My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Cargoton woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily oz It's Friday, the first of September. I'm Sam Kazlowski, I'm Zaras Sidelin. The government has stopped short of setting an age limit for online pornography, saying the technology just isn't quite there. This is despite the fact that, according to a safety research, more than seventy five percent of Australian adults support the idea of the government creating some sort of age control
for porn. So what's led to this conclusion and what will it mean for the safety of young people on the Internet. We'll let you know in today's Deep Dive. But first, as news from Australia's biggest airline.
Yesterday, Quantus has scrapped its end of year deadline for customers to redeem their COVID travel credits. This is of course what we did a deep dive on earlier this week, so we will chuck that in the show notes. But the decision does follow recent scrutiny over the airline's handling of canceled COVID flights. Quantus customers with a credit balance can now request a cash refund instead, while Jetstar, which is owned by Quantas, says customers can use their COVID
vouchers indefinitely. It coincides with news that Australia's consumer watchdog is suing Quantas for allegedly advertising flights it had already canceled.
Police are investigating the cause of a fatal crash on a Victorian highway yesterday. Four people were killed when the car they were traveling in collided with a truck. The truck driver was hospitalized with non life threatening injuries.
Gambling signage outside New South Wales pubs and clubs has officially been banned from today. Gambling related signs things like VIP lounge or Golden Room, and images of dragons, coins or lightning motifs must be removed or concealed. Liquor and gaming New South Wales will now begin compliance inspections, promising a zero tolerance approach from December one. That's when eleven thousand dollar fines will be handed out to venues who fail to adhere to the change.
And today's good news. The eighth season of the AFL Women's Competition begins today. Defending aflw Premier's Melbourne will take on Collingwood in the season opener tonight. Round one will continue throughout the weekend and include local rivalry games in Sydney, Adelaide and Perth. According to E Safety Research, seventy five percent of sixteen to eighteen year olds have seen pawn online now. Of that group, nearly one third saort before the age of thirteen, and then another half between the
age of thirteen and fifteen. So what we wanted to look at today is how the government's been considering limiting the access Australians under eighteen have to porn.
Online pornography aside, we know that regulating online spaces is extremely difficult, and then when you add the layer of pornography, I imagine it's even harder. What's the government been considering in this space? How do you even begin to regulate this.
Okay, So at its most simple level, what's being proposed is a process of age verification to stop under eteens from accessing porn on the internet.
How do you do that, Like, what does that even look for?
Well that's where things get a little trickier because the how and the what it would look like and the back end of it is actually really hard to work out. So the government asked the a Safety Commissioner and that's Australia's independent regulator for online safety, to kind of figure it out.
You're going there ready to the solutions. I think before we've really highlighted what the issue here is. What are the issues that we're talking about here in relation to pornography.
Well, there's a few concerns here. So E safety has done some research which unsurprisingly found that exposure to porn was one of the top concerns for parents of children age two to seventeen. Now, another point brought up by E safety is that, while the research into this space is complex, some studies suggest an association between adult consumption
of mainstream porn and gender based violence. E Safety says that some of the studies have characterized the nature of mainstream porn as normalizing depictions of sexual violence and degrading
sexual narratives about women. So with all of this context, the E Safety Roadmap suggests that limiting access to this content before somebody is eighteen would actually make someone better equipped with critical reasoning skills and context in order to interpret what they're seeing and minimize potential harm.
You've said them minimize what they're seeing. But you know, a fourteen year old logging on somewhere in Australia might be seeing something very different to thirty five year old logging on elsewhere in the country. And we're using the catch all phrase of pornography. But not all porn is the same.
There's a massive spectrum, and in the creation of the roadmap, E Safety says they've consulted all sorts of people who work to make or publish porn, and the roadmap does indeed acknowledge that in a local context, many producers of local content are female and LGBTQAA plus. Now on the other end of that spectrum, the international porn market is fairly dominated by the company minds Geek, which owns porn Hub, amongst other popular sites. All of that to say, not
all porn is the same or even problematic. But one of the issues coming through in this report is that despite children not actively seeking out pornographic content at present in the wild West of the Internet, they are at risk of being exposed to it anyway.
So the majority of sixteen to eighteen year old of seen pornography of some description and sometimes without meaning to. So what does the roadmap consider as the way forward?
So, yeah, this roadmap was the e Safety Commissioner's attempts to see how the government could go about actually enforcing an age limit on porn and what that would look like online. Now, my first thought when I think of age verification online is when you go to order some alcohol and you just asked to kind of input your age, and there's a drop down menu and you select your year.
And the issue in that situation is that you're relying on trust, which the roadmap points out is a pretty significant flaw because research shows that kids often lie in these situations about.
I was going to say when we all made Instagram accounts back in the day, That's exactly what I was thinking lately. Thirteen before I was.
Thirteen, definitely, And you know I also lied about my age to Facebook at some point, So we have to look at different options, and that's why the roadmap looks at a variety of different ways the technology could work a bit better, proposals around facial or voice analysis technology. There was also some mention of using government issued documents to confirm someone's age, but those also raise different issues or areas of concern, and these ones are more about
privacy or bias in technologies. There is one interesting alternative model currently being trialed in Europe. It's called EU Consent, and the way it works is it issues an electronic token based on your age, and that way the verification technology isn't actually storing your personal information. It's what they call a double blind system. So the site that you're visiting doesn't know who you are, and the token issuer
doesn't know what sites you're visiting. So the roadmap recommends that the government trial a lot of these technologies and see what's a good fit in an Australian context. But as well as all of that technology talk, they also insist on the investment in more education measures, which I think is really important.
So you've said there that there needs to be more work done to understand what's happening in an Australian context, but I think this is one of those issues that it is a worldwide issue. It's an international issue no matter where you are. Have we seen any similar responses from any other jurisdictions.
There are a few examples. I remember a couple of months ago we reported on the fact that Utah in the US had passed the law requiring porn sites to take what it describes as reasonable steps to verify users are at least eighteen years old. In response to that, Pornhub actually blocked users in Utah from accessing its content altogether, and similar legislation has been passed in Louisiana, Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Virginia,
and Texas. The UK is also in the final stages of considering its second go at legislation that would require porn sites to verify the age of its users.
So, ultimately, E Safety, who works in this space, has looked around and seen what they think is the best way for But then government actually has to do something about it, right.
Yeah, So they kind of put these recommendations to the government about how to move forward. It's then up to the government to respond, and the government have heard E Safety recommends that they go trial different technologies and perhaps find the best way to implement them. But they looked at the concerns that E Safety raised about the limits of the technology available and ultimately made the decision that
it wasn't really up to scratch. So rather than testing any of these technologies itself, the government has been said taken a position where they say they're going to hold the porn industry accountable to ensure children are kept safe. It says it will keep an eye on technology to see if anything changes, and perhaps trial it later down the line. That's all we've got time for today and this week on The Daily Oz. But if you did learn something from today's episode, we'd love to hear your
reflections and thoughts in the questions box on Spotify. We'll be back on Monday morning. Until then, have a wonderful spring weekend.