Since 2013, FamilyVoice Australia has been involved with helping develop policy and legislation to protect children from internet harms – particularly harms through access to pornography.

The positive government response to the inquiry held in 2017 had far reaching consequences toward developing the helpful legislation we are seeing today.

However, a five-year-old child searching the word ‘porn’ on their mobile phone browser today will still immediately access explicit hard-core pornography.

On 1st December 2021, Michelle Rowland MP, Shadow Minister for Communications, said, “The Morrison government has run late on everything from legislating a new online safety act, to reforming online privacy law, to improving digital media literacy and now to initiating this inquiry into online harms in the last sitting days of this year.”

She also stated, “It's important that both digital platforms and governments undertake research to understand the evolving online harms and what can be done in a very practical way to keep citizens and consumers safe online. But this research must not be misused. Governments need to fix the yawning information asymmetry on how platforms and the algorithms that drive them are used and abused.”

Click here to send a message to Michelle Rowland MP, Shadow Minister for Communications to ask her to advise of Labor’s plans, if elected next month, to hasten legislation. What practical steps do you propose to keep Australian children safe from the harms of pornography on the internet, and to hold digital platforms to account?

Will a Labor government commit to direct and adequately resource the eSafety Commissioner to expeditiously develop and publish a roadmap for the implementation of a regime of mandatory age verification for online pornographic material, as recommended in the Age of Innocence Report?

Please send a quick message to Michelle Rowland MP now.