Page 1943 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017
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Debate (on motion by Mr Ramsay) adjourned to the next sitting.
Crimes (Invasion of Privacy) Amendment Bill 2017
Exposure draft
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.21): I seek leave to table an exposure draft of the Crimes (Invasion of Privacy) Amendment Bill 2017 and associated papers, and to make a statement in relation to the papers.
Leave granted.
MS LE COUTEUR: I present the following papers:
Crimes (Invasion of Privacy) Amendment Bill 2017—Exposure draft—
Exposure draft.
Explanatory statement.
Consultation arrangements.
Invasions of Privacy & Technology-Facilitated Abuse—ACT Greens discussion paper, dated June 2017.
Madam Speaker, this exposure draft that I am tabling today seeks to protect our community from non-consensual sharing of intimate images and documents. I am pleased that this is something which clearly the whole Assembly has recognised as an issue. I thank Mr Hanson for his contribution a minute or two ago. I will speak a little more about that later in my speech. I also thank the Labor Party and the Attorney-General for their interest and contribution to this debate. We have also had some useful discussions with your staff.
We have a situation in which there is a ubiquity of cameras. We have them on our phones. I have one on my desk. I imagine we probably all have one on our desk or on our person. They are on our computers; they are in our houses; they are in shops. It just makes it easy to take photographs of people and videos of people without either their knowledge or consent. Social media and the internet make these images easy to share and to distribute widely. Our laws need to evolve with the changes of technology and to keep pace with the behavioural changes in society that result from these changes.
We know that, regardless of whether they have experienced this abuse themselves, 80 per cent of Australians think that it should be a crime for someone to share a sexual image of another person without that person’s consent. As Mr Hanson did, I am going to quote some figures from the recent study by the RMIT. It found that one in five Australians has experienced image-based abuse. Victims of image-based abuse experience high levels of psychological distress.
Interestingly, women and men are equally likely to report being a victim but perpetrators of image-based abuse are most likely to be male and known to the victim.
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