Senator Gerard P. Craughwell - speech from 16 Oct 2019

On that, it's an issue I had with gambling already. It is possible for the ISPs in the country to ensure that external content can be blocked at the point of entry. Now I know that there are ways around that and I've worked in the area long enough to know that there are ways around most things but ISPs have to be held responsible for the material that's allowed into the country. When you're drafting the bill, if you're not prepared to see Senator Friedman's go the whole way, we have to start holding the platform providers who have washed their hands and said, well, this is nothing to do with us, it's the individuals who put up the stuff. And the type of site Senator Friedman was talking about, where somebody is taught how to become anorexic, is totally and utterly repulsive. Where somebody is taught or put through a series of steps in order to take their own lives, that is just outrageous. There is no graded system that can measure that. The site should be gone and the individuals behind it should be arrested in whatever jurisdiction they're in. But there is a responsibility on the ISPs to control content. Now, I went through this myself as the head of an IT section in a further education college. What would we control and what would we not control vis-a-vis what students could see on the college site? And we took the view at that time that our students were adults and we were not going to limit content. But from time to time we did encounter problems with people who transgressed what would be normal behaviour in society. So from that point of view, I think a simple bill that would prevent those sites, which we have in front of us here today, would be something worth considering as an immediate step to stop at least that much. At least we can walk away and say there will be no sites allowed to teach people how to commit suicide or teach people how to become anorexic or teach people how to injure or harm other people. We're never going to stop bullies. Bullies have been around since time immemorial, you know. I'm sure if we go back to the time of Christ there was bullies, you know. And there will be bullies and sadly a lot of them leave the playground and come into the office and they're as bad in the office as they were in the playground. We're never going to stop that but we can limit the speed at which it is transmitted. And I think that's what Senator Friedman is trying to do. Senator Friedman.