European pollies to study our eSafety

Members of the European parliament are flying to Australia next week for five days of high-level talks with government and the eSafety Commissioner.

Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Members of the European parliament are flying to Australia next week for five days of high-level talks with government and the eSafety Commissioner to learn lessons from Australia’s world-leading approach to combating child exploitation online.

The visit comes at a critical moment, with the European Commission set to release new legislation to combat child sexual abuse and exploitation, which will shape the future of ­online regulation across the continent and the world.

Australia was the first country to create the role of eSafety Commissioner, filled by Julie Inman Grant who used to work for tech giants including Twitter.

“Australia has been leading the world in online safety regulation for the past six years and we now have a successful and ­replicable model that the rest of the world is closely looking at,” Ms Grant said. “This visit by representatives of the European parliament shows how important this work has been.”

Other countries are also considering creating eSafety commissioners and officers, ­in­cluding Ireland and Britain.

Ms Grant said Australia had started its journey on creating a safer online environment after television personality Charlotte Dawson took her life in 2014 in what was dubbed a “Twitter suicide”, after she was abused ­relentlessly on the platform.

Australia’s wide-eyed ­approach to the dangers of the internet has since seen it foster an “extremely hostile environment” for the hosting of illegal content such as child sexual ­exploitation material, to the point where no such sites are able to operate domestically.

However, thousands of Australians access child exploitation content hosted overseas every year, with the trend growing since the outbreak of Covid-19.

Fresh data from the eSafety Commission showed illegal content like child sexual abuse mat­erial was up 101 per cent in 2021 compared to 2019 levels.

Ms Grant hoped members of the European parliament would take lessons from Australia to help it shut down sites hosted on the continent and prevent mat­erial flowing into Australia.

“It’s encouraging the EU is looking at our experience because if Europe were to follow a similar path to Australia, it would help to close the net around those seeking to trade and profit from this terrible content,” she said.

Ms Grant said some of the “biggest players” in creating and distributing such content were in the Netherlands and France.

“Some people (in the content) may be Australian children. Yes, the content is not hosted here, but it is a global scourge and requires a global response,” she said.

The EU delegation includes the co-chairs of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children’s Rights, Swedish MEP David Lega, Italian MEP Caterina Chinnici and Intergroup secretary-general Emilio Puccio.

They will hold roundtable talks with Ms Grant and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher, along with officials from the Department of Home Affairs, National Office of Child Safety, Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation and the Australian Federal Police.

Mr Fletcher said co-operating across national borders was critical when it came to managing the online risks.

“If you have like-minded governments around the world adopting like-minded approaches on these issues it will get the outcomes we want from big tech, because the things they (big tech) need to do to keep Australians safe is the same as what they need to do to keep people in France or Belgium safe,” he said.

“What we want is to get a group of legislators from the EU better informed about the tough legislation we’ve introduced in a number of areas and the regulatory mechanisms we have.”

The tough legislation includes new powers given to the eSafety Commissioner allowing her to contact websites hosting abhorrent material and order take downs. If the websites refuse to comply, Ms Grant has the power to contact the internet browser or the app store and demand it act.

Ms Grant said the delegation would also examine the Safety by Design program developed by eSafety, which encouraged digital service providers to make safety a key part of their design and development process.

“Ultimately, we want to get to a place where we are stopping online harms from happening in the first place,” she said.

“This is the goal of our Safety by Design program and it’s encouraging to see the European parliament taking an interest in this potentially game-changing initiative.”