Enhancing Online Safety for Children

Listen

We are asking for your views on how the Australian Government can best support parents and teachers in protecting children from harmful content and malicious and illegal online activities.

Why we want your input

We need to know how the Australian Government can support parents and teachers in protecting children from harmful online activities.

How you can voice your opinion

Tell us what you think in a written submission.

What will be the outcome of this consultation?

Better ways to protect children from harmful online activities.

The Issue

Australian children are immersing themselves in the online world through social media sites, online games, smartphones and tablets. We are asking for your views on how the Australian Government can best support parents and teachers in protecting children from harmful content and malicious and illegal online activities.

Relevant Documentation

Discussion Paper - Enhancing Online Safety for Children

Published 22nd Jan 2014

Download PDF (988.61 KB) Download DOC (458 KB)

Discussion Paper - Enhancing Online Safety for Children

Outcome

New laws to protect children

Legislation will be introduced in Parliament by the end of the year to:

Establish the Office of the Children's e-Safety Commissioner.
Implement a two-tiered scheme for the rapid removal of cyber-bullying material from social media sites (the rapid removal scheme).
Implement a cyber-bullying civil notice regime under which the Commissioner will have the power to issue civil notices to a person who posted cyber-bullying material targeted at an Australian child.

Other outcomes

The Government has also committed to developing a range of measures to help protect Australian children online, including:

Working with industry to improve safety options on smartphones, other devices and internet access services. This includes software that parents can choose to install to help protect children from inappropriate content.
Giving parents advice about the appropriateness of individual media items for children.
Funding for Australian-based research and information campaigns on online safety.

The Government's other online safety measures include:

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) Child Protection Operations Team investigates online child sex exploitation.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority's (the ACMA) Cybersmart programme
ThinkUKnow offers help and advice, including information relating to the posting of offensive and explicit material online and via mobile phones.

Use the INTERPOL list to block child abuse content online.

The Cooperative Arrangements for Complaints Handling on Social Networking Sites (the Protocol) which was developed through close cooperation with industry and has been agreed to by Facebook, Google (YouTube), Yahoo!7 and Microsoft. The Protocol assists in improving the information that social networking sites make available to their users about their handling of complaints for material posted online, and to highlight and educate users on mechanisms to deal with problems which arise on their sites.