually committed to introducing legislation in this term, its earlier statements on this subject indicated an intention to act with alacrity.
On November 1 last year, when welcoming the report prepared by Delia Rickard, Ms Rowland said, "Keeping Australians safe online is a key focus of the Albanese government."
"That's why we brought forward the commencement of the review by a full 12 months. It was clear our laws needed to keep pace with emerging technologies and their associated harms ... the Albanese government has been proactive in ensuring our legislative framework remains fit-for-purpose".
That statement, interestingly enough, was made just days before the US election. Since then, the social media titans, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, have lined up behind the new president and Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter who refused to take down footage of the Wakely church stabbing, has emerged as the Trump whisperer-in-chief.
The risks associated with making this type of footage freely available on the web were highlighted when, just 40 minutes before he murdered three schoolgirls and attempted to murder eight others, British teenager Axel Rudakubana searched social media for the video of a 16-year-old boy stabbing Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel.
Musk, who became embroiled in a heated exchange with the e-Safety commissioner, claimed that Australia was unilaterally trying to censor the internet.
The possibility that footage of a brutal attack by a disturbed teenager on one side of the world may have prompted what was possibly a copycat attack by another on the other side of the globe does not appear to have crossed Musk's mind. Or, if it did, he just dismissed it as collateral damage in his ruthless pursuit of wealth, power and influence.
It is obvious that individuals such as Musk and Zuckerberg, who axed Facebook's fact-checking unit following what he described as a "cultural shift" brought about by Donald Trump's election, have no interest in policing their own domains.
They are quite content to rake in advertising dollars off the backs of their users while allowing fake news to proliferate, hatreds to fester and bad actors to interfere in elections around the world.
If these people are allowed to have their way, the internet will degenerate into a dystopian "Wild West" online environment that you dip into at your own risk.
It would be very disappointing if, as some are suggesting, the government has shelved this issue for the time being because, with an election in the offing, it doesn't want to run the risk of poking the American bears.
While it is a given that Musk, Trump, et al. would be incensed if Australia moved to introduce punitive fines for companies that allowed content that harmed young people, endangered mental wellbeing, promoted harmful practices or was just illegal, that's no reason not to act.
Australia changed the global dynamic when it refused to be bullied by China. It has the ability to do this again with the narcissistic cyber bullies in charge of social media.